Tagged With "Child Welfare System"
Blog Post
Understanding Trauma to Promote Healing in Child Welfare [co-invest.org]
California Child Welfare Co-Investment Partnership, Summer 2019. For child welfare stakeholders, the concept that children and their families come into our systems bearing the burden of traumatic experiences associated with neglect and abuse is not new. What has evolved over the last couple of decades is the science of ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences) and understanding of the long-term physical and behavioral health consequences and high societal costs. A landmark study , and the many...
Blog Post
Unfinished business: Bipartisan help for child vicitims of the opiod crisis [thehill.com]
I found this post to be a helpful focus on important federal health legislation as we face a potential transition in priorities to address trauma-informed approaches to the opioid crisis. The author encourages bipartisan support to keep up momentum gained by successful programs and grants already serving communities and researching further solutions. Opioid addiction is undeniably a public health concern we know impacts multiple systems. Why not focus on increasing cross-systems support to...
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Using Screening and Assessment Evidence of Trauma in Child Welfare Cases [americanbar.org]
While many families encounter child welfare and never become involved in the legal system, a large majority of open child welfare cases are court involved. This means that most of the major decisions being made about children and families are occurring the court room. Lately, we've all seen a lot of news, discussion and stories about trauma-informed judges and trauma-informed courts. Trauma-informed courts are important everywhere, but especially in child welfare. As a child welfare worker,...
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Videos & Audio
20/20 Reports On Foster Children And How Psychotropic Drugs Are Being Used To Control Behavior/Emotions. Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...amp;feature=youtu.be Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...amp;feature=youtu.be Link:...
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Washington to combine child services programs into one department [RealChangeNews.org]
A commission released its recommendations to fix Washington state’s faulty system that delivers services to children and families by breaking up the agency out of the Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS) and creating a new, independent department addressing the needs of children 21 years old and younger. The proposal would dramatically realign the current system, including the state’s foster care system, by taking the Children’s Administration out of DSHS and combining it with the...
Blog Post
We Have to Better Understand What Foster Parents Need [chronicleofsocialchange.org]
By Ross Hunter, The Chronicle of Social Change, October 11, 2019 As a new leader in the child welfare space, I thought it would be worth my while to do some listening before I made any big changes. So I went on a tour all over the state of Washington. I talked to caseworkers, foster parents, birth families, judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys and anyone else I could find who had an opinion. I got an earful. “Everything is broken.” “I had a great experience.” “The caseworker never called...
Blog Post
We Have to Better Understand What Foster Parents Need [chronicleofsocialchange.org]
By Ross Hunter, The Chronicle of Social Change, October 11, 2019 As a new leader in the child welfare space, I thought it would be worth my while to do some listening before I made any big changes. So I went on a tour all over the state of Washington. I talked to caseworkers, foster parents, birth families, judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys and anyone else I could find who had an opinion. I got an earful. “Everything is broken.” “I had a great experience.” “The caseworker never called...
Blog Post
We Need to Help Relatives Navigate Their Child Welfare Options [chronicleofsocialchange.org]
By Jenny Keefe and Nikeyah Flagg, The Chronicle of Social Change, November 21, 2019 A new data project focusing on foster care capacity has illustrated a growing reality across the nation’s child welfare system: relatives are increasingly stepping up to provide care for children removed from their parents. The newly released data, compiled and analyzed by The Chronicle of Social Change, shows that the most recent surge in youth entering foster care is over. It also finds that a majority of...
Blog Post
‘We Want to Be Heard, Not Fixed’: Voices of Foster Youth [risemagazine.org]
These days, I follow so many related organizations that I am never sure when I come onto ACEs Connection, if I am simply reposting something I discovered from ACEs connection in the first place! That's just a way of saying- this is an...
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WEBINAR: Fostering Equity: Creating Shared Understanding for Building Community Resilience
Struggling with how to Foster Equity Conversations in Community? Join the national partners of the Building Community Resilience Networks as we share our lessons learned in fostering equity as a strategy to prevent childhood adversity and build community resilience. Wednesday, February 26th 12pm-1:15pm Eastern More info at go.gwu.edu/EquityWebinar As a nation we have agonized over how to approach conversations on race, racism, inequity and racial justice. Too often we have opted to attempt...
Blog Post
What Does Trauma-Informed Mean to Foster Youth? [JJIE.org]
For three decades, I have listened in awe to the brave voices of children, youth and families who have shared, in anguish, their past experiences — experiences that anyone would objectively call “adverse” and ones that can have lasting effects on health and well-being. The seminal ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences) study opened my eyes to how pervasive their stories were and how these findings might influence the development of effective interventions and treatment, especially for...
Blog Post
What If We Could Reach Families Before the Crisis? There Would Be Fewer Kids in Foster Care [chronicleofsocialchange.com]
It’s no secret that our foster care system is overburdened. More than 250,000 children enter foster care each year. We don’t have enough foster families to meet this demand, and we don’t have enough adoptive families either. At the end of 2017, 123,000 kids around the country were still waiting to be adopted into a family. But what if the only answer isn’t recruiting more foster and adoptive parents? Are there other things we can do? What if the answer is recruiting more communities to get...
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When Child Welfare Systems Embrace Trauma-Informed Care [AECF.org]
When child welfare systems infuse trauma-informed care into everything they do, kids experience fewer placements and fare better in foster care, according to new Casey-funded research. In a five-year study conducted by Child Trends , researchers focused on kids served by KVC Kansas, a nonprofit offering child welfare and behavioral health support through a public/private partnership with the Kansas Department of Children and Families. As part of the study, administrators, staff and foster...
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Why Do LA’s Foster Care Facilities Keep Calling The Cops On Traumatized Kids? (witnessla.com)
On March 21, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors passed an important motion that instructed the Director of the Office of Child Protection, Michael Nash, former presiding judge of Los Angeles County’s Juvenile Court, to find out why so many of LA County’s foster children were crossing into the county’s delinquency system, what could be done to prevent that crossing, and how these so-called crossover kids could be helped if and when and if they found themselves in the clutches of both...
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Why Neuroscience, Positive Feedback Are Transformative in Youth Work [youthtoday.org]
I am a long-time advocate for how the power of neuroscience can transform the youth-serving profession. When combined with a commitment to putting the needs of youth first and a sizable dose of courageous leadership, the insights and practical guidance provided by brain research can have remarkable results. A prominent example of the transformational application of this “secret recipe” can be found at the Sacramento County (California) Youth Detention Facility (YDF). In 2010, Sacramento...
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Why We Need To Collect Data on LGBTQ Youth in Foster Care [chronicleofsocialchange.org]
In the United States , the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System (AFCARS) collects demographic and other types of information on all youth who enter the foster care system. This practice allows the government and the public to track how well the system is meeting its ultimate goal — to place all children into stable and loving homes. In 2016, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Administration for Children and Families (ACF) made a final rule that would...
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Why we should do everything possible to avoid foster care and keep kids with their families [DallasNews.com]
When I read about the crisis in Texas foster care system, all I can think about is my beautiful younger sister Nannette. Nannette got out of foster care, but she didn't survive. She became a statistic, a victim of the consequences of what experts call adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs. Research has shown that ACEs accumulate over time, and the number of these experiences in childhood predicts morbidity and mortality in adulthood. It doesn't say it on her death certificate, but Nannette...
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Will the Legislature do what's needed for foster care? [crosscut.com]
Proposed foster care reform continues to wait in Washington State as legislators continue to negotiate budget and policy proposals... Republicans and Democrats in Olympia insist they want to shore up the state’s failing foster care system, but major reforms could falter as they head into a special legislative session to hammer out budget and policy proposals that remain miles apart. Compared with their Republican Senate colleagues, Democrats who control the House have proposed millions more...
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Will the New Foster Care Law Give Grandparents a Hand? [pewtrusts.org]
The aim of a new federal law is to reduce the number of children who end up in the troubled foster care system — the biggest reboot of the child welfare system since 1980. But already, the Family First Prevention Services Act, signed into law by President Donald Trump in February, is generating some controversy. A key point of contention: how it will treat extended family members caring for children outside the foster care system — and whether they will be eligible for financial assistance.
Blog Post
Young LGBTQ Nevadans ask lawmakers for change in foster care [miamiherald.com]
CARSON CITY, NEV. Young adults formerly in Nevada's foster care system told state lawmakers Monday that gay, bisexual, asexual and transgender kids would be safer if social workers are specially trained to help LGBTQ adolescents. Speaking from experience, they said abuse that lands kids in child welfare facilities can worsen under state oversight — whether due to intolerance, negligence or assault. Allen Johnson, 23, called it ignorance. His foster mother isolated him from her other kids...
Blog Post
Young Parents Speak Out: Barriers, Bias, and Broken Systems [aecf.org]
By National Crittenton and Katcher Consulting, Annie E. Casey Foundation, March 2020 Founded in 1883 as a social justice advocacy organization, National Crittenton has been dedicated to the needs and potential of girls, young women and women facing violence, poverty and injustice across the country for more than a century. Additionally, National Crittenton convenes the 26 Yet, systems have turned a blind eye to the ways in which the “safety net” designed for adults is a “trap” for young...
Ask the Community
ACE's Informed Child Protective Services?
As I listen to and watch the struggles in the Illinois and Indiana Child Services Departments, I search for states that have implemented the lens of trauma awareness and resilience into the child protective services practices. We know, by the numbers of foster care placements, failed placements, re-placements, residential treatment placements, failed residential treatment placements, failed adoptions, etc. that removing children from their families is not necessarily an answer for families...
Ask the Community
Are Foster Care Children Excessively Medicated?
I thought I'd bring this important Denver Post series, " Prescription Kids ," to the group's attention. The articles focus on the rate at which antipsychotic and antidepressant medications are prescribed to foster children in Colorado. The...
Ask the Community
Looking for Writers: New magazine addressing foster care system and family trauma
Hello, Everyone, I am co-editor of a new publication on Medium.com, to be launched in March 2020. Collective Power is the written arm of Home for Good , a collective organization recently launched after 6 years of planning. HFG began when our founders asked themselves, "What would a system that reflects our love for our children look like?" HFG's mission is to transform the trauma too often perpetuated by the various helping systems, among the people they purport to help—whether the...
Calendar Event
A New Era of Funding Family Justice (webinar)
Comment
Re: Child Protection Agency in Australia Introduces Digital Memory Boxes for Kids in Foster Care
Originally Posted by Tina Marie Hahn, MD: One of the lead child protection agencies in Australia, Barnardos Australia , has introduced a resource for children and youth in foster care : a digital “memory box” called MyStory . The purpose of the digital memory box is to give children and youth in foster care a place to store their photos, report cards, drawings, letters, and other documents without fear of losing them while in foster care. In doing so, the agency hopes to provide a sense of...
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Re: How does the general public percieve Foster Children?
Well Jeff, You cannot educate everyone! There are those that do not want to see or hear, at least not yet, not until it becomes personal. The one thing that people should keep in mind is that not all children in foster care are/have been abused. There are many reasons that children enter into the foster care system. Are there sociopaths in the "system", sure there are. However, it does not appear that the proportion of sociopaths is higher in foster/congregate care than it is in the general...
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Re: How does the general public percieve Foster Children?
Just to add a piece here ... 80% of people in prison have been in the foster care system .. many for pretty serious crimes .. and most arrested under the age of 25 !!!
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Re: How does the general public percieve Foster Children?
January 28, 2014 My Dear Colleague Jeff Bergstrom: The interaction you had with the couple in the restaurant in June 2013 was fascinating, scary and probably an honest summary of some of the mis-information and the biased thinking that dominates segments of this country. I have been told that it is difficult to reason someone out of something that they have not been reasoned into. This may be one of those conversations. But I wonder where the ideas about children in foster care came from? It...
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Re: Are Foster Care Children Excessively Medicated?
Hi, Rebecca-- My contact with foster children is primarily throgh in-home behaviroal health services in Southern, NJ. I cannot comment on the use/over/under use of medication. What I can comment on is severely inadequate trauma recognition and trauma-informed treatment and interventions across systems--lack of recognition of trauma symptoms/trauma effects and punitive responses to them; lack of preparation by the child welfare system for foster families for the level of severity of...
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Re: How does the general public percieve Foster Children?
WOW!!! I am amazed at your excellent impulse control.... I could not have been so still listening.... I would have had to leave and would have been ill with a migraine for a day or I may have confronted less graciously .... But I love how you artfully had their engagement and then informed them they had met their first former foster child.... You are a hero!!! I totally understand the experience of stigma but I guess there is a blank spot in my intellect as to why??? I have never hid that...
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Re: Are Foster Care Children Excessively Medicated?
I would recommend the blog talk radio that I put on the aces in peds group from Dr. Bruce Perry who discusses how to deal with these kid. Also the Foster Care AAP pdf has a section in the last pages about signs/symptoms kids can present with and how to respond to them. With these kids sensitivity is the key. Anything negative - a small look, a tone of voice that suggests even the slightest possibility of disappointment in the child can produce internal feelings of "I am terrible, I should...
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Re: Cross Culture/Loss of Culture in Foster Care
Very interesting topic! I would be interested to see what talking points will emanate from you panel discussion. Below is link to an interesting article on a case of Muslim kids loosing their identity in the foster care system in Michigan. Population demographics are important precursors for the recruitment of foster homes, not to say recruitment and retention of foster parents is an easy task. https://www.freep.com/story/ne...lim-homes/473928001/
Comment
Re: Is child protective services effective?
When I entered child welfare, the worker who came into my beat down, no plumbing trailer asked me what I did to make my parents - parents who had provided me with 10 ACEs- so mad? I was going to be Valedictorian despite all the Hell and Pain I had endured. They separated me from my brother and sister and put them in a separate foster home where I had no contact. When I called, the new home my sister was in told me to never call back because my sister had a new family now. I almost died from...
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Re: Is child protective services effective?
Thanks for sharing your story. I agree that the child welfare system misses on a lot of fronts and tends to pile more ACEs on to people who have already experienced many. Instead of maintaining your sibling relationships, they caused you more stress. Hopefully we can work to get the system to work better.
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Re: Chronicle investigation spurs calls to close foster care shelters (sfgate.com)
Dana: It makes so much sense why families sometimes have so much fear of the systems presumably set up to support and help during times of crisis. Thanks for sharing this story. Cissy
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Re: Chronicle investigation spurs calls to close foster care shelters (sfgate.com)
"Fostering Failure: How shelters criminalize hundreds of children" (May 18) exposes a heartbreaking reality in California's foster care system today. It highlights the lack of understanding and appreciation of the trauma and adversity these children have suffered and the critical need for "trauma informed” responses to their behaviors. No doubt the children in the story are trying to cope with years of unrecognized and untreated trauma. Research clearly shows that when behavioral indicators...
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Re: Chronicle investigation spurs calls to close foster care shelters (sfgate.com)
I echo Margaret's points and dream of a system that from top to bottom is ACEs science driven, and not only avoids causing further trauma to our foster children but also prevents trauma from occurring in the first place. The good news is that there are many examples (on this site and ACEsTooHigh.com ) of law enforcement organizations, child welfare agencies and other entities that are using ACEs to do just that.
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Re: ACE's Informed Child Protective Services?
Elaine: I know that Benchmarks PFE (Partnering for Excellence) has a pilot program going. They are working with researchers from Duke to help measure and assess. They are doing a few things I think are pretty cool: Making sure therapists and clinicians are trauma-informed and ACEs aware. Making sure Child Welfare and Family Services is trauma-informed and ACEs aware. Making sure medical insurers they work with are as well. But they are also doing some innovative things such as working with...
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Re: ACE's Informed Child Protective Services?
This is a problem area for sure. I did my residency at Riley and worked as a pedi in several places in Indiana. The child welfare system is incredibly broken because the resources alloted in Indiana are poor (and MI too). And all over the country. The case workers are not well trained or paid and all I have met are almost totally unaware of the importance of ACEs science, but getting better. I’ve talked to a few of my fellow peds classmates still in Indiana and it hasn’t changed much I am...
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Re: When should a child be taken from his parents? [newyorker.com]
Thank you Alissa for sharing this gut wrenching article! My heart and soul ache reading through Mercedes life experiences as a child, daughter and mother., in addition to her heartbreaking experiences with the foster care system. We have much work to do... "The reckless destruction of American families in pursuit of the goal of protecting children is as serious a problem as the failure to protect children,” Martin Guggenheim, Sherman’s former colleague, says. “We need to understand that...