By BJ Walker, The Imprint, August 19, 2020
Every morning when you wake up as a child welfare director, you are scared for somebody else’s children, and not just because you worry about abuse and neglect. You worry because the government established standards and protocols for working with these kids would be unacceptable for anybody but somebody else’s children.
Everyone talks about changing child welfare, but few want to do the work to change it because it means working with adults who have complicated lives. The result is that we keep locking parents, and particularly Black, brown and poor parents, into no-win situations.
There are some parents we should be afraid of for the sake of their children – and our child protection business model is designed to intervene when we are afraid for children. But this child protection model is missing the capacity to differentiate between the small fraction of parents who have neither the skill nor will to keep children safe, and those who have the capacity to learn, and overcome existing vulnerabilities and limitations.
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