WHY DO THE STRUCTURALISTS, THE LEADERS
OF THE B/P COMPLEX, RELY MORE ON POLITICS THAN ON MEETING CLIENT NEEDS
TO ACHIEVE LEGITIMACY?

Meeting the needs of those served would be a more convincing base
upon which to establish credibility. It is the route that every other
social institution has followed to gain ratification by the public. But
the child welfare field in its present form is little more than a “middleman,”
allocating and providing service resources. This role hardly makes the
case for canonization or elevation of the field to the pantheon of social
institutions. To achieve this status the field would have to identify
and then fill a significant niche among the institutions of family, religion,
justice, education, health, and commerce. It is hard to see an opening,
and this accounts for the fact that Universalist advocates of the welfare
state had such a hard time making the case for their concepts with the
American public.

The next best alternative is a “takeover” of one of the established
institutions. In the case of the social services, the family is the only
suitable target, and strategies proceed bit by piece-not in a grand sweep,
which experience has taught riles the public-to convert family functions
to governmental responsibilities. This is done quite effectively by defining
more and more family functions and children’s behaviors as dysfunctional
or problematic. Doing this warrants the expansion of involvement by the
B/P Complex in family affairs.

The child welfare field focuses specifically on parental functions
and child behavior. There are three things that can fundamentally endanger
the futures of any child which qualify them as public policy issues of
concern to the child welfare field:

• Poverty.
• Inadequate parenting.
• Poor behavioral skills and/or performance on the child’s part.

The question is, “What can the child welfare services, in their present
form, do about any or all of these three things that endanger the futures
of children?” The answer is, very little.

Concerning poverty, child welfare services neither create wealth
for their clienteles nor help them create it themselves. All they do is
distribute wealth deposited with them, and what is distributed, by design,
never exceeds whatever is officially determined to be the poverty level.
Both the Maximalists and Minimalists think poverty could be better addressed
with the distributive middleman out of the way. The former trust parents
to make good use of such resources, once they are given more direct control
over them; the latter think parents should simply be urged off their backsides
into employment.

While the Structuralists acknowledge the endangering effects of
poverty on children’s futures and upon prospects for success of their
own services, they tend to do so in a curious fashion that reaffirms their
resolve to continue doing exactly what they are doing. Costin (1972) observes
that:

Until the unconscionable blight of poverty is removed, priority must be
given to services for poor families and their children. The effects of
poverty are manifest throughout the range of child welfare services and
prevent the attainment of social service goals. (p. 401)

Rather than joining forces with either the Minimalists or Maximalists
and throwing their resources behind initiatives to reduce poverty, the
Structuralists prefer to follow their own agenda, which is centered on
using resources available to them to relieve inadequate parenting and
problematic child behavior. In targeting these problems, the B/P Complex
makes an implicit claim that the number of children facing endangered
futures will be diminished. Thus it is reasonable to ask how well they
are doing in relieving those problems and reducing those numbers.

Concerning inadequate parenting, the primary response has been
to compensate by substitution. This response has appeal because foster
and group caregivers can be consolidated into the operations of the B/P
Complex, whereas parents can’t. Taking children from their homes is an
effective way to reduce the number of children with endangered futures
in an immediate sense, although the social and financial costs attendant
on its implementation are often contested, as are any claims that child
placement has value beyond its immediate protective purposes. As an alternative,
some moves are now being made in the direction of providing more parent-
and child-focused home-based support and training services, but this remains
a minuscule investment compared to that being made in out-of-home care
programs.

The Maximalists and Minimalists press the question whether these
home-based services might not be more appropriately provided through established
religious, health, education, and even commercial institutions. Child
welfare services have hardly made the case that they are better then these
institutions at supporting good parenting or child behavior, and it seems
dubious, given their record over the past several decades, that they have
acquired a body of knowledge and skills clearly superior to those possessed
within other social institutions that they could use to their advantage.

Concerning poor child behavioral skills, the record of the child
welfare services is ambiguous. The reason for this is their historical
reliance on problem-oriented theory and problem-solving technology, which
makes it difficult for these services to prove their effectiveness in
unequivocal ways that are convincing to the public. Placing priority on
the detection, analysis, and resolution of harmful experiences arising
from problematic conditions and personal behavior has the effect of lifting
such experiences out of the context of children’s everyday lives, thereby
magnifying their apparent importance. A problem-oriented service delivery
approach tends to detect problems not obvious to either clients or the
lay public, to heighten their seriousness by examining them out of context,
and to project dire long-term consequences unless they are professionally
interdicted.

The general effect is to create an inflated baseline for assessing
effectiveness in reducing problematic conditions or behavior, one that
is comparatively broader, deeper, and longer in dimension than the straightforward,
common sense one used by the public. This inflated baseline yields errors
in assessing effectiveness and leads to dubious claims that intervention
has led to problem resolution when, in fact, the observed reduction or
non-recurrence in problematic conditions or behavior may well trace to
(a) their not having existed at levels of seriousness sufficient to warrant
intervention in the first place; (b) to their having been one-time, chance
induced, or otherwise non-recurring in nature; (c) to their having been
outlived by children as they mature; (d) or to their having been canceled
out by self-directed changes in circumstances.

In sum, a problem-oriented approach makes it difficult for the
public to comprehend what child welfare services are doing and achieving.
As illustrated above it makes it difficult for these services to produce
unambiguous proof of intervention effects. Further, and most importantly,
agencies dependent on problem-oriented service delivery approaches are
dependent upon detecting more and more problems for their livelihoods.

This leads the public to the common sense observation that the
child welfare field is experiencing chronic mission failure, because the
number and severity of problematic conditions and behaviors afflicting
children are inevitably presented as spiralling upward, in spite of the
field’s best efforts and repeated additions of more resources. If the
public’s interest in behavioral competency development is growing, this
shift in public demand will inevitably lead to a perception of chronic
mission failure, because the field will be seen to be less responsive
to changing public demand.

This is likely for three reasons: First, the field’s claims that
rates of problematic behavior are escalating obscure whatever success
it is having in reducing problematic behavior; second, the methods the
field relies upon to reduce problem behavior incidence rates, including
child removal and supervision, produce that result without necessarily
increasing the behavioral competencies of those exposed to them; and,
third, the “talking” therapies the field relies upon cannot unequivocally
be shown to produce greater behavioral competence among those exposed
to them for the four reasons already indicated. The absence of compelling
proof that the field’s interventions are producing more behaviorally competent
children and families breeds doubt among the public, doubt that leads
to the conclusion that the child welfare field is not doing what is being
asked of it.

Both Maximalists and Minimalists believe that the capacities needed
to help children develop behavioral competencies lie outside the B/P Complex
and are spread among clients and established societal institutions. As
“proof” they appeal to the powerful common sense argument that, left
to their own devices and/or provided the resources needed to make good
choices, families assisted by established societal institutions have been
developing their children into behaviorally competent adults for centuries.

For both parties this is enough to justify finding ways to bring
education, justice, health, commerce, and religion back into play. Both
feel the family is the key social institution, although opinions differ
between them about the amount of support that is needed or is justifiable
from other social institutions, and both see the intrusion of the child
welfare field into family functioning as doing more harm than good. If
the field persists in attempting to prove the merits of its case in terms
of its ability to reduce behavior problems, chances are that the public
will look elsewhere for solutions and find either the Minimalist or the
Maximalist perspective increasingly appealing.

Electronic Editor’s Note: This is the end of the third electronic installment.
In the next installment, we will start with the following question: