New Article Series - Child Welfare Wisdom

The guest author of Child Welfare Wisdom is a current leader and administrator with over 3 decades of experience in public child welfare. The author will be regularly offering commentary reflecting the wisdom and perspective gained from a long-time passion for and commitment to public child welfare issues.

Any of the opinions expressed within Child Welfare Wisdom do not necessarily represent those of ACTION for Child Protection, Inc. or any of its staff.

July 2005

Training

It is difficult to keep up with the latest developments in child welfare while simultaneously attempting to manage day to day assignments. Therefore, it is quite possible that the musings which appear below may have already occurred to you or been successfully addressed. If so, I would be interested in hearing from you.

While the content and amount may vary over time, every public child welfare agency with which I am familiar considers staff training an elemental, indispensable part of staff development. It seems to me that we may have let our beliefs about the effectiveness of our current approach to training override our experiences. Sometimes we act as though we had discovered a mathematical formula for social work. T=IP or better yet MT=VIP. Training equals improved practice and more training equals vastly improved practice. (I won’t go into the subject of refresher training at this time as I have not perfected the equation. It will look something like D=NRT. A disaster indicates a need for refresher training regardless of the cause of the disaster.)

While I value training I believe that we should reexamine our approach to this subject. My belief is based on my experiences in child fatality reviews and reviews of cases that have received attention from the Legislature, newspapers and television.

In the course of these reviews one of the factors taken into consideration is the training that the worker assigned to the case had received. In most, if not all cases, the worker had completed the currently available training.

More disturbing perhaps is the lapses in practice which are identified are most often related to a failure to properly address clear signs of danger to the safety of the child. For some reason the lessons taught in training did not make it into practice.

As a child I grew up listening to the radio and was jealous of my older brother who, because of his age, was allowed to stay up and listen to the Shadow. The first television on the block was purchased by the father of one of my friends. My friend and I were faithful viewers of Howdy Doody. As a young adult, my undergraduate education and a large part of my graduate education were traditional. The professor lectured, the students took notes and there was usually some time for a structured discussion. This approach was the norm all across the country. But things and people have changed since those days.

There is a different generation now providing child welfare services and before we train them we must find out how to engage them. I don’t know what it takes to engage this generation but we need to find out before we invest any more of our resources in training. The child fatalities I have reviewed were not very complex cases in that there were a myriad number of signs of imminent danger that were not addressed. But, apparently, these signs were simply missed. If this is not your problem I suggest that it is time to think again.

Because of my involvement with the Interstate Compact on the Placement of Children and other casework assignments I have reviewed child welfare cases from other states. Other states child welfare programs often have the same problem that my colleagues and I do. Failing to master the basics followed by tragic results appears to be as common nationally as it where I live and work.

Staff turnover and staff retention are common topics of conversation. I would long for the old days when staff stayed forever except that there has always been turnover. Child welfare is difficult work and we have always been faced with the need to train new staff. Now we need to find a way to engage them and keep them engaged while we are training them.

I don’t know if Bill Gates has a better idea but I know that he is more in tune with this generation than I am. I am an old coot. I still spend much more time reading than watching television, I don’t play video games, I don’t have a cell phone, and I subscribe to the local newspaper and read it daily. I do a lot of other old coot stuff as well. This works for me but it is what I grew up with. It won’t work with this generation and whether or not you like it isn’t the point. We need to find a way to engage this generation if we want to protect this generation’s children.