Welfare Watch -  October 7, 2011 - Values That Define our Society 

Something to think about…  

From Chapin Hall Center for Children - “Child welfare is not another social program.  It deals with life and death issues.  It deals with coercive state interventions; the stripping away of a family’s privacy, the taking of a child from a family, and the presumption of a public standard of acceptable and unacceptable parenting.  Its consequences have life-long effects.  The values it deals with, too often cavalierly, are the values that define our society.  

Child welfare is different because it cannot be about one thing.  It must be about many things: 

- If you have a wonderful system of investigation of child abuse or neglect, yet you have no service to help keep a family together, then you have failed the children and the family and the public interest.

- If you have a good investigative branch and good services to help keep the family together, but you have poor foster care for those children who must be placed, then you have failed the child and his family and the public interest.  In fact, you have perpetrated a terrible hoax on the child, asking him to trade the devil he knows for a possible equally bad or even worse devil he doesn’t know. 

- If you have good investigators, good family services, good foster care, good health care, and good mental health services, but terrible residential or institutional care, then you have failed the child who needs such care and the parents and foster parents who have proven that the child can make it only with such specialized care.” 

 Dr. Harold A. Richman, Director
Chapin Hall Center for Children
University of Chicago