Fear of change should not thwart child-welfare reform

Fear of change should not thwart child-welfare reform

As in most lines of work, nobody in child welfare likes to be told that the way they've been doing things for years is wrong.

So sometimes people get defensive. They nurse their grudges and wait for the next horror story about the death of a child known-to-the-system, then exploit it to scapegoat reform.

That's what really was on display Sunday as those who want to undercut Iowa's first tentative steps toward fixing child welfare exploited the horrible death of Ziarah Williams to claim that the "pendulum had swung too far" toward keeping families together.
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Critics of reform say Iowa's fanatical dedication to child removal makes children safer. But I know 15,000 children who might disagree. They're the 15,000 children whose records were examined in a landmark study to see who did better in later life: children placed in foster care or comparably-maltreated children left in their own homes.

The researcher zeroed in on the "in-between" cases - those where there is a real problem in the home, but the decision could go either way. He found that the foster children were far more likely to get pregnant, far more likely to be arrested and far less likely to be able to hold a job than the children left with their own parents.

Note: Take that you system suckoffs!