The Road Less Traveled

 

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference. 

The poetry of Robert Frost has been a lifelong source of inspiration for me, since I first read him in high school, although I’ve never been sure that he intended all the allegory that I permit myself to read into his words.

Nonetheless, I find the meaning that I search for, and I apply it to the circumstances that I find myself in. We are in circumstances now that, in my thinking, are ripe for interpretation by one of our history’s finest writer/philosophers.

 Two roads . . .

 And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads onto way,

I doubted if I should ever come back. 

For the four plus decades that I have been a part of our child welfare system, there has been a distinction made between two roads - family preservation and foster care.  It is an artificial distinction and always has been, yet the argument persists.  We have always had the moral responsibility to preserve the integrity of family togetherness before resorting to foster care only when no less drastic alternatives are possible.  Yet in reality, we’ve most often seen the two as distinct philosophical commitments.

To my horror, I still read articles suggesting that we should be taking more, not fewer, children into foster care.  That black children are more likely to be abused and neglected, rather than the reality that black children and families are more likely to suffer the ravages of over-surveillance and poverty, which we continue to confuse with neglect.  That we need more and more and more foster homes.

Unlike the unidentified traveler in Frost’s poem, I don’t think the field of child welfare actually made a conscious choice to take this road that we’ve been on for decades. Yet, knowing how way leads onto way, once foster care became the major accepted intervention to ensure child safety, we have steadily built this road to be more enduring and passable, rather than critically thinking about where the road actually leads.

For those hikers among us, you will know that the most used trails in the country are emblazoned with markers that let us know we are still on the designated trail and haven’t wandered off into uncharted territory where bears lurk.  These blazes can be as simple as a white paint mark on a pine tree, just enough to let us know we are heading in the direction we committed ourselves to.

As I think about the blazes that mark our chosen road in child welfare, they are a bit more complex but no less compelling in keeping us on that road:

•  Offer few to no supports to prevent maltreatment before it occurs.

•  Equate poverty with neglect.

• Check the box on the court order that reasonable efforts were made to prevent removal.

• Put families on wait lists for services.

• Copy the last boilerplate case plan and change the date.

• Require drug test after drug test at the parents’ expense.

• For lawyers, meet with the child five minutes before the court hearing.

• Set up standardized parent-child visiting schedules, regardless of the circumstances, and require parents to earn more visiting time.

• Ensure the child’s physical safety above all – well-being and permanency would be nice too.

• Terminate parental rights at an arbitrary point in time, e.g., 15 of 22 months in foster care.

• Accept as inevitable that tens of thousands of youth will leave foster care with no permanency.

• Create new funding to pay for services to fix the trauma.

• Others . . .

This is not a condemnation of those of us, myself included, who have carried and continue to carry caseloads and represent children and parents, who care about children and families and who do the very best we can do.  It is a condemnation of the road that our child welfare system is traveling.

While we did not make a conscious decision to take this road, in order to go back to the point where two roads diverged in a wood does require a conscious choice – the choice that is before us now.

It requires us to mark that trail with an entirely new set of blazes that let us know we are on the right track: 

•  Fund and provide primary prevention services on at least an equal par with foster care.

• Empower communities to support families.

•  Create alternatives to reporting to hotlines those concerns that are not really abuse or neglect.

• Get serious about organizing and coordinating federal programs around addressing the poverty that leads families to child welfare.

•  Value parents as experts on their families’ and children’s needs.

• Insist that foster care, when essential, is a support to whole families.

•  Recognize that different vulnerabilities and needs exist among populations, and respond to them in ways that are equitable and just.

• Refuse to allow a youth to leave foster care without some form of permanency.

• Prevent the trauma rather than only trying to fix it.

• Always, always ask children, youth and parents what they need and ensure they have high quality legal representation to raise their voices, even before foster care becomes a possibility. 

There’s never been a more advantageous and opportune moment to go back, to make a conscious decision to re-commit our pathway . . .  to re-imagine the possibilities . . .  to heed the voices of those who know our system from a first-hand perspective . . . to create new blazes along the road less traveled.