While I try to avoid endorsing political candidates on this site, I felt it was imperative to acknowledge the excellence of Mr. Obama’s recent speech on race and the issues facing the United States at this time. Whether or not he becomes President, he has recently defined himself as the kind of leader we both need and many are willing to follow, especially in this area.
I haven’t heard such a thoughtful speech in years.
One of the most important skills of resilience is the trait of optimism. Martin Seligman, in The Optimistic Child, describes how to work with youth to develop this important trait. This short presentation provides an overview of the theory of optimism, and some Cognitive Behavioral Techniques to help youth become more optimistic.
Much of our work at Success Technologies is providing training in the use of the Casey Life Skills Tools developed by Casey Family Programs. The use of these tools has grown exponentially since the beginning of the century, and they are incredibly useful tools for anyone wanting to improve the skills of young people, and, actually, young adults.
We find, however, that there are ways of using the tools that are more effective than others, and often have people in our training who have used the primary assessment for years, who realize during the training that they haven’t been doing justice to the young people in their programs in the way they had used it prior to training. We feel very good about improving the use of the tools, but it is quite disheartening to know that there are probably many more people who are using these tools in a hit and miss, frankly mediocre fashion. This leads to mediocre outcomes with their clients.
While this type of issue occurs in most areas of human services practice, we are dedicated to improving the ways programs and individual professionals work with young people using the Casey tools. So if you are using these tools and haven’t been trained, we suggest you sign up for training with one of the Authorized Training Providers listed on www.caseylifeskills.org. We, of course, hope you choose us at Success Technologies.
This is the second holiday season during which we have been working with a young woman in the Child Welfare System. Last year, she was living with us, and we had planned on an adoption. We will still probably adopt her as an adult, but now she is living in a transition program.
This Friday, we will go pick her up for the holidays, and it will probably make for a more adventurous time for us. We love her deeply, and she finally knows that.
The most difficult time for me will be this Friday when I go to pick her up, and am faced with the others who have no one to isn’t staff of the home to offer them belonging and support. Sometimes they even resent our “daughter” both because she has someone and they don’t, and, being herself, because she will frequently take us for granted.
We are doing what we can realistically do, but the temptation is to try to take more of them home. In doing so, we would recreate some of the same dynamics she has there.
Permanent connections are incredibly important for youth in the system, and I wish I had understood this many years before I did. If you have the time and energy, I hope you consider becoming the permanent support for a child in the system. They need us!
We had another death of a small child involved in the Indiana child welfare system this month. The child was beaten to death by her parents after being reunified. The foster parent who had taken care of the child shared how she cautioned the child’s worker against returning the child, and has been quite vocal about the tragedy of the child’s death.
She is obviously correct. It is a tragedy which shouldn’t have happened. It will, however, happen over and over again. In Indiana, and every other state which follows federal guidelines, the top priority goal in a child abuse and neglect case is to reunify children with their birth families. While safety of the child is the top priority, it is to be achieved, whenever possible by working with the child’s family. Unless there is a very clear and compelling reason not to, children are helped to maintain relationships with, and be returned to their birth family.
This priority is based on years of research documenting that the removal of children from their families often causes more damage than either leaving them with their families, or reunifying them with their families after the families have received services. There is no doubt that children are harmed by spending significant time in the system. This is federal policy, and staff are trained to think of reunifying first. Families are given time limits to prove they can change their behaviors, and are often allowed at least one chance to care for the child(ren). The time limits are also based on research that indicates multiple placements over a long time in the system also damages children. They also, however, only give staff and the courts short time frames within to make critical decisions.
So the case manager in this case was trained to reunify the child with the family unless he or she could make a very strong case to the court that the child would be in danger. So the child’s parents were given a chance. The child was murdered. This is the result of the double bind of being expected to protect the child while having the top priority goal of reunification. It is difficult enough to keep children safe when the safety of the child is both the top goal of the system and the top practice goal are the same. There is strong evidence that fewer children are harmed when the current priorities are followed. However, children are going to be harmed either way.
It is impossible to always predict when people are going to harm their children. The safety, risk and needs assessments they use are scientifically designed, and are good, but not perfect. Turnover is high, so people are often leaving their jobs before they master the skills they need to be really skilled investigators.
No matter how hard they try, they won’t always be able to get it correct every time. They will either make mistakes by taking too many children from their families and placing them in situations which also have high incidences of abuse, or they will reunify the wrong children and those children will be abused again by their families. Their methods aren’t foolproof. As a society, we have chosen to bet on the families when there is a chance they can succeed.
In this case, and many others, it appears there might have been a missed opportunity. Foster parents often have very important information and perspectives about the potential dangers within birth families. They often have far more experience than the staff involved in the case. To often, in these situations, we find that the staff failed to give credence to very solid information and a child died when it could have been avoided. I don’t know if that is the case here. I do know there is a very upset foster mother who feels her input was ignored.
I write this because of the media coverage. The underlying assumption of the coverage is always that this should never happen and some one is at fault. The theme is always that someone needs to be held accountable, and that staff is at fault. Indeed, someone might have been negligent and somehow culpable in the death of this child.
However, we need to know that, whether or not it should happen, it will. It will happen at times, even when staff do their job as well as they are trained to do. The sciences behind child welfare practice are, like most sciences, imperfect ones. To deny that we are simply incapable of getting it right every time. Child welfare workers are human and while they need to be accountable, they also need to be supported when they come face to face with the death of children, children they were charged to protect.
When I was younger, my dream, noble or not, was to be a trial attorney. I had admired Perry Mason, and watched most TV shows which featured attorneys and crime. This is still a preferred form of entertainment, though I no longer want to practice law.
I mention this because the leadership in my high school had no idea of my dreams, and never asked. Even though I entered my senior year in high school first in my class academically, my cultural background was blue collar, and I was a very skilled mechanic by the time I was seventeen. Obviously, this strength in auto mechanics impressed the principal of my high school because he recommended the person who was second in the class for a scholarship for which I was technically the proper candidate.
When I confronted him about this, he admitted that he had simply assumed that I wanted be a mechanic. The only problem was, I hated being a mechanic and had learned the skills in order to avoid beatings from my father. Of course, no one else in my family was in college either, and that made an impression. No one at school ever asked me whether I had worked so hard for grades because I had a dream that included academics.
To give credit to my principal, he did help me receive more money than I would have if he had given me that scholarship. After he understood my dreams, he helped me.
I mention this because many people working with youth assume that identifying a strength and identifying something which motivates the youth are the same thing. Strengths aren’t necessarily motivating. We develop strengths because someone else saw a talent and coached us, or because we have a genetic talent, or through any of a number of means which might have nothing to do with our goals.
Our dreams motivate us. We might have dreams in areas in which we don’t have any obvious strengths. I wanted to an attorney, but barely received a C in my college speech classes. Now, thirty-five years later, I make my living as a trainer and public speaker. I discovered a dream of helping youth, and needed to learn to be an effective speaker to succeed at my dream.
Strengths are useful. They can contribute to success in our chosen areas. However, we need to avoid becoming distracted and believing that the presence of a strength indicates some underlying goal and motivation. If we coach dreams, strengths will evolve. If we identify strengths and talents and coerce others in the direction we think is important, we are, though well-meaning, insulting who they are.
Ray Hoskins
After 35 years of working in Human Services, I am totally convinced that mutually respectful relationships are the foundation of all successful work in groups. Whether it is adults working with youth in delivering services, adults working together to improve systems, developing new strategies for services, the quality of the results is dependent upon the quality of the relationships between the people involved.
Conversely, some systems, programs, even families struggle over and over for years with the same surface issues when the core issue sabotaging their success is hostile, disrespectful patterns of relating. If we fix the relationships, we then have the chance of addressing the other issues. If we can’t learn to work together, then we never will succeed.
In the 1970s, Eric Berne and others wrote a number of books including the trite theme of “I’m Okay, You’re Okay.” While the saying became a fad, then was disregarded, as most fads are, the idea behind this saying is important to working together.
Berne stated that people had to be in a state of feeling good about themselves and good about others in interactions before they would “get on with” the work at hand.
If people felt good about themselves, but superior to others, then they would “get rid of” the others. Others would shut down and find excuses to avoid the superior acting persons.
If people felt bad about themselves and saw others as being more experienced, more valuable to the process than themselves, they would try to “get away from” the others involved. Of course, if the others involved also felt superior to them, it was even more motivation to withdraw.
Finally, the fourth position was I’m not okay, you’re not okay. In this scenario, everyone feels inadequate to whatever challenges confront them, and holds no faith that anyone else has a clue either. In this situation, ironically, people do not withdraw from each other. Rather, they “go nowhere together”. They will stay together for years, pretending together that they have the confidence, skill and other resources to solve problems, but somehow they never follow through and succeed. For a consultant, the I’m not okay, you’re not okay system or community is a nightmare.
How do you and those with which you work match up with Berne’s model. Are you
If you are doing anything but getting on with it, then you need to look at how you can develop the kind of self respect and respect for others necessary to succeed in your goals.
Ray Hoskins
Recently I have had several opportunities to work with programs who serve older youth in care, and am amazed at the practices I see. Many programs are trying to transition youth to adulthood using a model of levels and being primarily concerned with coercing young people 17 and above to be respectful, nice, etc, rather than working with them to learn how to support themselves, find housing, and find permanent supports.
I learned a long time ago that coaching is much more successful than coercing. In order for coaching to happen, there has to be shared goals that the young person and the coach agree is the target. Whenever you lose focus on the shared
goals, you move rapidly into coercing. Research indicates that coercive and prescriptive approaches only produce adherence to plans about 35% of the time.
We need to have the focus and the skills to help young people set and achieve goals they need to and will achieve. Let’s reassess the level systems for transition, and look at other models.
Ray Hoskins
One of the welcome trends in child welfare is currently setting targets to reduce the number of youth in the child welfare system. Some municipalities and states have reduced the children in the system by about 50%. They do this through a number of means, including a major shift of priorities and diligent addressing of issues like the overrepresentation of minority youth in care. Changing the methods of financing care is also an important piece.
In some cases, agencies are investing in higher percentages of relative caregivers, and providing support for families to help them succeed in caring for members of their family who have suffered severe abuse and/or neglect. By recognizing that relative caregivers need the same kind of support as anyone else who is willing to care for our abused and/or neglected children.
Casey Family Programs is among the leaders in this work, and has the goal of helping agencies reduce the number of youth in care and to reinvest their funds in doing a better job with those youth who need services. This is a great idea and one which needs to be seriously considered by anyone in leadership in child welfare.
I recently attended a conference and listened to the state youth advisory group for Independent Living. Of all the things I heard from those young people, the most memorable were their comments about their preference for being adopted or even placed in foster homes over being placed in group home settings.
All the youth but two had been in both family setting placements and in group homes. They were unanimous in their relative condemnation of group homes. One young person had only lived in foster homes and was eventually adopted. The most striking statements were from a young man who had been raised in group homes from a very young age. His was advice was “no more group homes”.
There is a national movement away from congregate care, and this movement is being driven largely by this type of testimony by young people. It is also consistent with statements made by foster and adoptive parents I have met about the difficulties in integrating youth who have spent a significant amount of time in group homes into their families. They report dealing with young people who have an expectation of being taken care of and almost waited on. More significantly, young people do not learn the kinds of responsibility in group homes that is required in families.
On the other side of this debate are group home providers who are able to quote their successes. The young people who come into their homes in incredible pain and leave to successfully graduate from college and have successful lives. They also accurately describe needs for behavior management techniques that are beyond the abilities of the average foster home to meet.
After considering this debate, I think we need to work to transfer every young person who can live in a family setting to such settings. That means an eventual reduction in the number of group homes and a need to major recruitment and intensive training of resource families.
On the other hand, we need to insure that we are able provide safe environments and behavioral management capacity for those youth who need such services, but only for the length of time these environments are needed.
There are a number of strategies which are succeeding around the country, the most promising of which are the pairing or funding mechanisms in which states establish a monetary value for the care of the child based on intensity of need, and work to develop resource families who can address more intense needs.
For example, an autistic child might currently be placed in a facility at $350 per day. He or she will also have Medicaid, and receive special education services through the department of education. Traditional funding approaches would have the child eventually moved to a foster home with other children as part of the services of a therapeutic foster care agency. The foster care agency might receive $100 per day which is split with the foster parent receiving perhaps $50 of that. The state seems to be saving money, and is, when this type of placement works.
However, the stipend for the foster home means that one or both parents have to hold full time jobs, and/or there needs to be multiple children in the home in order for them to financially afford to work with the child.
Under the new system, the same child is classified as a child needing a level of care valued at $350, plus Medicaid and special education services. It doesn’t matter where the child is placed, this is considered to be the amount of money needed to care for this child. So this child is placed in a foster home in which the therapeutic agency receives perhaps $75 per day, and the foster family receives $275. This makes it possible for the parents to have more flexibility in their schedules, and focus more on the needs of the child. In some cases, this has been resulted in far superior care and follow through for the child’s special needs. Reviews of treatment plans often show that some youth fail to receive the services in their plans because of the management issues in such homes. When foster families only have one child, it is easier to guarantee the services occur.
The initial research on this funding strategy indicates that youth have better long term outcomes with this approach and actually progress on their problems, and are more likely to be adopted and leave the system. States such as Illinois have far fewer children in care in part due to this system. Other states need to look at similar mechanisms. Too many children are asking that we get more proactive at moving towards No More Group Homes.