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Child Welfare Thesis Statement

1448 Words6 Pages

Research Statement
I am passionate about the field of child welfare and focused squarely on advancing scholarship on foster care and adoption through research and teaching the next generation of social work practitioners and scholars. I am knowledgeable about child welfare and youth services broadly, as a result of my past experiences as a child welfare social worker in Santa Clara County, as an applied researcher at Westat (a social science research firm) and Chapin Hall Center for Children at the University of Chicago, as a policy analyst with the Pew Commission on Children in Foster Care, and as a senior policy advisor to former Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano, where I worked directly on a major overhaul of the Arizona child welfare system. …show more content…

TYPS is a longitudinal study seeking to understand what types of supports are available to youth during their teen years and after they turn eighteen, based on their permanency outcomes, as well as how different permanency outcomes impact health, life skills, education, safety, and vocation outcomes. Among other things, TYPS will allow me the opportunity to operationalize the conceptual classification scheme of relational permanence discussed above and test it for validity and reliability over time. To date, we have published an online literature review establishing the importance of TYPS (Adkins, Faulkner, & Pérez, 2016), fielded a pilot study, launched a website (http://utyps.org/), and are working with the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services to gain IRB …show more content…

The Foster Care Independence Act of 1999 established the John F. Chafee Foster Care Independence Program (CFCIP) to help youth who are transitioning out of foster care to achieve self-sufficiency through an array of independent living services. Although states are required to report service receipt data to the National Youth in Transition Database (NYTD), few studies have examined these national data to understand service provision for youth aging out of care. Because of my close personal (I was a featured speaker at the White House bill singing of the Foster Care Independence Act and a former recipient of independent living skills) and professional (through my work with Westat, I helped develop NYTD) attachments, I applied for and was awarded a research fellowship through Cornell University to be trained on using NYTD data to advance the field’s knowledge of independent living services. Through the Cornell fellowship I met two scholars, who I have since collaborated with to build a research agenda extending our knowledge on federal independent living services utilization. As such, we collaborated on a manuscript seeking to understand the underlying patterns of services receipt to prepare for youth’s successful transition to adulthood. This manuscript uses multi-level latent class analysis (MLCA) to identify

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Children in foster care are the nation 's children, and we all bear a collective responsibility to ensure their healthy development while in state care. We can and should do more to return these children to wholeness, but it will require everyone who touches the lives of children in foster care—friends, families, communities, caseworkers, courts, and policymakers—to claim shared responsibility for the quality of those lives. Reforming the child welfare system requires all of these actors to build bonds and create a strong web of support for these vulnerable children. Reform is not a destination —it is an ongoing process of organizational self-examination, evaluation of practice, careful public oversight, and vigilant attention to outcomes. The route to reform is clear.

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This essay will explore the state vs. federal jurisdiction of the foster care system, examining the structure of foster care at the state level, the structure of foster care at the federal level, comparison of state

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The foster care system shatters like broken glass and there is no repair for broken glass. Permanent damage can only be fixed with drastic solutions, redesigning the system is the method to follow. Foster parents go through hardships and trials while trying to adopt children. Children need stability and the parents willing to give them that they cannot be with forever. A reason for a shattered system is the result of a shattered admissions process.

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The Fostering Connections to Success and Increasing Adoptions Act ensures “A kinship navigator program to assist kinship caregivers in learning about, finding, and using programs and services to meet the needs of the children they are raising and their own needs, and to promote effective partnerships among public and private agencies to ensure kinship caregiver families are served” (Speaker of the House of Representatives, 2008). “The child welfare agency is often involved in providing services to children and families or making referrals to other groups that provide services” (Child Welfare Information Gateway, 2010). The Sanchez family would benefit greatest from financial support programs that provide cash to the family including Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) if the family’s income meets the requirements, Supplemental Security Income (SSI) for Vicki, and if Hector is eventually laid off Unemployment Insurance (IU) (Chapin, 2014). The Fostering Connections to Success and Increasing Adoptions Act provides families, such as the Sanchez family, with cash kinship guardianship assistance payments for one to three years (Speaker of the House of Representatives, 2008). Non-cash programs that would assist the family with meeting their needs include Supplemental

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3543 Words | 15 Pages

Introduction For this last assignment which is my signature assignment, I was asked to develop an envisioned methodology and design for my dissertation research topic based on the research problem, purpose, and previous research courses, and then write a research paper to identify the strengths and weaknesses of my envisioned method and design. Within this research topic I will discuss foster children. There is a great number of individuals that have experience foster care at some time or another in their lives. Some of those individuals such as myself actually grew up in foster care and because of that experience sent my life in a different direction than it was headed.

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1679 Words | 7 Pages

Foster systems have attempted alternative routes to traditional foster homes by trying group homes, but this does not provide the correct amount of care that a child should endure. With that drawback, there are statistics that are proven true that say the following: “In 2012, 23,396 youth aged out of the U.S. foster care system without the emotional and financial support necessary to succeed,” “Nearly 40% had been homeless or couch surfed, nearly 60% of young men had been convicted of a crime, and only 48% were employed,” “75% of women and 33% of men receive government benefits to meet basic needs,” and “50% of all youth who aged out were involved in substance use and 17% of the females were pregnant” (“Facts and

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Tie to the audience: Some of the children that are in foster care might be related to you or the child could be someone that you know like a friend’s child. C. Thesis and Preview: Consequently, we need to do something to make adoption easier and better not only in the United States, but all over the world. Today I will give you a few solutions to fix the foster care system. I’ll begin by telling you about the need to improve foster care. II.

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Common misconceptions associated with being in foster care portray youth in the system as orphans. Youth in foster care are supposedly delinquents, and will perform poorly in academics compared to their peers who are not placed in these institutions. In society, these stereotypes are often pretended, but very little people understand the circumstances and factors the youth in the foster care system are facing. Youth in care are often juxtaposed to their community counterparts, to signify the impact of being a ward of the state, rather than being with a family member.

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1559 Words | 7 Pages

Rachel L. Swarns of the New York Times reports that “Over the last six months more than 1000 foster kids, mostly teen-agers, have spent at least one night huddled on the floor of the city’s placement office while caseworkers frantically searched for beds.” These children, who are going through important stages of their lives, have nowhere to sleep and no one to count on. Something needs to change for these kids or they are going to grow up with nothing. When the foster children eventually age out of the system, the transition to the adult world is tough for them because they rely so much on state-provided care. Miller, Paschell, and Azar of Science Direct write that, “Close to 21,000 youth age out of the

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1422 Words | 6 Pages

In addition to the maltreatment of children in foster care, another issue that arises is that children are moved from one foster care home to another on an average of every six weeks (NCANDS, 2012). With the changes in the caregivers of children in foster care experience, the more likely they are to exhibit oppositional behavior, crying, and clinging. With that being said, in 2012, 23,396 youth aged out of the U.S. foster care system without the emotional and financial support necessary to succeed. Nearly 40% had been homeless or couch surfed, nearly 60% of young men had been convicted of a crime, and only 48% were employed. Seventy-five percent of women and 33% of men receive government benefits to meet basic needs.

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979 Words | 4 Pages

Many financial and independent recourses are provided to the older youth of the system. According to the most recent research, less than 10 percent of foster youth graduate from college. With support from Foster Care to Success, their success rate rises dramatically 65 percent of our scholars graduate within five years, a percentage higher than that of the overall

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1238 Words | 5 Pages

When people think of children, images of innocence and love flood their minds. Sadly, not all children get to experience love. The foster system was created to place minors into a state certified home. Individuals may know what foster care is, but many are unaware of what goes on in the system. Due to unfortunate circumstances, foster children’s lives are in the hands of a new guardian and grow up depending on the system.

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1080 Words | 5 Pages

Here in Arizona there are more than 18,000 children in the foster care system, therefore it is obvious that there is a great need for foster families to care for these children all over Arizona. This is a topic of big interest to many people due to wanting to make an impact in the lives of many unfortunate children in care. This is a very sad but true topic. There are many opportunities for people to help these children by opening their homes, their lives, to these less fortunate children that have been abused or neglected. There are many opportunities to foster one of these children if one is interested to do so.

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2116 Words | 9 Pages

Have you ever thought about how it feels to be ripped out of the only place that you know as home? To get no explanation of why your parents just did not want you anymore? Not a lot of people think about this. Usually, the only people that do think about this is children that are experiencing or have experienced this problem. The children’s rights website stated that, “On any given day, there are nearly 428,000 children in foster care in the United States.”

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890 Words | 4 Pages

Without this attachment, children can often experience varying emotional, social, and behavioral effects. In contrast to children placed in institutional care, those who were formerly in foster care “had a higher percentage of secure attachment representations and a lower percentage of insecure representations” (Nowacki & Schoelmerich, 2010, p. 556). Another study had also found a correlation between the presence of social support mental health in youth who are aging out of foster care and who were victims of maltreatment. The youths who were perceived to have higher levels of social support showed fewer symptoms of depression (Salazar, Keller & Courtney, 2011). In addition, research has examined the adult outcomes of children in foster with at least one mentoring relationship.

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