Child Welfare Policies - Essay Example

This included free school lunches; medical, dental, and psychiatric services and child guidance clinics in schools; playgrounds; children's courts; special schools for handicapped children; and care in foster families for children of broken homes. Infant and child clinics were often provided by municipalities.(Packman,1968)
In the United States child welfare services are administered through the Administration for Children and Families within the U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services. Some of the legislations passed included the Child Nutrition Act, the Head Start Program, and the Foster Grandparent Program. The International Union for Child Welfare (1920) organized relief for child victims of major international and national disasters. The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF, 1946) targets malnutrition and helps reestablish children's services destroyed in war. Current child welfare concerns include child abuse and child care.
Since then child welfare policy has undergone many changes through trial and error to help children with a sincere effort to do no harm. As a result of which there have been various models that have come into being. The most popular of them happen to be the democratic, liberal and the corporatist model.
The corporatist model is simply a privatized model. ...
Here the state transfers all resources associated with child welfare to private agencies, which assume responsibility for serving all children within the area who need care. These 'lead agencies' as they were called subcontracted for services with community providers. (Armstrong, 2002)

In all these arrangements the agencies were financed by capitation or case rate payments.
The model has problems, but due to the non availability of baseline data, its success could not be documented. However due to its wide acceptance by welfare staff, clients and the local communities the state is privatizing all welfare services in the state. The one program that was successful in its pilot stages namely the Sarasota County project, was largely due to active participation of the local community. This was a clear indication of how a community and not the government was the major stakeholder for child welfare. The other pilots that did fail were in part due to the financial deficits in various counties. One of the most important advantages of this model was an increased percentage of completed investigations and reduction in caseloads. What it required was increased numbers of staff, money and active community participation. (Peacock,1999)

The liberal model is said to be founded on faulty logic as it is embedded in liberal thinking which suggests that
#1: Children in families with higher income seem to do better in life.
#2: Welfare can easily raise family income.
Thus concluding that welfare is good for kids(Hill,1993)
From this logic has sprung a relentless 30-year effort to raise welfare benefits, expand welfare eligibility, create new welfare programs, and increase welfare spending

Together, they become a recipe for a disastrous system of aid which ...Show more