Child Welfare and our Youth

It is no secret that the Child Welfare System needs to change their policies when it comes to fathers involvement with their children, how to effectively find proper placement for the children, and it seems to me that instead of creating positive change for their organization they tend to continue to show us how messed up and unreliable they truly are.

This alone should be enough information for people to never call CPS on a family because it’s obvious they are only going to mess up a youth’s life even more. Taking a child out of the custody of the parents is dramatic enough for the youth and in some cases has lead to youth’s attempting suicide, rebelling against any authority figures, and also results in our youth joining gangs or finding other sources of acceptance by becoming addicted to narcotics and other substances.

Having worked with so many different families and youth who have received Child Welfare Services, I can honestly say that nobody has ever had one good thing to say about them, even in my own case with CPS I realized some of the things my families and youth were telling me about…

One of the main issues I have with the Child Welfare System out here in California is the fact that if a child is removed from the home before the child is place in foster care or a group home the other members of the family must be contacted.

Now where Child Welfare goes wrong is majority of these children are from single family homes, meaning that the father is not present and they are suppose to contact the father of that child immedatly and see if the father wants the child before sending them to the paternal grandparents or any other family members. The next step would be to do a investigation of that person’s home and make sure it was fit for the child to live.

Child Welfare Systems rarely ever calls the father and asks if they would like to take the child, they assume right off the bat that since the child was with a single mother the father most not be involved in the child’s life or must not want to be involved, which in my opinion is FALSE!! Yes, there are a lot of dead beat fathers out there who never deserve to be called a “Dad” however haven’t we learned anything from the years and years of racism that we should never judge a book by its cover?

A father’s love is just as important as a mother’s love, and I feel very strongly that Dad’s all over the nation should stand up and scream for their children no matter what it cost!!! Nobody can do better for your child then yourself and that’s the truth. One of the many things destroying our nation is the lack of fatherhood, and it’s time to change that around but that is not the intentions of this article…

Another major issue with the Child Welfare System is that every 3 months they change social workers on you, which is detrimental to anyone successfully completing a case plan with Child Welfare because of the fact that as soon as you feel comfortable with a certain Social Worker and your family starts to open up to that social worker, they end up destroying any bond you may have gotten with that social worker because they end up giving you somebody totally new and uninformed on your situation.

It throws a left hook in the way of your case plan because now your new social worker is trying to start you back at stage one but your already ten steps ahead of your new social worker. This puts a huge bridge in the way of the family partnering with the social worker and the goal of a social worker is to work together with the family and youth in order to have a successful completion of the case plan and unless you are superman or have no job or commitments anywhere else you can follow suit and do exactly what they want you to do.

This makes it pretty impossible for any family to ever successfully complete their Child Welfare Case Plan and have any chance of reunifying with their children; however there are rare cases of successful completion as there should be because how else would Child Welfare reach their numbers!

The scariest part about all of this is what is happening to our youth. We need to come up with a better solution on what we do with these youth, way too many youth are resorting to substance abuse, having suicidal tendencies, fall into deep depression, joining gangs, and millions of other issues that result from just taking the child away from their comfort zone.

Yes in a lot of these cases the child needs to be taking away from the home, I understand that and agree with those severe cases of child neglect, abuse, etc.

However what are we offering these youth? How are we helping them understand the reality of the situation and help them through what it is that is going on? Counseling just isn’t enough and majority of the youth do not want to participate in any type of therapy. My suggestion would be to enroll these youth in a coaching program dedicated towards helping them build self confidence mixed with some goal setting techniques that will really help the youth put time and energy into their own personal growth and development instead of reminding them constantly on how messed up their family is.

We need to remember how alone these youth feel once they are taking out of their home, and we also need to remember how egger these youth are to find something to make them feel like they are not alone. This is why so many of our youth end up addicted to a substance and/or results in a life of crime.

Now let’s take a look at the people that work for the Child Welfare Systems and please understand that these are just my personal views and in no way am I trying to be funny or disrespect anyone’s culture in anyway and with that being said my personal view on the people who work for the Child Welfare System is the following: Majority of the people who work for the Child Welfare System are non-family members meaning they do not have any idea how to run a family, raise a child, etc. this simply means that these people should have no business investigating or working with a family because they have no clue how to do it on their own, who are they to judge the way another person raises their family and then there are different culture’s who have different believes on how to raise their families so really who are we to judge that person’s cultural views? Then from my personal research I have noticed that Child Welfare mostly only hire’s female social workers and majority of these female workers or women who have had a history of violence in their relationships and dislike men and these are the people who are working with our families and youth and we are wondering why fathers involvement is being overlooked when it comes to Child Welfare Case Plans? The proof is in the pudding and I seriously believe we need to be putting our social workers through better trainings to help them better work with the families and youth they serve instead of against them because the way they are doing business now obviously isn’t working…

I remember one time I was sitting in on a Team Decision Meeting with a client and the before this man could even introduce himself to the team of Decision Makers at the table they automatically started bringing up this clients juvenile record and using that as a reason for not allowing this client to have weekends with his child. Now this client was already 24 years old and the last time he was in any type of trouble with the law was when he was 16 years old, and the crime wasn’t even that violent he was charged with robbery for stealing clothes at a local mall and has had a extremely clean history with the law since then so is it really fair for us to judge this person off of something he did as a child and in the same respect is that a good reason to tell this person you are not allowed to be involved in your child’s life however we expect you to pay child support?

Doesn’t seem fair to me not even a little bit, and this is just one small case out of the millions and millions of cases in just San Diego County alone I can’t even begin to imagine the things going on in Los Angeles County and San Francisco.

Are we going to continue to allow this to happen and then wonder why youth are so messed up? This is a major cause in many of the youth issues we face today and its time we did something to change the way the system works so we can better serve our families and youth who are in dire need of some real support and services geared towards helping their family thrive towards success.

How many more cases are going to be overlooked before we actually stand up to the Child Welfare System and tell them we demand changes, better social workers, better programs for families and youth, better service, and the ultimate goal of us working together and building healthier families so our youth have a easier chance to accomplish their goals and stay away from substance, violence, and things like that?

What can we do as a community to get the message across to Child Welfare Systems and let them know our families and youth need better services, better social workers, more commitment from Child Welfare (not changing social workers every 3 months), better support for the youth who are taking out of the home, and a overall commitment of excellence to help all struggling families who get their services thrive towards successful completion of the Child Welfare System Case Plan?