The Child Welfare System

Introduction: The child welfare system is a corrupt system. Many suspected cases of neglect (GRTEP defines this as “parents should have done something for the child but failed to do so,” such as denying medical care or not feeding them) or abuse (GRTEP defines this as “Abuse means that you did something to hurt your child,” such as molesting them or hitting them hard enough to break bones) are going unreported or uninvestigated, children are living in miserable conditions (even after DCS intervention or when in foster care), and are not given a smooth transition into adulthood. Perhaps a more family centered approach to ending child abuse and neglect would benefit our country the most.
Discussion: With many children living in neglect and abuse …show more content…
Shared Family Care is most beneficial for parents and families who are willing to change, or simply don’t know how to be good parents. GRTEP mentions that in Shared Family Care, “the children are not taken away from the parent, the whole family is in effect put into a form of foster care (referred to as a foster/model family in this paper) where they live with a family that models effective parenting for them.” This has the potential to not only stop the abuse, but also to teach parents how to effectively parent and provide for children in the future, should they become independent or have more …show more content…
Not enough is being done to prevent or stop abuse in families. Families may not have knowledge of/ access to valuable resources, they may be living in poverty (which can be a contributor to abuse), and families are often traumatized by separating kids from parents. The policy proposed above is the Shared Family Care model, instead of moving children away from their biological family and into a foster setting, this policy has entire families staying with a foster/ model family so that the family can learn effective parenting skills, see healthy family dynamics, and address core problems such as poverty, mental illness, or drug abuse. Helping connect these families to resources to help get them out of poverty is another way to end the abuse. Many people are not aware of how many resources are available to them. In order to prevent poor implementation and/ or corruption of this policy, more frequent home visits and additional training for those working or volunteering in the child welfare system would be extremely