By Karen Baynes-Dunning, Photo: Unsplash, The Imprint, January 31, 2022
I titled this essay Stop Blaming the “Uncooperative Mother,” because it has become a racial trope used by well-intentioned people who work with families throughout our nation’s child welfare system. Over nearly 30 years of working in and around the child welfare system, I have heard variations on this theme: the angry mother; the hostile mother; the disrespectful mother; the antagonistic mother; the aggressive mother; the argumentative mother; and many other negative labels that drive how systems engage.
Within the child welfare context, there is a power dynamic between agencies and families. Throughout all the “voluntary” engagement as caseworkers assist families who have come to their attention due to allegations of abuse and neglect, there is always the lingering threat that the government may take the family’s children and place them into foster care. Thus, full cooperation, deference, and respect are the subjective land mines that parents must navigate, and often young and inexperienced caseworkers get to control.
Rarely is the caseworker’s approach to engagement even considered as a factor in conflict-riddled relationships between caseworkers and birth parents. Tripping any of these land mines and upsetting the caseworker, the Court Appointed Special Advocate (CASA), the judge, or even the court-appointed lawyer assigned to represent the parents, can lead to permanently severing their relationship with their children.
Comments (0)