Changes to assessments of child well-being brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic - Finnish family services and child welfare services supervisors' perspective

The COVID-19 pandemic impacted social work practices, given limitations to practitioners' possibilities to meet with clients face-to-face since spring 2020. In this article, we examine the kinds of changes the COVID-19 pandemic brought about in relation to assessment practices in Finnish family and child welfare services. Collected in 2021 and 2022, data consist of 17 interviews with supervisors who work in family and child welfare services and who are responsible for organising the assessment of children's well-being. To analyse the data, we employed a thematic analysis. As a result of our study, we identified and named three different themes to describe changes to practices from different perspectives. These themes are moving to remote communication, delays in the availability of social and health services and assessment deadlines as well as the challenges of conducting assessments.

Harm reduction for problematic substance use

A harm reduction approach, as the name implies, seeks to minimize the adverse consequences of behaviors without necessarily reducing or eliminating the behavior. Harm reduction policies have been initiated for a wide range of public health challenges throughout the world, including carbon exchange programs to combat air pollution, food labels to encourage healthier eating habits, access to condoms to reduce sexually transmitted infections, and directives to minimize large social gatherings to avoid contagion during the COVID-19 pandemic. The current opioid epidemic, which in the United States claimed more than 46,000 lives in 2018 alone 2020, brought about a renewed urgency to make medication available for treating opioid use disorder. The use of agonist medications for the treatment of problematic substance use is a narrowly targeted harm reduction approach generally reserved for people with substantial opioid addiction. Social workers are employed in a vast array of settings conducive to a harm reduction approach, including schools, colleges, hospitals, child welfare services, mental health clinics, housing, and private practice. In the end, the harm reduction model neither condemns nor condones drug use, and instead concerns itself with the quality of life for individuals, community, and society. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

Disasters in times of sheltering in place: Social work and the COVID-19 pandemic

The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic was first identified in Wuhan, China, in December 2019. The virus is primarily spread between people during close contact via small virulent droplets produced by coughing, sneezing, and talking, with less common infection spread by touching a contaminated surface and then touching one's face. The coronavirus pandemic has also disrupted the provision of social work services ranging from child welfare and school social work to clinical and psychiatric social work. During the COVID-19 emergency, states and localities issued emergency stay-at-home orders requiring the temporary closure of nonessential businesses, including some private social work practices. As the world recovers from the COVID-19 pandemic, social work practice will adjust to the needs of the client groups. The most vulnerable and marginalized populations will experience greater impacts on their health;welfare;economic stability;and access to medical care, education, and technology. Social work will have a valuable role to play in the amelioration of negative impacts that are devastating the United States and the world. The infusion of telemedicine and teletherapy in social work practice seems inevitable, and it is hoped that these will provide an efficient and effective new social work practice modality. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

Report from the Field the Power of First Voice Advocacy: Rallying Lived Expertise to Support Equitable Transitions to Adulthood for Youth in Care in Canada

This report describes a national lived experience advocacy movement support equitable transitions to adulthood for youth in care in Canada. The emergence of the National Council at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic is presented, as well as the ongoing progress and achievements in advocacy and best practice efforts at the national and local jurisdiction levels. This article, by three members of the National Council, is the first to provide an account of the process associated with national lived experience advocacy mobilization by and for youth in care.

Deficits in the Socio-Educational School Inclusion Strategy for Students with Social Difficulty in Spain during the Covid-19 Pandemic

Students with administrative care measures have historically faced difficulties in achieving school goals. The Covid-19 pandemic forced the declaration of a lockdown, which accelerated changes in the schools' pedagogical actions. This investigation analyses the strategies used by the educational system to promote the academic inclusion of students who have an open protection file in the child welfare system within the context of Covid-19. Two different phases are compared: Phase 1) from the March lockdown to the end of the 2019/20 school year;Phase 2) The first six weeks of the beginning of the 2020/21 school year. Longitudinal follow-ups were carried out with adolescents in care with a sample of N = 10 (Phase 1) and N = 11 (Phase 2). Based on the grounded theory, information is supplemented by case studies through interviews with educational professionals, N = 14 (Phase 1) and N = 11 (Phase 2). The results indicate deficits of schools' adaptability to the situation of the students suffering social exclusion and difficulties in monitoring when students do not attend school in person and do school activities at home. It is concluded that the design of the educational policy applied in the context of the pandemic does not take the social factor into account. © 2023, University of Ljubljana. All rights reserved.

Child Welfare Service Adaptations during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Balancing Worker Safety and Doing Essential Work

Using a socio-ecological framework, this qualitative study provides an understanding of the context of child welfare workers' worries and concerns resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. This study is part of a larger mixed-methods research project that included qualitative interviews with child welfare workers to explore approaches to child welfare services and child safety interventions for newcomer families during the COVID-19 pandemic. The main question that frames this study is how Ontario workers and managers managed their worries and concerns about the pandemic. The participants we interviewed talked about their personal safety and navigating modified work during the pandemic. The fear of getting sick with COVID-19 when visiting multiple families resulted in stress and anxiety for some workers. For others, work modifications resulting from the pandemic created challenges in terms of childcare, increased isolation due to working remotely, case assignments/planning, and blurred family/work boundaries. Child welfare workers in Ontario felt excluded from the provincial designation "essential service workers” during the pandemic, making them feel that their work was unacknowledged by the government. Despite this lack of a designation, we centralize the issue of essential work in our analysis to underscore the challenges faced by child welfare workers and the potential supports that can be provided in and out of their work settings as the pandemic continues to unfold.

Physiological evidence of escalating stress during COVID-19: a longitudinal assessment of child welfare workers

Studies have shown that stress has contributed to employee turnover and retention problems for agencies, and at the individual level, chronic stress has been associated with coronary heart disease, anxiety, depression, and many other negative effects. In the past, the extent of stress one has felt has been measured by subjective paper-and-pencil instruments;however, recent technological advances have improved our ability to obtain accurate biofeedback assessments from wearable instruments. The Kentucky Child Welfare Workforce Wellness Initiative is the first known study to explore physiological stress in a sample (n = 32) of child welfare professionals using biometric technology (Firstbeat Bodyguard 2) and the first to report that data longitudinally over a four-month period. The study revealed that a variable associated with the strength of the Autonomic Nervous System (RMSSD) remained below the norms for a healthy population as participants experienced consistent and prolonged physiological stress. When examined relatively to the agency's lifting of COVID restrictions and returning to face-to-face service delivery, stress levels began to further rise almost to significant levels (p < .10) and the participants' ability to achieve a state of physiological relaxation significantly decreased. Future research employing biometric technology is also suggested. © 2023 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

Enhanced-youth transition planning: An innovative practice change with transition-age youth involved with child welfare in a rural setting

This article presents Enhanced-Youth Transition Planning (E-YTP), an innovative child welfare workforce practice change for transition-age youth (TAY) involved with child welfare services from five rural jurisdictions in the State of Maryland. We describe the practice change from services as usual for TAY, including training and coaching needs for the child welfare workforce. This study presents quantitative and qualitative data assessing the impact of the E-YTP practice change on the workforce. A total of 36 supervisors and foster care workers participated in the study. The Professional Quality of Life and Maslach Burnout Inventory-Human Services Survey were given to the workforce at four time over a four year period. Findings suggest an increase in burnout and secondary traumatic stress (for the PQL) and an increase in emotional exhaustion and personal accomplishment (for the MBI-HS). Focus group and interview findings suggest that the workforce endorses E-YTP. The workforce felt that the practice change made their work with TAY feel more meaningful, was a necessary practice change for TAY, and that E-YTP worked well in preparing youth for a successful exit from child welfare. We discuss implications for workforce practice changes with TAY in a rural setting, adaptations for the COVID-19 pandemic, and the need for ongoing supervision and coaching for the workforce. © 2023

Essays in child welfare and long-run economic well-being

This dissertation is composed of three papers, all using modern applied econometric methods that try to isolate causal estimates in several important settings. Each chapter examines social and formal institutions on the well-being of children.The first chapter studies the importance of parental presence for children's adulthood labor market outcomes. Through interactions with their parents, a child develops the basic foundations for cognitive and non-cognitive skills that directly shape their adulthood economic well-being. Motivated by this critical role, a large body of research has sought to uncover the consequences of disruptions to family structure and parental inputs on a child's development. Despite its importance, we know relatively little about the consequences of the most severe form of parental absence: the death of a parent. Empirical evidence of the long-run causal effects of parental death has been limited since it requires sufficient longitudinal data and plausibly exogenous variation in parental mortality. To overcome these challenges in the literature, I make use of a rich dataset of over 180,000 historical mining accidents and link individual accident victims to the full-count U.S. Census. Doing so allows me to follow the sons of mining accident victims through to adulthood and study the causal effects of parental death on economic well-being. To identify the causal impact of parental death, I compare the adulthood outcomes of children of fatal mining accident victims to children whose parents suffered a serious but non-fatal mining accident. I find that, compared to children of non-fatal mining accident victims, bereaved children experienced nearly four percent lower wage income during adulthood. Further analyses reveal the most severe effects stem from those that lost their parent at an early age. Specifically, adults who were younger than primary school age when they lost their fathers had roughly 15 percent lower wages. Exploring potential channels, I show that most of the estimated earnings penalty can be attributed to differences in employment along both the intensive and extensive margins and is not due to differences in human capital accumulation. Bereaved sons were more likely to be out of work, report unemployment assistance, and work fewer weeks. Together, these employment channels can account for more than 60 percent of the estimated loss of adulthood income. The second chapter of this dissertation, coauthored with E. Jason Baron (a classmate at Florida State University) and Joseph P. Ryan (Professor of Social Work at the University of Michigan), examines the sources of over-representation of Black children in foster care systems and the causal effects of one popular reform that seeks to reduce this over-representation. The program, known as "blind removals," conceals demographic characteristics of children at-risk for foster care placement from child welfare professionals weighing whether or not to remove the child from their home. We present the first quantitative analysis of blind removals by examining a comprehensive administrative dataset of the universe of child maltreatment investigations in Michigan and presents two main findings. First, the over-representation of Black children in foster care systems is almost entirely driven by Black children being twice as likely to be investigated for child maltreatment as White children. Conditional on initial rates of investigation, White and Black children are placed in foster care at similar rates. Second, the study finds no evidence that blind removals impacted the already small racial disparities in the removal decision, but the program substantially increased the time to removal.The final chapter of this dissertation, coauthored with two classmates from Florida State University (E. Jason Baron and Cullen T. Wallace), highlights the link between educators... (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)

REDUCING FAMILY SEPARATIONS IN NEW YORK CITY: THE COVID-19 EXPERIMENT AND A CALL FOR CHANGE

Child welfare agencies and family courts have long removed children from allegedly abusive or neglectful parents as an ultimate means of ensuring a child's safety. The theory that high numbers of removals are necessary to keep children safe, however, had never been tested-there was no mechanism or political will to do so until the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020. With the near-complete shutdown of New York City, the child welfare apparatus had no choice but to remove fewer children from their homes. Catastrophe did not ensue. Rather, the numbers tell a different story. Children remained safe across a range of metrics, avoided the trauma of removal from their homes during a global pandemic, and experienced sustained safety as the City began to reopen. This Piece argues that New York's child welfare system must learn from COVID-19 and significantly curtail its drastic measure of removing children from their families, which can cause substantial, often irreparable trauma to children. It uses the COVID-19 pandemic as a case study to demonstrate the safety and soundness of reserving removals (also known as remands) for only the most extreme circumstances. This Piece focuses on the dramatic reduction of removals specifically during the pandemic;examines the traumatic, racially biased, and overused practice of family separation from a child's perspective;and calls for specific reforms within the existing system to reduce remands while protecting children's safety.

Child safety, welfare and well-being: Issues and challenges., 2nd ed

This book provides a focused and comprehensive overview of the status of children across society, with special reference to emerging features and measures of child safety, welfare, and overall well-being. The book is arranged into four parts covering various dimensions of child welfare and well-being. In this second edition, highly experienced academics, researchers, child rights activities, and policymakers from both developed and developing countries have contributed chapters on topics such as status of children living under institutional care, sexual abuse of male children and tribal girl children, issues and challenges faced by children living in conflict zones, children living on the streets, COVID-19 and its impact on the education of children. The status of marginalized children gets special importance in the second edition. The new chapters include field-based experiences of researchers in protecting child rights and preventing child abuse. It also considers the promising strategies and promising future directions in enhancing effective prevention, intervention and responses to child abuse and neglect. This volume is essential for a wide range of professionals and researchers from the social sciences, law, medicine, and behavioral sciences. It is also beneficial for policymakers and law enforcement agencies working with children. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

Introduction-Child safety, welfare, and well-being: Need of the hour

Globally, public health policy makers are very much concerned about the child's safety from all adversities. In this regard, various policies and programs are taken in different countries following the broad guidelines of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) to ensure protection of children and creating a child-friendly environment. Social distancing caused by COVID-19 created additional problems for children across the world. It did not affect children emotionally;it adversely impacted their learning process and created a big division between urban and rural children. Rural children in India were deprived of education in the last 19 months. In this chapter, emphasis is given on discussing the child safety and overall welfare and well-being of children in different social strata in the developing countries like India. Further, the chapter discusses the international efforts for child safety and protection with special emphasis on various initiatives taken by the Government of India. Poor reporting of child abuse and neglect cases is one of the main challenges for improving the situation. Therefore, the chapter also narrates various strategies for encouraging the parents and victim children for reporting incidents of abuse to the appropriate authorities. There is a need to review the legislative measures and programs from time to time which is highlighted in the chapter in addition to discussing the importance of the documentation system. At the end of the chapter, preventive measures and intervention strategies and related challenges are elaborated. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

The impact of COVID-19 on children with additional support needs and disabilities in Scotland

Recently, as a result of international treaties and domestic legislation, children's rights have moved to centre stage. In Scotland, under the terms of the Education (Scotland) Act 2016, those with additional support needs and disabilities (ASND) enjoy enhanced and legally enforceable rights, described by the Scottish Government as the most progressive children's rights regime in Europe. This paper assesses the extent to which children's rights have been prioritised during the COVID-19 crisis. Evidence is drawn from a qualitative study of the experiences of 16 families including a child with ASND during June and July 2020. We conclude that, particularly in the early days of the lockdown, scant regard was paid to the rights of children with ASND as education and care services were suddenly withdrawn. Existing inequalities were exacerbated, such as unequal access to IT, varying levels of support and differences in family resources. Families also reported some positive experiences, such as enjoying more time together and a release from school-generated stress. The paper concludes by arguing that the hiatus in educational provision is likely to have a negative impact on the educational progress and wellbeing of children with ASND, which will take determined efforts to rectify in the future. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

Child protection social workers in Italy and the Covid‐19 challenges: Redefining services to support children and their families

During the Covid‐19 pandemic, social workers played an essential role in helping people understand what was happening and cope with new unforeseen difficulties, even carrying out new tasks and activities. Social workers were asked to redefine their work methods to maintain aid relationships with families. This reorganization was complex and challenging for child protection services. The paper will discuss the results of a qualitative research project aimed to describe the Italian child protection social workers' functions during the Covid‐19 pandemic. Three online focus groups were conducted with child protection social workers. These focus groups helped researchers explore the new organization of social workers' work in child protection services, which was aimed at maintaining their role and performing the new tasks they need to carry out to support families and children. Three main areas of discussion emerged from the qualitative analysis: (1) postponed and maintained activities;(2) remote work advantages and challenges;and (3) new professional learning.

Judging in a time of COVID

The pandemic of 2020 has turned much of the world upside down and courts have had to find new ways to meet obligations to the law and the people they serve. This is especially difficult in child welfare courts, where children's needs cannot be delayed. This reflection piece addresses the challenges faced by all the dependency court participants in a COVID environment. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

Is the child welfare system prepared for an increase in children with type 1 diabetes?

This article discusses the child welfare system for children with type 1 diabetes (T1D). Research on chronic physical illnesses among children and adolescents in foster care has been infrequent, and the capacity of state child welfare systems to respond to certain health-related challenges remains unknown. Children diagnosed with T1D have substantial healthcare needs, requiring close coordination between involved caregivers and a pediatric diabetes multidisciplinary care team. The majority of children with T1D lack the cognitive skills and maturity to manage their condition independently. Meeting the needs of children with T1D upon their entry into foster care can be a challenging task for state child welfare agencies. The pandemic coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) brings a new sense of urgency to conversations about children with T1D in foster care. Emerging research suggests that a COVID-19 diagnosis can precipitate or accelerate T1D onset in children and youth, leading to an increase in new cases. An increase in children with T1D can add strain to an already overburdened US foster care system, plagued by shortages of placements for children and youth with complex medical needs. The prevalence of T1D has increased rapidly over the past two decades and may increase further due to the COVID-19 pandemic. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

Unfolding children's agency in ensuring child protection

Children's right to protection is enshrined in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Children, and it is further reiterated in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) with time-bound targets and a monitoring framework. It is more than 30 years since the UNCRC was adopted, and there are only nine more years to achieve the SDG targets, but the reality presents a dismal picture with increasing incidents of violence and abuse against children. COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the situation with a reversal trend in the protection of children and bringing to the fore the deep inequalities that exist in the society. This chapter seeks to highlight the importance of child participation and child-centric approach in the recovery strategy to protect children during this pandemic and prevent a 'generational catastrophe'. Right to participation envisages enhancing the capacity of children, creating space for children to voice their opinion and views on issues concerning them, adults capacitated to listen to the voice of children, respect and recognise their views and opinion and take them into consideration in formulating policies and schemes. Participation of children in COVID-19 recovery is elucidated from the experience of Arunodhaya, an organisation in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India. The chapter concludes with recommendations for protection of children. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

COVID-19 and resource families: an examination of ongoing impact and disparities

Resource parents (n = 527) in Los Angeles County were surveyed about their experiences with COVID-19, comparing the beginning of "Safer-at-Home” to over a year later. The findings reveal increased infection rates, maintained or increased reports of adverse impact and coping challenges, decreased reports of positive impact, and increased access to resources across time points. Compared to White resource parents, Black and Latinx resource parents reported both more adverse and more positive impact and less access to resources. Further, single caregiver households reported more financial worries, and foster parents and kinship caregivers reported more coping challenges than foster-adoptive parents. © 2023 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

Child Welfare Practice Improvement Efforts: A Descriptive Study of Capacity Building Services Received by Courts, States, and Tribes

The staff practices and organizational processes of child welfare agencies and courts influence families' experiences and outcomes. Capacity building services have been delivered to improve organizational performance and practices, but studies of their impact are hampered by a lack of data on specific features of services. This study describes services delivered by the Child Welfare Capacity Building Collaborative during 2017–2019 using data from the Collaborative's service and outcome tracking system. By supporting more rigorous study, these data can promote service improvements. These service data also provide a baseline that can be used to explore how services may change over time in response to federal legislation and social contextual factors such as the coronavirus pandemic.