Recently The Chronicle of Social Change published a discussion between Sean Hughes and Richard Wexler. A good part of the discussion focused on the impact of IV-E being converted to a “block grant” versus remaining an entitlement.
But implicit in that discussion is another: “Which works better to keep children safe: Foster care or family preservation?”
The question as framed presents a misleading dichotomy. When Richard Calica and I developed the Illinois Model of Practice in 1995, we purposely crafted the concept of emotional security and argued that child protection was both a matter of ensuring a child’s physical safety and emotional security.
We write that emotional security cannot exist without physical safety. But we also noted that emotional insecurity creates a sense of not feeling physically safe.
Emotional security is compromised when children are abused or neglected. At the same time a child’s emotional security is clearly damaged by the trauma experienced when the child is removed from the only caregiver the child has known. Since the emotional bonding process begins at birth, this can be true even for the youngest of infants. As a consequence, child protective services agencies must necessarily be concerned for both the physical safety and emotional security of children.
I contend that the concept of emotional security gets lost in the term family preservation, which sounds more like the preservation of a valued societal social structure than the protection of a child’s emotional security. In reality a primary reason for preserving the family rests with preserving the emotional security necessary for development of the capacity to trust and form lasting healthy relationships.
[For more of this story, written by Thomas Morton, go to https://chronicleofsocialchang...featured/16584/16584]
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