Child welfare services are intended to prevent the abuse or neglect of children; ensure that children have safe, permanent homes; and promote the well-being of children and their families. Federal support for child welfare activities is provided via multiple programs. The largest share of this federal child welfare funding is provided for support of children in foster care, and for ongoing assistance to children who leave foster care for new permanent families (via adoption or legal kinship guardianship). This book begins with an overview of appropriations activities for child welfare programs. It then includes a discussion of how annual funding levels are determined for child welfare programs and briefly discusses the effect of sequestration on that child welfare funding. The remainder, and largest part, of the book provides descriptions of each federal child welfare program.
Child welfare services are intended to prevent the abuse or neglect of children; ensure that children have safe, permanent homes; and promote the well-being of children and their families. As the U.S. Constitution has been interpreted, states bear the primary responsibility for ensuring the welfare of children and their families. In recent years, Congress has annually appropriated between $7.6 billion and $8.7 billion in federal support dedicated to child welfare purposes. Nearly all of those dollars (97%) were provided to state, tribal, or territorial child welfare agencies (via formula grants or as federal reimbursement for a part of all eligible program costs). Federal involvement in state administration of child welfare activities is primarily tied to this financial assistance. The remaining federal child welfare dollars (3%) are provided to a variety of eligible public or private entities, primarily on a competitive basis, and support research, evaluation, technical assistance, and demonstration projects to expand knowledge of, and improve, child welfare practice and policy. At the federal level, child welfare programs are primarily administered by the Children's Bureau, which is an agency within the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). However, three competitive grant programs (authorized by the Victims of Child Abuse Act) are administered by the Office of Justice Programs (OJP) within the Department of Justice (DOJ). Federal child welfare support is provided via multiple programs, the largest of which are included in the Social Security Act. Title IV-B of the Social Security Act primarily authorizes funding to states, territories, and tribes to support their provision of a broad range of child welfare-related services to children and their families. Title IV-E of the Social Security Act entitles states to federal reimbursement for a part of the cost of providing foster care, adoption assistance, and (in states electing to provide this kind of support) kinship guardianship assistance on behalf of each child who meets federal eligibility criteria. Title IV-E also authorizes funding to support services to youth who "age out" of foster care, or are expected to age out without placement in a permanent family. Legislation concerning programs authorized in Title IV-B and Title IV-E, which represents the very large majority of federal child welfare dollars, is handled in Congress by the House Committee on Ways and Means and the Senate Finance Committee. Additional federal support for child welfare purposes, including research and demonstration funding, is authorized or otherwise supported in the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA) and the Adoption Opportunities program. Further, the Victims of Child Abuse Act authorizes competitive grant funding to support Children's Advocacy Centers, Court Appointed Special Advocates, and Child Abuse Training for Judicial Personnel and Practitioners. Authorizing legislation for these programs originated with the House and Senate Judiciary committees. Each child welfare program that receives discretionary funding is funded through April 28, 2017 at about 99.8% of the funding provided for each of the programs in FY2016. For child welfare programs receiving mandatory funding, the continuing resolution makes funding available at the rate needed to maintain the current law program, under the authority and conditions provided in the FY2016 appropriations act. While the continuing resolution allows federal funds to be awarded, until a final appropriations bill is enacted, the total amount of FY2017 funding that will be made available for a given program remains unknown and may be less (or more) than the annualized amount provided in the continuing resolution.
Each year, child protective services receive reports of child abuse and neglect involving six million children, and many more go unreported. The long-term human and fiscal consequences of child abuse and neglect are not relegated to the victims themselves-they also impact their families, future relationships, and society. In 1993, the National Research Council (NRC) issued the report, Under-standing Child Abuse and Neglect, which provided an overview of the research on child abuse and neglect. New Directions in Child Abuse and Neglect Research updates the 1993 report and provides new recommendations to respond to this public health challenge. According to this report, while there has been great progress in child abuse and neglect research, a coordinated, national research infrastructure with high-level federal support needs to be established and implemented immediately. New Directions in Child Abuse and Neglect Research recommends an actionable framework to guide and support future child abuse and neglect research. This report calls for a comprehensive, multidisciplinary approach to child abuse and neglect research that examines factors related to both children and adults across physical, mental, and behavioral health domains-including those in child welfare, economic support, criminal justice, education, and health care systems-and assesses the needs of a variety of subpopulations. It should also clarify the causal pathways related to child abuse and neglect and, more importantly, assess efforts to interrupt these pathways. New Directions in Child Abuse and Neglect Research identifies four areas to look to in developing a coordinated research enterprise: a national strategic plan, a national surveillance system, a new generation of researchers, and changes in the federal and state programmatic and policy response.
Kids in danger are treated instrumentally to promote the rehabilitation of their parents, the welfare of their communities, and the social justice of their race and tribe—all with the inevitable result that their most precious developmental years are lost in bureaucratic and judicial red tape. It is time to stop letting efforts to fix the child welfare system get derailed by activists who are concerned with race-matching, blood ties, and the abstract demands of social justice, and start asking the most important question: Where are the emotionally and financially stable, loving, and permanent homes where these kids can thrive? “Naomi Riley’s book reveals the extent to which abused and abandoned children are often injured by their government rescuers. It is a must-read for those seeking solutions to this national crisis.” —Robert L. Woodson, Sr., civil rights leader and president of the Woodson Center “Everyone interested in child welfare should grapple with Naomi Riley’s powerful evidence that the current system ill-serves the safety and well-being of vulnerable kids.” —Walter Olson, senior fellow, Cato Institute, Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies
In the 1930s, buoyed by the potential of the New Deal, child welfare reformers hoped to formalize and modernize their methods, partly through professional casework but more importantly through the loving care of temporary, substitute families. Today, however, the foster care system is widely criticized for failing the children and families it is intended to help. How did a vision of dignified services become virtually synonymous with the breakup of poor families and a disparaged form of "welfare" that stigmatizes the women who provide it, the children who receive it, and their families? Tracing the evolution of the modern American foster care system from its inception in the 1930s through the 1970s, Catherine Rymph argues that deeply gendered, domestic ideals, implicit assumptions about the relative value of poor children, and the complex public/private nature of American welfare provision fueled the cultural resistance to funding maternal and parental care. What emerged was a system of public social provision that was actually subsidized by foster families themselves, most of whom were concentrated toward the socioeconomic lower half, much like the children they served. Analyzing the ideas, debates, and policies surrounding foster care and foster parents' relationship to public welfare, Rymph reveals the framework for the building of the foster care system and draws out its implications for today's child support networks.
Comprehensive history of the Children’s Bureau from 1912-2012 in eBook form that shares the legacy of this landmark agency that established the first Federal Government programs, research and social reform initiatives aimed to improve the safety, permanency and well-being of children, youth and families. In addition to bios of agency heads and review of legislation and publications, this important book provides a critical look at the evolution of the Nation and its treatment of children as it covers often inspiring and sometimes heart-wrenching topics such as: child labor; the Orphan Trains, adoption and foster care; infant and maternal mortality and childhood diseases; parenting, infant and child care education; the role of women's clubs and reformers; child welfare standards; Aid to Dependent Children; Depression relief; children of migrants and minorities (African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans), including Indian Boarding Schools and Indian Adoption Program; disabled children care; children in wartime including support of military families and World War II refugee children; Juvenile delinquency; early childhood education Head Start; family planning; child abuse and neglect; natural disaster recovery; and much more. Child welfare and related professionals, legislators, educators, researchers and advocates, university school of social work faculty and staff, libraries, and others interested in social work related to children, youth and families, particularly topics such as preventing child abuse and neglect, foster care, and adoption will be interested in this comprehensive history of the Children's Bureau that has been funded by the U.S. Federal Government since 1912.
Adolescenceâ€"beginning with the onset of puberty and ending in the mid-20sâ€"is a critical period of development during which key areas of the brain mature and develop. These changes in brain structure, function, and connectivity mark adolescence as a period of opportunity to discover new vistas, to form relationships with peers and adults, and to explore one's developing identity. It is also a period of resilience that can ameliorate childhood setbacks and set the stage for a thriving trajectory over the life course. Because adolescents comprise nearly one-fourth of the entire U.S. population, the nation needs policies and practices that will better leverage these developmental opportunities to harness the promise of adolescenceâ€"rather than focusing myopically on containing its risks. This report examines the neurobiological and socio-behavioral science of adolescent development and outlines how this knowledge can be applied, both to promote adolescent well-being, resilience, and development, and to rectify structural barriers and inequalities in opportunity, enabling all adolescents to flourish.
Shattered Bonds is a stirring account of a worsening American social crisis--the disproportionate representation of black children in the U.S. foster care system and its effects on black communities and the country as a whole. Tying the origins and impact of this disparity to racial injustice, Dorothy Roberts contends that child-welfare policy reflects a political choice to address startling rates of black child poverty by punishing parents instead of tackling poverty's societal roots. Using conversations with mothers battling the Chicago child-welfare system for custody of their children, along with national data, Roberts levels a powerful indictment of racial disparities in foster care and tells a moving story of the women and children who earn our respect in their fight to keep their families intact.
In the early 1970s, a new wave of public service announcements urged parents to "help end an American tradition" of child abuse. The message, relayed repeatedly over television and radio, urged abusive parents to seek help. Support groups for parents, including Parents Anonymous, proliferated across the country to deal with the seemingly burgeoning crisis. At the same time, an ever-increasing number of abused children were reported to child welfare agencies, due in part to an expansion of mandatory reporting laws and the creation of reporting hotlines across the nation. Here, Mical Raz examines this history of child abuse policy and charts how it changed since the late 1960s, specifically taking into account the frequency with which agencies removed African American children from their homes and placed them in foster care. Highlighting the rise of Parents Anonymous and connecting their activism to the sexual abuse moral panic that swept the country in the 1980s, Raz argues that these panics and policies—as well as biased viewpoints regarding race, class, and gender—played a powerful role shaping perceptions of child abuse. These perceptions were often directly at odds with the available data and disproportionately targeted poor African American families above others.
