Reflections on Kinship Care

 “According to the Illinois Children and Family Services Act (20 ILCS 505/7), when DCFS takes custody of a child, the Department must make reasonable efforts to find and notify all adult relatives who are ready, willing, and able to care for the child. DCFS should place the child with a relative if that relative can adequately provide for the child’s safety and welfare and it is consistent with the child’s best interests.” https://law.justia.com/codes/illinois/2015/chapter-20/act-20-ilcs-505/?utm_source

Sometimes I think about how the child welfare system is supposed to protect kids, but it doesn’t always protect them from everything. In Illinois, when kids get taken away from their parents, they can be placed with relatives instead of strangers, and on the surface that sounds like a good thing. Being with family feels safer than being with people you don’t know. But just because someone is family doesn’t automatically mean the home is healthy.

I’ve heard real stories around me that make this complicated. A girl in my class, said she got taken from her mom and sent to live with her grandparents. She said it did get her away from the main problem, but the emotional abuse didn’t stop. That stuck with me because people assume “grandparents = safe,” but that’s not always true. Kids can still suffer in quieter ways that don’t leave bruises.

I’ve also seen this in my own family. My uncle and his girlfriend were on drugs and had a baby. The hospital found drugs in the baby’s system, so DCFS got involved. My step-aunt was a certified foster parent, so they placed the baby with her. But she was close to my uncle and his girlfriend and lived less than two miles away. That means there wasn’t much distance from the problem. Later, because of her health issues, she couldn’t keep caring for him. Then he went to my grandmother, who literally lived upstairs from my uncle. Eventually my parents took him in. In the end, my uncle and his girlfriend gave up guardianship because they couldn’t get better.

Watching this happen made me feel like the system tries, but the policies don’t always match real life. Kids get moved around again and again. Family members might love the child but still be connected to the same unhealthy environment. Just placing a child with “any” relative doesn’t guarantee safety or stability.

I believe in DCFS. I even want to work there one day because I want to help kids. I know they have a hard job, and they see the worst situations. But believing in something also means wanting it to improve. A policy that could help is making sure kinship placements (placing kids with relatives) have stronger check-ins and emotional wellbeing evaluations, not just a quick background check. Maybe there should be required counseling for the child and parenting support for the relatives. Maybe there should also be more distance from the original harmful environment when possible.

I’m not saying don’t place kids with family. Family can be the best option. I’m just saying it shouldn’t be automatic without deeper investigation. Kids deserve not just a familiar home, but a healthy one. If the goal is protecting children, then emotional safety should matter as much as physical safety.

Sometimes I think people forget that kids remember everything. They remember the yelling, the instability, the feeling of not knowing where they’ll live next. Policies aren’t just rules on paper they shape real childhoods. And childhood is something you can’t redo.

If I ever work in DCFS, I want to be the kind of worker who looks beyond “good enough” and asks, “Is this truly safe for this child to grow up in?” Because every kid deserves more than just surviving. They deserve peace.

Adoptive Grandparents Need Support

 One issue that has been on my mind for a long time was the lack of supportive care my grandparents had to adopt my four siblings and me. As a kid, I was in and out of foster care from the ages of six to twelve because of being abused and neglected by both my parents and their never-ending stream of partners. Both my mother and father at the time would rather buy drugs and alcohol instead of food for us children. Because of this, we starved. I was malnourished when I was first placed into DCFS. Often, my brothers, sisters and I were only allowed one meal per day and were punished if we got into any food related items in the kitchen. Some meals that I remember eating as a kid consisted of only these items: sugar cubes, canned tuna because we had to feed our cats, fruit loops given to us dry, in the box, in the morning and told to make it last, and most memorable a maggot ham that we had to cut around to eat. Reasons like this were why I often went hungry. I remember being so grateful when school time rolled around because it meant that I got three meals a day. My older brother got caught several times stealing honey buns and pop tarts from the nearby gas station. He got into so much trouble trying to keep us safe and fed. He worried so much about what we were eating next because he understood more than us younger kids what was going on. 

I know I keep rambling on about food, but it is most important to the story because it wasn't the fact that we were malnourished, abused, and smelled like pee and cigarettes every day that caught the school administration’s or DCFS’s attention. The specific situation that got us permanently taken away from our parents happened one morning when my sister woke up yet again, hungry. My mother, being high on drugs, was asleep on the couch. When she was like this it was nearly impossible to wake her up, and when she did wake up, it was crucial to get out of her sight for at least three hours unless we wanted her wrath. My sister tried to wake my mom up for something to eat and she wouldn't budge. So, my sister went back upstairs, only to come back about an hour later to try again but with the same luck only this time she went into the kitchen. She pulled a chair over to the counter to get into the cabinet to see what she could find to eat. She found a sleeve of ritz crackers and began eating them. I guess my mom had heard my sister come downstairs because my mom walked into the kitchen to find my sister eating. She beat my sister for this, probably because she wasn't high anymore and needed to get high. My sister had a phone at the time and ended up calling the police. I don't remember this day at all except for being put into a car in my pajamas and going to the DCFS office. 

After going to several different homes for a few months of my life, I was placed into the care of my paternal grandparents. While I can say that my physical needs were met with my grandparents, I think that the emotional support lacked significantly. See, at my grandparents’ home, we were emotionally abused, called pigs, told to use our brains, called dumb, basically worthless, and most memorable, my grandpa telling my sister to go kill herself and that he would help her do it. I've heard from my family that from the period of my dad and his brothers being children to my siblings and I being children, my grandpa has calmed down a lot. Generational trauma is most certainly present in my family. This makes me terrified to hear the stories of what happened to them as they have never come to light, but also a little confused. My mother and father however, after all the abuse and neglect they gave during their addiction, had to go through a significant list of requirements such as parenting classes, NA meetings, AA meetings, randomized drug tests, randomized house visits, visitations with their children, and so much more I cannot think of. What's most heartbreaking however was that after my mother cleaned up her act and completed all the mandated requirements, more requirements were added. It only continued like this until she was fed up and surrendered her rights as a parent in the state of Illinois. The system was working against her. She lost her children, relapsed, went to prison, and only now is turning herself and her life around. 

What I would like to point out however, is that my grandparents didn't have to take any parenting classes. No required meetings, random drug tests, and most importantly no follow up care for either the parental guardians or the children involved, only the fact that they were our grandparents held up. According to americanbar.org, “kinship caregivers often receive fewer supports than non-relative foster parents”. My grandparents didn't understand what it was like to raise children in today's world, let alone children that have severe trauma from abuse and neglect. They don't believe in mental illness, and they laugh at counseling and say “just pray about it” to almost everything and because of this, I think my siblings and I’s mental illnesses exacerbated more than it should have. I think it is safe to say that as children, we were all angry and mostly towards each other. We took the abuse and it turned into anger. It wasn't until we got placed together with our grandparents that we trauma bonded, leaned on each other, and became each other's best friends. I think the emotional abuse we took from my grandparents had more of an impact on us because we had just come from such a bad situation, thinking it would be better just to find out it's the opposite. We all suffer from depression, but this didn't show up until we all were in the care of my grandparents. What could have prevented it is education. 

I think that DCFS should mandate all guardianships to take a course at least every two years on mental illness. These courses would be created by social workers, either online or in person, to educate guardianships of mental illness, trauma, abuse, neglect, and other related issues children face. I think that a lot of the arguments and disagreements we had growing up with our grandparents involved them not understanding where we were coming from. They didn't understand our food insecurity, our mental states, or the care we needed to become active members of society, so they couldn't help us out at all. These courses could have offered my grandparents some insight into our thinking and ways of doing things. However, it almost seemed like because it was kinship care, DCFS didn't investigate any further into our situation with our grandparents, when they should have especially after our adoption. As stated by sagepub.com, “the majority of previous research has primarily focused on maltreatment that kinship children suffer, often overlooking the complex trauma, including household dysfunctions, that kinship children experience (Winokur et al., 2014). Therefore, expanding the lens from child maltreatment to include the full spectrum of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) is needed to better understand children in kinship care’s behavioral problems”. I think there should be DCFS after care for up to 5 years with just 6-month checkups. During said checkups, I think they should privately interview every family member involved to get a greater picture and take any further action that is needed. 

Another useful requirement that could be implemented to help more children is speaking with them individually. A little bit after being placed into the care of my grandparents, I struggled with food insecurity. Hiding, hoarding, and bingeing food was very common, and I was caught one time, the only time I ever got caught because I never did it again. My grandpa caught me eating my cousin's valentine’s day candy that was hidden on top of the fridge, which at the time I didn't know. I was screamed at, grabbed by the back of the neck and thrown into a love seat that we had. What was most scary, however, was not getting grabbed, but being yelled at. Anyways, DCFS doesn't like when children are grabbed and thrown, so word got around and next thing I know I was sitting next to my grandparents with a social worker in front of me asking me, “do you feel safe here” and my response was “yes” even though I disagreed. I would have told them otherwise had I not been sitting next to my grandparent. It just makes me wonder how many maltreatments slip between the cracks like this because a child is scared to sit in the presence of their abuser and admit that what they did had an impact. I'm not sure if it has changed since then, but I think that, not every visit, but maybe once a month, individual meetings should be necessary. Another requirement that I think all guardianships should have mandated to them is counseling. I think that, especially in situations like mine, generational trauma was present and affected us beyond the protection of DCFS. Just like in social work, you can't help people if you don't help yourself first. That applies to guardianship care as well. 

 

 

References

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/10634266221076475

https://www.americanbar.org/groups/public_interest/child_law/resources/child_law_practiceonline/child_law_practice/vol30/september_2011/kinship_caregiversreceivefewersupportsthanfosterparents/

Social Worker Safety After the Murder of Deidre Silas

 Deidre Silas was a social worker working at The Illinois Department of Children and Family services in Springfield Illinois. On Jan, 4, 2022, Silas was stabbed to death while making a home visit by someone staying in the house. Safety has always been a concern regarding Social Work and the murder of Silas has encouraged people to advocate for policies to protect social workers. 

Despite state officials’ pointing out changes they plan to make to protect workers, little difference has been made a year after Silas’s death. Those in the field state that one of the main issues that causes social workers to go to visits alone, is there are too many cases and not enough workers. A study done in 2020 showed that more than 73% of public child welfare workers had been verbally abused, 36% have been threatened, and about 50% have experienced symptoms of PTSD (Gerstein). Illinois has a policy that states that a social worker may delay a visit until they can have another person with them if the situation could be dangerous. Although this is ideal, it is not realistic for the oversized workload most social workers have to deal with. 

Policies suggested include providing bullet-proof shirts to social workers, cell phone signal boosters, and panic buttons for investigators to contact law enforcement. Another controversial policy signed into law by Governor Pritzker, requires departments to provide their employees with pepper spray. Unfortunately it is widely reported that these changes are not happening soon enough. A lobbyist for the Illinois chapter of the National Association of Social Workers, Kyle Hillman states, “DCFS was not interested in things that were going to cost them more money; they’re interested in things that would make good media reports…We’re going to see more tragedies.” (Gerstein).

Works Cited:

Gerstein, M. (2023, February 22). Murdered on the job: A year after a child welfare investigator was killed, little has changed. Youth Today. https://youthtoday.org/2023/02/murdered-on-the-job-a-year-after-a-child-welfare-investigator-was-killed-little-has-changed/

While it has not been a statewide change, the Sangamon County DCFS Field Office where Deidre worked has had two deputies from the Sheriff's department assigned to work with social workers since shortly after her murder. They often go out on child removals, and they help research people in households since the law enforcement database they use is much quicker than the national child abuser databases social workers use. This change has been welcomed by the social workers at the office. When I visited the office about ten months after her murder, her cubical was pretty much untouched as she had left it, and posters asking for justice for Deidre were abundantly posted around the office.

The man who killed Deidre was allegedly suffering from a psychotic disorder, and possibly not understanding the situation when he stabbed her. My sources in the county jail described the man as being “crazy” ever since he became a guest of the county. Mental illness and substance abuse are frequently present as parental situations in the appendices of the annual report on child deaths from our state’s inspector general. That is, social workers covering the most difficult cases where children’s lives may really be at risk are often encountering adults who may be intoxicated of suffering from psychosis during a home visit. In the case of the DCFS worker Pamela Knight, who was also murdered in the line of work a few years before Deidre, the father who beat her up was just an angry and violent person. He took a plea deal and will serve 21 years incarcerated.

Social work is a dangerous job, but not as dangerous as commercial fishing, forestry, law enforcement, truck driving, construction, and a few other occupations like that. The Department of Labor has estimates of the number of injuries and deaths per hours worked in various occupations. Social work is more dangerous than most jobs, but not among the very worst (most dangerous) careers.

DCFS should place siblings together in foster care

According to a Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) training titled “Keeping Children Connected to Their Brothers and Sisters,” when my mother received a sibling group of three in [date omitted to protect privacy], she should have been asked to take in the fourth sibling, who was an infant at the time. Additionally, when siblings are separated in foster care, they should have two sibling visits per month in addition to visits with the biological parent(s). Not only was this not facilitated, but any attempts to request the contact information of the foster parents of the fourth sibling were denied. It even says on the DCFS website that children in foster care will be told where their siblings are living and how to contact them. Also, if only one sibling from a sibling group is adopted, then the caseworker is supposed to speak with all parties involved about a continued contact plan or visits between the children.

This was not the only time DCFS neglected to follow through on their own policies. The sibling group of three was moved [about a year after initial placement with this student’s mother] because parental rights were being terminated, but my mother was still not able to contact the foster parents of the youngest sibling. We were told that they would be placed in a home five minutes away from the youngest, so my mother felt comfortable that they would be able to see each other. Following this removal, one of the children that was with my mother went to live with the youngest, and the other two children went to live in the household that was five minutes away. Later, the two that stayed together were moved because they were being abused. 

Throughout all the placements, the two sibling visits each month did not happen; they only saw each other during the parental meetings. The two siblings, who suffered through two placements and two school districts, came back to my mother [about seven months after being moved out of the student’s household when parental rights were terminated]. Finally, in [recent days], DCFS is getting around to moving the third child back into my mother’s care, which should have happened within 60 days of the other two returning to my mother’s house back [approximately nine months earlier], as explained in the training. Through foster parent support groups, my mother and I personally know of foster parents in similar situations. Foster parents are being denied the opportunity to keep siblings together; DCFS is failing to comply with their own policy.

We were not aware of this until my mother mistakenly took a staff training through Virtual Training Center (VTC), which shows that caseworkers should already have a working knowledge of the policy and are failing to implement it. Both caseworkers and foster parents should be aware of the information in this training, especially so siblings can stay together or stay in contact when that’s not possible. Foster children are negatively impacted when a rule like this is not enforced. Please contact your local DCFS office and urge them to consistently follow this policy.

For evidence of the importance of sibling foster care placement, see:

Washington, K. (2007). Sibling placement in foster care: a review of the evidence. Child & Family Social Work. 2007;12(4):426-433. doi:10.1111/j.1365-2206.2006.00467.x.