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.

Student wants improvements to Social Welfare Kinship Policy

The social welfare system has taken on more children than they have the capacity for. The agencies do not have enough workers for the children that need their help. Another factor for the workers being unable to take in all the children in need is the difficulty of the work itself. Working in social welfare can be a very challenging and mentally draining with the stress that is put on someone. This is why there should be a policy that makes it easier on the system and workers.

Dear ______________,

I am writing to you to direct your attention to the problem we face in Illinois due to lack of staffing in the Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS).  We do not have a sufficient number of child protection workers and child welfare workers, and as a result, the social workers in DCFS are given appallingly high caseloads—numbers that obscenely reduce the ability of those social workers to support the families and children. Social workers staffing DCFS already endure work that challenges their stamina and drains their energy, stressing and fatiguing even the most dedicated child welfare professional. You and your colleagues in the Illinois General Assembly must do something about this.  You need to make the system easier on DCFS workers.

Kinship care is a great concept, but it takes many steps and a long time for a child to be placed with a relative. Making a policy that allowed the process of children to live with relatives easier would lessen the number of children in the foster care system. With so many children in need of help and little space in the social welfare system to do so, many children do not end up getting the help and die from neglect and/or abuse. The process that relatives must go through to be granted the ability to care for a related child is extensive. It takes a long time for their application to be granted, meanwhile that child is either stuck in an unsafe home or in foster care with people they do not know. 

Does it really take a long time to place children with kin? I thought it was somewhat easier and swifter to find a family member who is willing to take a child.  But, I suppose it might take a few more days, as one needs to track down all the possible cousins and siblings and aunts and uncles and so forth, whereas if there isn’t a preference for kinship care, then whatever family is next in line to take a child can immediately provide a home.  But, wouldn’t it be the case that a child would stay as a “visitor” with a general foster care family while the DCFS workers try to find a kinship care placement?  What exactly could be done to make it easier to place children in kinship care? There are risks to consider when placing a child in someone related to the parents who had their child removed, although in general kinship care is safer and better than other foster care placements, it’s not always better. You say “it takes a long time” without saying anything about why it takes so long or how long precisely it does take.

There are both positives and negatives to this policy, just like any other. The positives would include that it will allow for more space in the system. The policy would make more foster homes available to children who may not have any relatives able to take them in. In 2018, there were almost 17,000 children in the social welfare system and many more that need the help of the agencies, but there was not a large enough capacity for them to do so (The Annie E. Casey Foundation). On the other hand, this would shorten the timeframe for background checks and home visits. With the process being quicker and easier, that would mean the relatives would not have as intensive background checks in the beginning. This could be combatted with more intensive background checks and visits once the child is placed in the home.

About 2.6 million American children live in kinship care type households (79,000 in Illinois). You could give him all the information from Annie E. Casey:

Foster Family Home - Non-relative: 7,719 in Illinois; 182,386 in the whole USA.

Foster Family Home - Relative: 9,045 in Illinois; 137,356 in the whole USA.

Group Home or Institution - 1,205 in Illinois; 38,799 in the whole USA.

Pre-Adoptive Home - 683 in Illinois; 16,559 in the whole USA.

Trial Home Visit - 736 in Illinois; 18,250 in the whole USA.

So, you are saying that the child protective worker who removes a child from a family should place the child in a sibling of one of the parents, or a parent of one of the parents, or a cousin, or an adult sibling, after some sort of cursory background check, and then do a thorough background check on that person after the child has been placed?  You need to be very explicit about this, and honestly explain that there are risks if the parents are emotionally or mentally troubled, that this may reflect a family pattern.  You then should say that despite that risk, you think the advantages of a quick and long-term placement with kin outweighs the risk, because even with a checked and trained and known foster care household, there is a risk of the foster parent maltreating the child.

From an ideological standpoint, the policy would allow an easier way for children to be taken care of by someone they may know better and be more comfortable with. The children are scared when being taken to a new place and this would allow for the process to be a bit easier for them. It would also allow for the child to not have to move around the foster care system and allow for less stress.

You might make this more persuasive and memorable if you gave this person a narrative story about two children removed from a home, with one going to a family member, and the other going to a foster care family they have never met, to help give the reader a very direct feeling about what this would be like.

Politically, this would allow for the government system to have an easier time finding staff. With the job being so stressful, there is often overworked staff and not enough people for all of the children. Placing the children would also be easier with a better ratio of workers to children since some would be going into kinship care quicker. The policy would also provide less backlash to the government because more children would be able to be placed into safe homes. One consequence that stands out is the safety with the background check being shortened for placement. If the relatives are not ready for a child or also neglect and/or abuse the child, that can become a major setback. This is why as soon as the child is placed, a more intensive background and home check should be started to ensure the child’s safety.

I do not understand how you are making a connection between streamlining placement with kin when a child is removed from a household and reducing the caseloads of DCFS workers.  Children in foster care, even if it is kinship care, remain on a DCFS worker’s caseload until they are either adopted or returned to a family, and even after being returned to a family or adopted they may remain under scrutiny of child welfare services. Is there a backlash against the legislature or the governor, and is that backlash based on children being placed (or left in) unsafe homes?  

I would like you to co-sponsor this policy. The action needed for this policy would be to come up with a quick and effective background check first. This would allow for a speedier and less stressful process of getting the child into kinship care. This would also allow for the system to start helping another child get into foster care if needed. After a background check is done, the child can move in, and a more intensive background check can start. Social workers should also make plans for home visits to ensure that the home is safe for the child and that they are being well taken care of. 

This is pretty much what child welfare social workers already do.  I think social workers make the plans for supervised visits with parents or guardians. I think your main point is that you want a change in policy to create two types of background checks, with one being a cursory and swift background check that allows DCFS to quickly place children in kinship care, before they have done a normal thorough background check.  You also seem to want the process of doing background checks to be streamlined or made speedier. You could, for example, suggest that DCFS social workers should have access to the same technology and databases used by law enforcement.  This is a policy that would achieve what you want, and I think it would be a good change.  

This policy would allow for the government to better their social welfare system and ensure safety for more children. The positives of the policy outweigh the negatives and solutions can be thought of for the negatives. Some solutions could be doing a house check right before placing the child or providing some necessary items for the relatives that are not prepared for a child in their home. The number of children dying from neglect and abuse would decrease due to the system being able to help more children. I think this policy could greatly benefit the social welfare system and allow for them to help many more children.

When you say the benefits or positives of a course of action outweighs the disadvantages or threats, and recommend the course of action, you generally ought to briefly explore the desirable and undesirable consequences of each of at least two actions. So, in a case like this, you want to describe the undesirable consequences of not changing the existing practices.  That is, you want to describe problems we have today.  Then, you want to stress that this policy would help us diminish the problems we have with the current situation. 

You have done that in this letter, but it would be better to organize such a letter this way:

1. Ask clearly for what you want from your audience, a member of the General Assembly or the Governor or someone who is an Executive Director of the DCFS. 
2. Explain what the problem is now.  You open with the problem of high caseloads and an insufficient number of social workers in DCFS to adequately handle the cases for which the DCFS is responsible.  Normally this would be solved by increasing salaries or improving working conditions for the workers, and doing more to recruit, hire, and retain them. There might also be efforts to train more social workers in preparation for working in DCFS. You, however, are suggesting mainly a way to make the work of placing children into foster families easier by streamlining the initial safety background check so that children can be more swiftly placed in a kinship care situation, and then that placement can be confirmed after a more thorough background check and interview is completed.  This does connect to the retention of social workers in DCFS, since this will presumably make their work easier. You should show some evidence that the current situation is burdensome, lengthy, and difficult.  You make that claim, but I saw no evidence for how bad the situation is.  Your argument would be stronger if you had provided some details about this.
3. Explain the benefits of the action you are proposing.  You do this fairly well.  
4. Consider the possible arguments against the course of action you have suggested, and counter those. 
5. Repeat the request. Works Cited

“Children in Foster Care: Kids Count Data Center.” KIDS COUNT Data Center: A Project of the Annie E. Casey Foundation, The Annie E. Casey Foundation, Apr. 2022, https://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/tables/6243-children-in-foster-care?loc=1&loct=2&msclkid=3931b6c5d82e144bb390d2dc07f8a711&utm_source=bing&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=Foster+Care+-+Topics&utm_term=foster+care+questions&utm_content=What+is+Foster+Care#detailed/2/2-53/false/37,871,870,573,869,36,868,867,133,38/any/12987.