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Take Me Home: Protecting America's Vulnerable Children and Families ReviewJill Berrick has written an interesting and important book about permanent planning for children in foster care and unlicensed kinship care and about the foster care system itself. Nevertheless, Take Me Home is an incomplete treatment of complex subjects, especially the chapter on reunification which (surprisingly) lacks an in-depth analysis of post-reunification services, re-entry into care, reunification criteria, promising programs for substance abuse or co-occurring disorders or more unusual approaches to reunification such as shared family care and intentional communities. These are puzzling omissions for an author who clearly wants a renewed child welfare investment in reunification practice and services and in improving the foster care system.
In her introductory chapters, Berrick argues that there is thin evidence that prevention programs or family preservation services either prevent child maltreatment or foster placements; and she is concerned that widespread support for poorly researched or ineffective family support programs is draining away valuable resources from children in foster care needing permanent nurturing families. Berrick asserts that "The fundamental mission of child welfare is downstream (i.e., after entry into out of home care), where children must be served, where the child welfare system accepts its greatest responsibility..." and "... the dollars spent on ineffective prevention services should be redirected to the children already under the supervision of child welfare agencies and the courts."
These are not likely to be popular views with child advocates, most of whom want an increased public investment in prevention and early intervention programs; but even more to the point, the funding for prevention / early intervention is currently only a small fraction of foster care funding. Even if the paltry public investment in prevention were redirected to reunification services and foster care, the increased funding would not amount to much in most states, including Washington State. The actual trade off since the passage of AFSA (which Berrick hardly touches on) has been between increased public investment in adoption and, to a lesser extent, subsidized guardianship vs.reunification . It is difficult to understand why Berrick's commitments to better funded and more effective programs for birth parents did not result in an analysis of AFSA's unbalanced public policy favoring permanency outcomes other than reunification.
The strength of Berrick's book is six case studies of parents who lost custody of children due mostly to substance abuse and neglect and then (sometimes after years) regained custody of some of their children. These are powerful candid stories told in the voices of parents with no punches pulled, stories which have the potential to challenge any policy framework. Berrick is skilled in adding narrative which fills out the stories without reducing their emotional impact. In these stories, young children are severely neglected by hopeless, helpless parents addicted to drugs until child welfare agencies make out of home placements, usually initially with relatives. The relatives entrusted with care of the children are themselves troubled, and often drug abusers as well. These relatives often returned young children to the custody of substance abusing parents for weeks at a time without the knowledge or permission of child welfare caseworkers. When children were placed in non-relative care, they were often moved from home to home and/or physically abused. Some of the mothers continued to have children who were removed one by one by child welfare agencies from the mother's care. After substantial periods of time and numerous reunification plans, some of the mothers report making a mysterious transformative commitment to recovery and gradually regain custody of some or all of their children.
Child welfare agencies/staff, relative and non-relative caregivers do not appear in these stories in a flattering light. Some of the parents are deeply angry regarding the treatment they received from caseworkers and their own family members; but they do not minimize the fact or extent of their addiction and neglect, and they are grateful for being coercively pushed into treatment programs. The children in these stories are poorly protected and served in out of home care; and permanent planning does not occur for them in a timely way. A few end up with birth fathers but most experience transient placements with both kin and non-kin foster parents, as well as birth mothers. If these stories are widely representative of the experience of children in out of home care, child welfare systems are in worse condition than even vocal critics maintain.
Berrick is at her most eloquent in commenting on the experience of one of these mothers: "When Tracy (one of the mothers in the stories) was working to reunify with Asia, Raymond, Amber and Tyson, she needed to learn how to engage in positive parenting experiences, she needed a coach to help her learn techniques for managing her children's now challenging behaviors; she needed support in responding to their needs in their new dyadic, intimate, day to day relationship. Tracy also needed concrete help establishing a home for her children. She needed an apartment in a new community, away from the familiar triggers she associated with the drug use of her past. She needed furniture, phone service, kitchen paraphernalia, bedding, clothes--Tracy needed all of these and had none. She needed an enriched child care program for her youngest and after school programs for the others. She needed reliable transportation.... She needed another bed, sheets and blankets. What Tracy needed was income to clothe and feed a very large family. What she got was another generic parenting class." As a cogent indictment of common reunification practice, this passage can hardly be improved on.
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