Advocating family preservation
Because March is national social work month, we want to educate the public by eliminating the stereotypes and give a fuller picture of why we do what we do.
It is often true that child protective services (CPS) removes children from the home because they are in danger of neglect or abuse, and it is deemed the best immediate option to protect the child.
However, the ideal goal for social workers is to preserve the family while maintaining the child’s safety. As social work graduate students, we believe that the most suitable place for children to be raised is with their own families.
We want to do everything in our power to support at-risk families by providing them with the tools to maintain a healthy family structure.
Children in the system often suffer emotional trauma after being separated from their biological families, so for this reason, foster care is a last resort for providing a child with a home.
The story of social work is one of great evolution.
In the beginning, its goal was to remove children from the hands of unfit parents who left them to fend for themselves.
In recent times, social work has headed in the direction of family reunification by providing individuals with tools to regain custody of their children.
The new focus of permanency planning and reunification has resulted in a drop in the number of children residing in foster care from 748,000 to about 400,000. The government should invest more funding into family-centered supportive services instead of the cost it takes to keep kids in foster care. This would likely prevent the need for children in foster care and make family preservation a viable solution for the well-being of children.
Dawn Brooks, Cynthia Lopez Herrera, Julie Martin, Annie Ng and Jennifer Allen are social work graduate students and contributing writers for the Daily 49er.
