Black Parents Fight to Keep Their Children: Foster Care Bias Splits Black Families (cont.)
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Giving Parents Support – and a Voice
For the system to begin to change, the perception of parents must change, says John Courtney, co-director of Partnership for Family Supports and Justice, a project intended to reduce incidents of child maltreatment and foster care placement in the Bronx. “Parents should be seen as partners and consumers of service,” said Courtney, a 40-year veteran in child welfare advocacy. “Not just troublemakers if they stand up for themselves. There’s this psychodynamic battle that goes on: ‘let’s run her through another round of parent training to see if she’s more compliant.’ And it’s really all about power.”
Courtney and other experts recommend these initiatives to support parents and their children:
- Increase the role of parents and parent advocacy organizations in
developing child welfare policies and practices.
- Track numbers of families kept out of foster care because of alternative
interventions.
- Compare number of placements to numbers of families that receive services.
- Develop measurements to hold organizations accountable for service outcomes,
for example, based on the number of families served, and those families’ level
of risk.
- Develop services depending on the needs of particular communities.
- Document the effectiveness of those services. “People are constantly questioning services, but we don’t question the effectiveness of foster care,” Courtney says.
– Robin D. Stone
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