THE FOSTER CARE OF NEGLECTED AND DEPENDENT CHILDREN BY J. PRENTICE MURPHY, General Secretary, Boston Children's Aid Society. More than fifty years of controversy on the part of children's workers as to which offers the better care,-the family or the institution, would never have taken place if all the parties interested had enjoyed a common understanding of the significance of what the modern social worker calls case work, that elastic, imaginative, penetrating understanding of each individual in need, that process of interpretation that never looks upon the individual as a solitary, isolated being, but as very closely related to many people and things and difficult to understand. Most of the workers engaged in the children's field of service have for years past developed systems of care and methods of treatment which they felt were indisputably right. One of the interesting developments of a good case work job is the discovery that it becomes increasingly difficult to classify rigidly the children or people you study. One child will be considered by an ineffective social worker as dependent but by a much more skilled worker as representing a variety of conditions other than dependency. There are copious illustrations along this line in society's treatment of adult delinquents. The more we know of the conditions causing crime, the more do we understand that pure delinquency as such is a very rare condition in any individual's life. Just so we discover through case work that pure dependency and pure neglect are equally rare conditions in the lives of children. They may be neglected; they may be in need of foster care; but they are also a series of different entities, some intelligent, some unintelligent, some capable of great growth, others not, some well, some sick, some properly trained, many improperly trained, some in need of a certain special individual touch, others equally in need of a radically different oversight and supervision. The laboratory method has prevailed less in children's work than in most other fields of social work. There has been little actual studying of methods and results, little open-mindedness; but on the contrary, often a fierce and violent contentiousness on the part of advocates, irrespective of the system in question, who were convinced that those differing from them were entirely in the wrong. We are here considering foster care of children who by reason of sickness, death, incompetency, improper guardianship or wilful neglect on the part of their parents or relatives, must be provided for in foster homes. We are not including in this group children whose parents are suffering solely from poverty. Such children do not. properly come within the scope of an organization giving foster care, but fall within the field of organizations giving relief in any form or able to advise and otherwise assist in the carrying out of plans which relieve the condition of poverty without giving material relief. We are not eliminating from this neglected and dependent group, children who by reason of the parental treatment they have received present special problems in the way of discipline but who do not fall within the so-called delinquent class. All of the countries of western Europe, and the United States and Canada have for two generations been engaged in the process of developing certain special methods looking to the best care of children who for any reason must be taken from their own families. The time has arrived, however, for a proper understanding of the only dependable method of approach to the care and treatment of such children. The whole controversy between institutions and agencies engaged in children's work and giving different types of care can be settled only through the application of good case work. Only in this way can there be carved out for each child that type of care which it most needs, and for each institution or agency that task or service which the community where it operates most needs. The introduction of case work has meant the revolution of medicine and law and is meaning the revolution of social work. Every branch of social work which is touched by case work methods, is in process of revamping its technique, with such results as make the newer type of service a very different thing from the service of even a few years ago. The problems of the destitute, of the sick, of the insane and mentally defective, of the delinquent, of the dependent, are now being expressed in terms of hopefulness and understanding such as were almost entirely absent in the past. This case work approach to work with children has particular significance because children more than any other members of society will most benefit from it. The approach to any neglected or dependent child, as to any other individual, adult or child, should be made only in the spirit of understanding his needs, of trying to meet them rather than with a feeling that his needs have already been interpreted; that he has already been classified; and that rigid and inelastic methods of treatment are always proper and wise. With such diverse groups of children, whose needs arise by reason of certain conditions in their own homes, the children's organization must deal, and it must so adjust its work as to be able to provide the special and intimate services, sympathies and understanding, which are the right of every child and without which no child can develop normally. It is the task of the social worker to know the children with whom he or she is dealing, to see things from their standpoint as much as from the standpoint of the adults and others who have affected the life of the particular child, and then to try to provide through social treatment the essentials which careful study shows the child to have lacked. Therefore, every children's organization which expects to do an effective, helpful service to the children and to the community which it reaches, must be provided with workers who are competent to understand the social problems which the children present, to get their right relationship, and then to apply the most effective social treatment. This better type of care will in many instances apparently cost more than less thorough work, but actually the best and most complete service to an individual in need, no matter how great the cost, is in the end the least expensive. Moreover, on the cost side, the war has fastened upon many people of all social positions this one great idea; that if so much money can be spent for a special national protective work, then with equal justice may society publicly or privately spend far larger sums than we have thought advisable in the past for the proper care and training of thousands of children. who through no fault of their own stand in need of development and opportunities which their parents cannot or will not give to them. As has been noted, we are not concerned in this paper with the problem of care for children in families where poverty is the chief cause of distress. One general principle should control all work for children, namely, that the child's own family ties with parents or other relatives, if it is living with the latter, should be broken only as a last resort. Because good case work does not hold with all children's agencies, this principle is not observed; action is often taken in ignorance of the child's real home conditions and resources, and he is injured rather than helped; for foster care, although it may be of the best, is nevertheless, in many instances, a poor substitute for the care which parents could and would have given if the means, opportunities or advice, had been provided. Even applications for temporary care of children should be carefully studied because often the thing asked for is not what is needed and other than temporary care may be necessary and imperative. The work of the Bureau of Investigation of the Department of Public Charities, New York City, under Commissioner Kingsbury, is proof of how more careful case work means the keeping of many children with their own people. Fewer children were committed by the Department to the children's institutions in New York City during the last years of Mr. Kingsbury's term than were committed during the term of the previous Commissioner, the decrease being the result of a more careful understanding of family problems affecting thousands of children. CASE METHODS APPLIED Let us apply case methods to the following special problems which concern every social worker and especially every children's worker. Consider the question of adoptions. A study of the reports of certain children's home and children's aid societies and certain institutions scattered all over the country, shows a surprisingly large number of complete adoptions of children for each year of their work. A study of the reports of other organizations, often in the same localities and usually dealing with the same types of children and caring for equally large numbers of children, shows almost no adoptions. Why is this so? Careful study leads one to feel that the difference is due largely to the lack of adequate case treatment on the part of the first class of agencies and to the use of good case methods on the part of the second class. The case work approach to the adoption problem presents a series of very special difficulties. First, the more one studies intake (that is, the more one studies the applications for care presented by parents, relatives, interested friends, and coöperating agencies, public and private), the more one finds out that there are relatively few children without some ties of relationship which should be preserved. This holds equally true for the child who is usually adopted and for the child who is given long time free home or boarding care, either in institutions or families. The great majority of children now given for adoption are illegitimate children. However, a large number are the children of lawfully married people, who for a variety of reasons are willing to give up their children or to permit their children to be taken from them under curiously illegal legal agreements entered into with the caring agency. The well trained social worker will try to preserve for a dependent or neglected child such ties of relationship as will help it. She will also understand that full knowledge about the child she is helping will inevitably mean better care. The adoption of a child should mean the answering of at least these questions: 1. Is an injury being done to its parents or relatives in taking it from them or keeping it from them? 2. Are they quite unable, with proper assistance, to train their own child? 3. Are we certain that the adoption proceedings do not represent an escape from proper responsibilities on the part of a parent? 4. Is the child well physically? Is it well mentally? 5. Have we fully satisfied ourselves as to why in each particular instance the relationship, provided the parents are living, is being severed? 6. Are we trying where possible to keep alive the relationship between brothers and sisters, assuming that the child considered for adoption has brothers and sisters? Our failure as communities to apply case work methods to the adoption problem has meant that courts, communities, governing bodies and social agencies have quite underestimated the significance of their large adoption rates. Social conditions are not right in a community that year by year is agreeing to adoptions of large numbers of children. Each unmarried mother takes on an entirely new significance if we survey the adoption of her child in the manner suggested. The maternity homes get into a right relationship to their jobs when case work methods are applied. Our failure to apply the case method to illegitimacy has meant our failure up until now to get the real significance of our illegitimacy situation. Only as innumerable stories |