and reach thousands of daily visitors
27 FEBRUARY 2009
NO 1406
Group care
Professionals working with children in residential group care know that conditions in the field are changing rapidly. Conditions present this year are different from those of last year and significantly different from those of the year before. The children entering care seem more troubled, the time spent on paperwork has expanded, recruitment of line staff is more difficult, staff turnover has increased, the length of time that a child can spend in residential care is often defined by regulations instead of need, and the recruitment of volunteer board members has become more difficult. In short, the field of residential group care is in the midst of a tempest of change.
Though institutions have long been under the scrutiny of reformers (Dix ,1845), and advocates for deinstitutionalization have been around in one form or another since the mid-nineteenth century, institutional care has persisted (Wolins and Wozner, 1982) and in some cases even expanded. Recently, however, the intensity of the reform movement and the legislative mandates for change have increased markedly. To understand the particular nature of these changes, it is necessary to look back on a few pages of our recent history.
From the early beginning of the American response to homeless and dependent children in the early nineteenth century, change has occurred in incremental steps and could be viewed as evolutionary. Since 1945, however, there have been two dramatic changes in the residential group care system. The first change, although dramatic in its effect on the American system of serving children in foster care, occurred over a period of approximately 30 years. This period, roughly 1945 -75, saw the development of a continuum in foster care services for children.
Before World War II, children who entered the foster care system were served primarily in residential centers, many commonly referred to as orphanages. Children whose needs could not be met in the fairly benign atmosphere of the residential centers were often placed in children's hospitals. Most children, however, received no special help at all. It was during this 30-year period, as more money became available to states and the federal government, more professionals were graduated from the nation's colleges and universities, and the birthrate soared, that more and more services became available to children and their families. Increasingly these services were not offered in hospitals and institutions but in community-based agencies or at home. The public schools developed programs designed to better serve children with special needs (special education, school counseling, school social work, and the like), and foster home and adoption programs flourished as social theorists increasingly advocated alternative services to out-of-home group care. These changes were gradual and were felt throughout the foster care system, but particularly at the established out-of-home group care agen cies and hospitals. The children entering care presented more problems, and most, though not all, group care agencies improved the quality of their programs to meet the changing needs of the children and to reflect their current social helping theory (Niskanen, 1971).
During the period 1975 to the present, a
decade of dramatic, almost revolutionary change has swept the education
and child care field, brought about primarily through the passage of
landmark federal and state legislation. These legislative mandates
required public schools and providers of foster care services to respond
to handicapped and foster care children in certain legally prescribed
ways. Many have identified these legislative actions as a bill of rights
for children.
GARY O. CARMAN
Carman, G.O. (1988). The winds of change: An
Introduction. In Carman, G.O. and Small, R.W. (Eds.) Permanence and
family support: Changing practice in group care. Washington D.C.
Child Welfare League of America. pp. 1-3.
REFERENCES
Dix, D. L. (1845). Remarks on Prisons and Prison Discipline in the United States. Munroe and Francis.
Niskanen, W. Jr. (1971). Bureaucracy and Representative Government. Chicago. Aldine-Atherton.
Wolins, M. and Wozner, Y. (1976). Revitalizing
Residential Settings. San Francisco. Jossey-Bass. p.7
