Child Welfare Problems

Society understands our current system is awful, but no one is protesting for a reform, or they’re aren’t trying hard enough. Child safety is the number one objective of the system, but it’s not working like it should. “In 2015, over 670,000 children spent time in U.S. foster care” (Foster Care). Of those 670,000 cases, more than half could be eliminated with a reform in the system. The focus should be on keeping families together, rather than taking them apart.

Many of the children who are placed into the care of Child Protective Services are situated into hellish foster homes with people who only care about the money they receive from the government for each child that is placed under their roof; and not for the welfare of the children. Numerous amounts of children that are caught up in the system, especially

Child welfare systems are designed to ensure the safety and well-being of children and families. The mission of this system is a noble one and can be very rewarding and beneficial for all involved.  Ironically, that same system that is designed to help families in times of crisis can be, harsh and challenging to families and social workers.

In the past few decades there has be an increasing amount of children placed in the foster care system. With the amount of rising teen pregnancies and maternal drug abuse means increasing numbers of infants abandoned at birth. There have been many cases of child abuse or neglect that have been on the rise. State and local agencies are unable to suitably supervise foster homes or arrange adoptions. Statistics show that many children will spend most of their childhood and teenage years in the foster care system, which has shown to leave emotional scars on the child. Today, Child Welfare groups are looking for federal funding and legislation to increase programs and services aimed at keeping families together.

The U.S foster care system is corrupt and the children trapped in it face the worst of it. The goal of foster care is to eventually reunite children with their parents or find the child a safe, loving home. Instead, foster kids face the harsh reality of abuse, mental illness, and temporary homes. The children and ripped from the homes they’ve known their entire lives because their parents struggle financially. The system would rather pay strangers to the child to take care of him/her rather than helping the parents of the child. This case would be called “neglect” when in reality most parents were doing all they could to take care of their children. The children’s new foster parents are paid hundreds of dollars per month. Often times, the money doesn’t go to the child and he/she is left truly neglected. The system is broken because children are taken from their homes for the wrong reasons and put into unsafe environments that will have a traumatic effect on the rest of their lives.

Many children will average about five or six years in the system and go through four to seven homes, making it hard for the children to find stability and have a productive life. Generally, when a child moves to a new foster home, it is far away, forcing the child to pretty much start all over from the very beginning. Moving from home to home and not having that stability causes the child to have many emotions, which are often ignored by foster parents. The neglect and maltreatment by a lot of foster parents is out of control, but a lot of social workers say there isn’t much they can do. And when the children age out of the system, there aren’t that many resources for them to be on their own. Once they turn eighteen, the foster parents usually send them out on their own, making it difficult for the children to finish school. An ideal environment for the growth of children does not usually exist anymore and in order to promote continuity in the social, emotional, and developmental growth of children, there has to be people out there willing to listen.

Majority of people in the world have a child or know one, also having system in which lets the wealthy individuals, lawmakers, and their associates have a say in the direction that foster care or the case in which kids have been hurt disappear or the redirects its focus on another aspect of the issue. The kids are not allowed to develop in the best way because they lack attachment of parent figure in their lives, this directs their whole life. the need for makes foster care to be a place in which kids should be secure and loved and are well taken care of, because most people know how it feels to be a parent if not then people should imagen their childhood and how it was or if it should have been better.

CPS is doing everything wrong. There are so many problems with the foster care systems. One of the huge conflicts has to do with how CPS is too focused on rules and protocols. Foster parents and discipline their kids other than putting them in time out. Which is causing kids to go to jail, recent data indicates that children in foster care are most likely to have criminal behavior(Smith, Children Laws) Caseworkers have way too many kids on their case therefore they can’t get the proper amount of attention.

The foster care system has been a public policy issue for some time. Advocates say there are six problems that hinder foster care in the U.S. The first problem hindering foster care is that too often group homes are the go-to. Because there are rarely enough foster families, there are more than 56,000 children that live in a group setting. Advocates argue that children who are placed in family settings from the beginning have more success than those that were defaulted to group settings. Group homes are also lacking in sufficient support and do not make financial sense since group homes cost seven to ten times more than if the child was placed with a family.

Most of the time the news that is being reported is negative and it is extremely hard to see anything positive. This is especially true for news about the foster care system. A lot of the articles and news stories on the foster care system is about what is wrong with the system. This is seen clearly in the article “As Arizona Struggles to Fix Foster System, Children Suffer the Consequences,” by Rick Rojas (2015), in which he describes Arizona’s foster care system. In this article, Rojas describes the types of things that children in the foster care system go through and the state government’s solution to it. They find that children are continuously being removed from one dangerous situation to another. It was reported that complaints of neglect and mistreatment were being ignored. The government’s solution to the problem was to separate child welfare from the Department of Economic Security and making the leader of the child welfare department report directly to the

4). In the scope of adoption, it is evident that child welfare agencies use the majority of their available resources for placing children in foster families, investigating child-abuse cases, and providing other family services. “As a consequence, they do not possess adequate additional resources for efficiently placing children in adoptive homes once they are available for adoption, depriving many children of the benefits a stable, permanent home provides” (Snell, 2000, p. 2). The current government operated child welfare system is detrimental to the children involved due to its inability to ensure their safety and

The second account of a changing stance toward children’s rights was evolution alongside women’s rights. Before this time, women and children were seen as unimportant under the law, whereas a father was given almost total control over all matters regarding his wife and children. If a father was violent or neglectful, society simply turned their shoulder to it. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, laws pertaining to the family system began to change. A new law recognized the equal rights of fathers and mothers with the mother’s rights reigning over the fathers in regards to the children. Also, the legal system began viewing children as important to the future of society, therefore “appropriate objects of the court’s

The system should be more of a guider then a “kidnapper”. Provide the families with help whether then tearing them apart. Have programs to help make home a happy place, make home a safe place. The state spend over 20 billion each year to administer these child protective services. If that money went into actually providing resources for families in need this would save a percentage of children from entering this dysfunctional

Another issue big issue with foster care is the lack of communication within the system and a lack of social workers listening to the children in foster care and checking on their well- being once they’ve been placed. As a social worker, it is your job to make sure the foster home and family is safe. This needs to be done well before any child is placed in their care and once a child is placed there it is still your job to make visits. So when a child comes to you with stories of abuse and neglect, you need to immediately get on your job and not push them off for a case you think is more important. However, over the years the amount of cases concerning foster care abuse and maltreatment has dramatically increased. In 2010 CBS News reporter Mary Calvi did a video story on four New Jersey brothers who had endured severe starvation at the hands of their foster parents. At ages nineteen, fourteen, ten and nine neither boy weighed fifty pounds. If it had not been for the oldest boy going out and looking for food and a woman who saw him had not called the police those young boys may have never been rescued. And why is that? The system failed them. They were placed in what was believed a safe home with

The foster care system can often place children in cruel homes and unhealthy environments. For example, there was a girl named Melissa who entered the system at the age of two. She bounced back and forth between families. “ I spent five years with a lady who blew the monthly stipend from DCFS on her own kids