May 1996, Vol. 2, No. 3

Children At Stake: A Case for Family Preservation
By L. Philip River, second-year student in the clinical concentration.

Imagine cruising through the classifieds and running across the following ad: "Gratify your narcissistic needs now for absolutely no money down. Factory new! This baby has all the toys!" Things are sounding interesting until you start on the fine print: "Must present proof that the honeymoon is over . . . mandatory two a.m. refueling sessions . . . unit may be delivered with noisy narcissistic needs of its own (which are subject to change without notice), . . . twenty-year lease is nontransferable . . . lessee responsible for all normal wear and tear."

Similar to leasing a new car, parenthood is not for the fainthearted. It is perhaps the most challenging and the least reversible undertaking there is. To make matters worse, the new parents' owner's manual usually consists of a message that is as unenlightening as it is terse: "Just do it!" Just muddle through as your own parents did, with greater or lesser degrees of extended family support. Just give them a lot of love, and everything will work out. You turned out "okay," didn't you?

Considering the magnitude of the task of bringing a human being to maturity, it is a testament to the resilient human spirit that so many of us do turn out "okay." Equally amazing are the positive effects that our family preservation policies often have on cases of parenting failure. Family preservation policy, after all, is an attempt to do the impossible. We try to satisfy simultaneously the prerogatives of the legal and childwelfare systems, of the parents themselves, and of the larger community in which each child is a future citizen. Our system of investigators, courts, foster care, group homes, and psychotherapy attempts to protect both the rights of troubled families to be intact and those of their children to be safe, healthy, and free from hunger and fear.

The value and meaning of the nuclear family as our core social organization is easily lost in the crosstalk among agencies, advocates, attorneys, judges, and frightened parents and children. Family preservation is important because parents and their children, as a result of the intense social and biological bonds between them, form a uniquely adapted cognitive-emotional unit. The sum of the developing child's experience is primarily about his relationship with his parents. While humans are incredibly adaptive and will often survive the loss of important others during infancy and childhood, the emotional cost of these losses can be very high.

Consider a recent high-profile example. Baby Richard has survived his traumatic separation a year ago from the only family he had ever known. Recent press releases suggest that he is thriving in his new environment. But the type of blow that he received to his inner world-the world defined by the security and constancy of his adoptive parents-can leave an indelible wound. Traumatic separations between parents and children raise painful questions about trust, betrayal, and abandonment. Children lack the cognitive ability and emotional development to articulate and think about such weighty issues.

Paradoxically, the extraordinary magnitude and arbitrary nature of Richard's loss, coupled with his natural resiliency, will probably speed his adaptation to his new life. But the wound will not disappear. When the biological parents who reclaimed him can no longer distract him with toys, trips, and attention, he is at heightened risk to develop clinical symptoms such as depression, anxiety, or behavior difficulties. His anxiety may be difficult to soothe, and his depression hard to treat because the family to which he is accustomed, the affective unit to which he belongs, is no longer available to him. It is also possible, based on research on childhood losses, that in the ongoing narrative of his inner world Richard blames himself for what happened to him.

Richard was four years old at the time of his forced separation. In one of my current cases, my client, "Harry," was placed for adoption in a home-of-relative setting at age eighteen months. Harry's biological mother hoped, naively, that he was young enough to forget that she was his mother. Harry grew up in a secure environment with his maternal grandparents and continued to know his mother as an aunt. Now eleven years old and otherwise a good student, he was suspended from school more than two dozen times this year because of his provocative behavior toward adults. The message behind Harry's compulsive trouble-making, "If I act out will you reject me, too?" is derived directly from his early childhood wound. It is the regressive, unconscious attempt of a small child to understand what he did wrong to lead his mother and father to abandon him.

When we evaluate what constitutes the "best interests of the child," it can be useful to consider the inner narrative that he will use to explain the inexplicable to himself. Parent-child separations can be deeply traumatic, especially when the child must traverse developmental milestones among strangers. When a child must be removed from his parent's care it is important to continuously assess the family's strengths and vulnerabilities during the separation. Failures in parenting are often responsive to supportive services such as individual and family therapy, respite care, and parent training. Active case management may help provide structure during periods of transition.

As social workers we may find ourselves to be the only child-advocates who take this larger perspective. Child-protection agencies of the state, the judicial system, and private child-welfare agencies often lack the necessary knowledge and time to evaluate the reciprocal needs and abilities linking the members of families in crisis to each other and to the outside world.

In social work, many roads lead back to the family. Our careers, whether primarily in the clinical or social administration fields, will inevitably bring us into some form of contact with this powerful, yet fragile, core social organization. We need to remember that our interventions resonate far beyond the walls of our treatment room, the details of our support initiative, or the boundaries of our research project. When we help a family communicate more clearly or become better adapted to its environment, we are also affecting the community in which they live, the other families and individuals with whom they interact, and the children of the generations that follow.

L. Philip River is a second-year clinical student.
His field placement is at Fillmore Center for Human Services.

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