by Daniel Heimpel, November 6, 2017
In June, the Trump administration hired Jerry Milner to lead the federal agency within the Department of Health and Human Services that oversees federal child welfare funding and policy.
The Administration for Children, Youth and Families (ACYF) was established in 1977 and oversees the Family and Youth Services Bureau as well as the much larger Children’s Bureau, which was created by President William Howard Taft back in 1912. As acting commissioner of ACYF, Milner oversees a budget of $9.7 billion and a staff of 200, giving him the power to significantly influence national child welfare policy.
Prior to his current role, Milner ran Alabama’s foster care system, and then joined the George W. Bush administration’s Children’s Bureau. There, he helped design the Child and Family Services Review (CFSR) process, a periodic review of state child welfare systems conducted by ACYF.
Milner also served as a vice president at a consulting firm called the Center for the Support of Families, where he presided over child welfare practice. Among his projects there was a 2016 report, where he and his team found that New Hampshire’s child welfare system was not adequately investigating reports of abuse and neglect in part due to a “seriously overloaded workforce.” These are some of the very issues he will have to grapple with in his new role, but on a much larger scale.
Following up an in person meeting in Washington, D.C. this fall, Milner agreed to provide written responses to a series of follow-up questions. In those responses Milner remarked on a range of issues including maltreatment prevention, federal finance reform and the future of the CFSR process.
When we met, you discussed the five key messages or pillars that you want to work toward during your time at ACFY. What are those?
We are very interested in changing our current system so that it strengthens the resiliency of families as our primary intervention and gives children what they need to thrive.
Right now, we typically respond only after families have lost much of their protective capacity and children have been harmed. We need to strive to create environments where they get the support they need before the harm occurs, which, in my mind, calls for a reconceptualization of the mission and functioning of child welfare systems. Tweaking what we already have in place won’t solve the problems.
While certainly not an exhaustive list, there are some priorities that are central in moving toward a system that truly strengthens families.
First, we need to change the focus of child welfare to primary prevention of maltreatment and unnecessary removal of children from their families. We can only break the cycle of family disruption and maltreatment by addressing the root causes of those situations.
Second, we should prioritize the importance of families by ensuring that when foster care is necessary, it operates as a support for the family rather than a substitute for the parent. The integrity of the parent-child bond is essential to healthy child development. Whenever it’s possible and safe, the foster care system should support that bond by engaging birth parents to remain a vital part of their children’s care and routines even while in foster care.
Third, we must focus our interventions on the overall well-being of children and their parents by changing our core practices, especially around removal and placement. We know that removal of a child from a family is traumatic. Trauma is very hard to undo and presents lifelong challenges. We should consciously avoid inflicting psychological and emotional damage to children in our efforts to achieve physical safety. We can help to do that by providing services to help families stay together whenever possible; keeping children in their communities if removal is necessary, ideally within their extended families; protecting the integrity of the parent-child relationship whenever possible; and normalizing their experience in foster care as much as possible.
Fourth, to be effective in supporting children and families, communities need the strength of a broad base of collaborative efforts among the entities that touch their families’ lives.
Finally, to achieve better outcomes, we must have a healthy and stable child welfare workforce. This is very difficult work, we need to make sure the workforce is skilled, supported, and committed to making families stronger through preventive interventions and not only when maltreatment has occurred.
Taken together, I believe these efforts will help reshape our system from one that is reactive and geared toward picking up the pieces after bad things happen to one that is supportive, accessible and provides children and families the services they need to remain healthy and strong.
In regards to primary prevention, what kind of programs and initiatives would you like to see the child welfare system focused on?
We need a range of support services that help to strengthen parents’ protective capacities; for example, parenting education and support, community-based substance abuse prevention and treatment services, ready access to needed medical and mental health services and trauma-informed services to help parents heal from their adverse experiences.
One of the keys to providing services is to ensure that they are flexible and can be tailored to the needs of individual children and families so that we can get at the root causes of the need for child welfare intervention.
Our current funding structure does not necessarily support such flexibility and changes are needed in order to build responsive prevention systems.
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