The day I received
the call last June informing me that my sister-in-law, Dr. Betty Shabazz, had
died after a valiant and painful struggle, the issue of kinship care shifted
irrevocably for me, from the professional to the personal. A kinship parent,
Betty Shabazz died doing what many have done for generations--raising a
daughter's child. She died as a result of injuries sustained in a fire in her
home, while caring for her grandson, Malcolm--a fire for which he has been
charged as setting.
Reports of her last words noted that she remained concerned about the care
and safety of her grandson. I was left with many private thoughts and memories
of my brother's widow, their six daughters, and a 12-year-old grandnephew--a
young boy whom I really did not know on the day of my sister-in-law's death.
Kinship care has been a constant focus in my professional work. As a social
worker, a policy developer and implementer, a child welfare administrator, and a
social work educator, I have consistently advocated for placing children with
relatives as a preference, for more effective policies and training of workers
involved in kinship placements, and for an honest dialog about kinship
issues.
That telephone call, and the pain my family has experienced, has brought new
resolve to my commitment. Kinship care is now both personal and familial. I will
always wonder whether my sister-in-law's untimely death could have been avoided
by a better, more skillful support system for kinship providers.
My hope is that we will live to see sincere progress regarding the value and
importance of kinship care. As more child welfare professionals, child
advocates, and human service systems look more intensely at kinship care, we
must recognize that both formal and informal kinship placements are growing at
unprecedented rates. If children are the true and primary beneficiaries of
kinship care arrangements, relatives who are providing parental care for young
children should have, as a matter of fairness, access to supportive assistance,
including medical, social, legal, and financial services.
Formal and Informal
Reasonable estimates are that four out of five kinship placements occur
informally, without official sanction or involvement. These families navigate
helping and educational systems to meet the needs of their children and will
interact with professionals and educators who are equally new to the many issues
that arise in kinship care families. I worry about these families. Knowing, as I
do, how slow progress has been in dealing with kinship care in the formal child
welfare system, and that we continue to experience deficiencies in services and
resources in public social services, I can only imagine the challenges that
relatives face, trying to assist children without the help of the formal child
welfare system.
The remaining one in five kinship placements, which occurs formally, is
especially significant if the child welfare system is to mature and become as
coherent and thoughtful as it can and should be. If formally placed children and
their relatives received appropriate programs and essential services, this
would, in turn, increase support for and sensitivity to the needs of all kinship
caregivers.
Child welfare professionals should take a more proactive stance on issues
impacting kinship care, exercising leadership by demonstration rather than
remaining silent or, worse, permitting often uninformed policymakers to talk
about kinship care as if it were just another form of foster care or an economic
drain on state and local treasuries and the recently reformed welfare
system.
Like most professionals, I have advocated permanence and safety for
vulnerable children. I have also witnessed many of the positive impacts of
services designed to strengthen poor families. Such initiatives as family
preservation and reunification, when carried out by trained staff and a
responsive child-serving system, work quite effectively. They are also much more
cost-effective and efficient than traditional out-of-home care approaches. So
why don't we use what works best for kids?
What's Best for Kids?
Recently, I have become aware of a unique ideological orientation growing in
influence in child welfare circles. However well-intentioned, these advocates
for change often present worst-case scenarios as the norm, emphasizing child
safety considerations as a mantra. Proponents of this approach are leading a
charge to terminate parental rights earlier, which will free more children for
adoption. They get community and other influentials involved in expounding the
virtues of streamlining adoption laws, practices, and costs. These are all
laudable objectives, but none of the proposals are complete and comprehensive in
their application to the children most often served in public child welfare
systems.
Some of the recent adoption advocacy initiatives take child protection and
safety issues to new levels. Concerns about child protection and safety, family
preservation, and family reunification are not polar extremes. Consideration of
these issues in an "either-or" context is misleading and disingenuous. Any
agency employee of conscience and integrity who regularly observes children
entering the child welfare system can tell you that most children can be
adequately served if their families are engaged actively and appropriately. This
country's child-serving system needs to do better protection, better family
involvement, and better reunification work. We should not seek to build and
increase one service outcome over another. Nor should we permit the old standby
excuse, "the system doesn't work, so let's do this over that," to become our
rationale for new service initiatives. Such approaches only weaken all
approaches.
As an adoptive parent of over 30 years, I know that freeing a child for
adoption is but one small step in a very important process. Finding and
developing the right family for a child is a bit more complicated than assuming
that there is a vast reservoir of appropriate families out there--only as far
away as state-of-the-art advertising, cyberlinks, subsidies, and tax credits.
These are all worthwhile activities, but they are by no stretch of the
imagination silver bullets for a child-serving system that does not value
children's own families as potential resources.
Families as Resources
We still must ask ourselves if we have thoroughly explored family resources,
such as extended-family members. They may be resources for temporary short-term
shelter, for longer-term placements, and quite possibly as adoptive parents
also. Families who are known to child welfare often are poor and lack an
understanding of and confidence in government and other child-serving systems.
They might come forward as participants in a more "open" adoption process if
they were valued as potential contributors to the child's safety and stability,
rather than only as probable contributors to the child's abuse or neglect.
Rather than looking outside of the family circle, we might better reassess
some of our ideas about family dysfunction, extended-family networking, and
theories about what best serves the growth and development of children. How more
permanent can we get than to encourage family members to assume responsibility
for the ongoing care of children? Extended-family members have been keeping
children safe, nurtured, and healthy for generations. Compared with traditional
foster care, the casualties of kinship care are few. We need more families to
come forward as primary care providers. The child welfare system should solicit
family members at least as actively as we solicit nonrelatives.
Have you ever thought about what you would prefer for your own child in the
event of your death or if you became impaired? Who would you prefer to continue
your family hopes and aspirations--a family member or close friend, or someone
unknown to the child?
My sister-in-law's decision to care for her grandson is not unusual in caring
families. Rather than condemning kinship care because of one family's tragedy,
let us seek to better assess relatives as resources for children and provide
them with better services and support.
This article is from the Winter, 1998 issue of Children's Voice
magazine. For information on the magazine contact the CWLA Publications
Department at mailto:%20books@cwla.org.
Copyright © 1998 by The Child Welfare League of America. All rights
reserved.