Happy Times Daycare
Our Society and Child Welfare
Happy Times Daycare Society
Introduction
The increased problems within families in the US have led to a similar increase in the number of children in need of child welfare services. The most common factors that have led to this increase include the loss of income, catastrophic illnesses, substance and drug abuse, divorce and incarceration of the parents. These problems lead to a great disruption in the life of these children who miss out on the love and guidance on the part of their parents. Parents are supposed to play an active role in the growth and development of their children. In spite of these problems, it is important to note that the best form of care that a child can get is from his own parents, …show more content…
especially the mother. It is for this reason that many institutions have joined hands with the government and other well wishers to provide the best form of treatment for these children to ensure their proper growth and development.
These agencies provide a wide range of activities to the children through social welfare services some of which include assisting families to live with their children in spite of the situations and circumstances that may be prevailing, assisting the reunion of children with their parents after times or periods of separation.
They also place the children in foster care in situations where they cannot stay with their parents as well as managing adoptions. These programs also provide the young adults who may be transitioning from foster care to adulthood a means of living independently through various programs such as useful life sustaining skills. The agencies work in liaison with the government, the local courts, local community, and many local institutions that may deal with children such as churches and educational facilities that provide services to the …show more content…
children.
The purpose of this paper is to explore the issue of children and child welfare services by defining the issue in depth and determining the relevance of this issue to social work and social welfare. This paper will also consider the development of child and children welfare services through history, and assess various policies and social attitudes that have affected and that continue to affect the provision of these services through history. In addition, the response of social work to the problem of child welfare will be evaluated, and my personal opinion on the effectiveness of the response by social work toward the issue will be provided. Apart form this, the extent to which this response is effective in achieving the core goals and objectives of the program will be studied in the paper. The study will also take a close look at the extent to which this response is effective in achieving the core goals and objectives of the program (DeRue & Morgeson, 2007).
Children and Child Welfare Services Child and children welfare programs are programs that are designed with the principle intention of giving services to children from broken families. These services are aimed at enabling the children to lead lives that are as close to normal as possible. These programs range from simple forms of assistance that enable the children stay with their parents to having the children removed from their homes and accorded care in foster homes and in charity centers where they receive a proper guidance and treatment from professional caregivers. Child welfare programs are created according to and guided by the following basic principles:to prevent the separation of children from their parents and families;to protect children that may be identified as dependent by providing them with emergency and long-term living alternatives besides their families; * to reunite children placed in foster care with their families after the issues in their families are sorted out through the correct channels; * to provide permanent placement of the children in foster homes when chances of reuniting them with their families are not possible or would not be in the best interest of the child;to help the older children move out of foster homes and safely transition to a life of self-sufficiency. The purpose of the programs is to ensure that children who meet these criteria are accorded the best form of care in a safe, healthy, positive and educational environment. These programs offer the children an atmosphere that enhances positive development so that they can grow up like normal individuals as those who grow up in normal homes with their families. This increases their chances of transitioning safely into adulthood.
The History of Child and Children Welfare Programs in the US
The issue of child permanency in the US gained prominence in the 1950s, with a number of research studies being conducted to determine the efficiency and effectiveness of child and children welfare programs on the wellbeing of the children involved (Urie, 1996). The research studies were aimed at unveiling the effects of a long-term foster care and separation of the children from their parents and families in the process of their growth and development. As years progressed, the child care programs continued with their support and treatment for the children with an emphasis being put on the need for the permanency of these services. In the 1980s, most studies showed that adoption would provide a better option for permanency for the children, where the children would move from the foster care homes to adoption by new families. Adoption ensured that the children were raised as if they were in their own families. The adopting parents were required to take up the children and treat them like their own biological children. This led to the enacting of the ground-breaking Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act of 1980. This act made foster care a temporary and transitional service, after which the children would be reunited with their original families or get adopted in new homes in which they could stay for the rest of their lives (Maas & Engler, 1959).
In 1997, the Adoption and Safe Families Act was passed (Maas & Engler, 1959). This act sought to ensure the safety of the child in his or her adopted home (Maas & Engler, 1959). This also served to emphasize the importance and need for accountability for the child welfare services, which required that the foster care services and the adopting parents act with a lot of care and concern toward the adopted child and ensure his or her safety at all times. Today, a number of agencies continue offering needy children assistance in the form of foster care and other permanent home programs that are aimed at ensuring the comfort, safety, and proper development for the children.
Policies and Social Attitudes to Child and Children Welfare
The issue of child and children welfare is an integral issue in the US. The government and other social agencies make an effort to ensure that the children under the program receive the best possible treatment. In this way, the government and policy makers have implemented a number of policies that are aimed at ensuring that these agendas are met with efficacy. These policies are geared towards protecting the children from all forms of abuse by the caregivers and other members of society and ensure the effective development of these children while in foster care and homes. These policies also ensure that proper procedures and protocols are followed through the adoption stages to avoid incidents of criminal activities and malpractices in the adoption process.
One such policy is confined to the state laws on child abuse and neglect (DeRue & Morgeson, 2007). This law addresses the processes of reporting incidents of child abuse and neglect to the respective authorities in respective states (DeRue & Morgeson, 2007). These laws also seek to protect the children from all forms of domestic violence and abuse among many other related issues. State laws on child adoption address the processes that should be carried out when a child needs to be put on ‘out-of-home’ care (DeRue & Morgeson, 2007). These processes include the proper planning of the cases, putting a reasonable effort to ensure that the child is reunited with his or her parents after they are considered fit to raise the children and all other issues pertaining to child placement (DeRue & Morgeson, 2007). State laws on adoption deal with the issues related to domestic adoption, inter-country adoption, and any post-adoption problems that may emerge after the adoption process regarding the safety and the well-being of the child (Fansel & Shinn, 1978). The Social Security Act outlines a number of major policies that have been passed with regard to child welfare services. These include the Child Welfare Services and Promoting Safe and Stable Families programs, the Adoption Assistance Programs, the Chafee Foster Care Independence Program, and the Social Services Block Grant among many other state and federal legislations (Fansel & Shinn, 1978).
Throughout the history, the communities in the US have harbored both positive and negative attitudes towards the child welfare services in the country.
Although there have been mixed attitudes with regard to these services, a majority of the attitudes have been positive and supportive with relations to the programs. The public has independently taken initiatives to support these programs through well wishers ' initiatives and through the government by encouraging legislations pertaining to these services. However, there have been exceptions in public support of these programs as the need for the programs continues to increase amidst hard economic times. This is especially the case when a number of children in need for these programs are from minority races. For instance, there have been allegations and concerns that African American parents create an unnecessary need for child welfare services by engaging in high-end criminal activities. This is shown in the studies that indicate that a high number of children in foster care belong to such parents. The parents are usually incarcerated or negligent as they engage in drug and substance abuse among other forms of criminal activities. Despite this setback, the child care programs continue gaining a lot of support on the part of the public and other social avenues and institutions that provide all sorts of support for the
programs.
The Relevance of Children Welfare Programs to Social Work and Social Welfare The children welfare programs are an integral component in social work and social welfare programs (Fansel & Shinn, 1978). These two programs are co-existent and are related in a number of ways so that one cannot exist without another. Child welfare professionals are essentially social workers, who get their professional training on social work and related programs (Fansel & Shinn, 1978). Achild welfare program officer is one of the career options that social workers can pursue and use the knowledge and skills that they gain from their classes in social welfare. “The delivery of agency-based child welfare services is historically rooted in the social work profession” (Fansel & Shinn, 1978). Social work professionals continue to play major roles in the field of child welfare including administration, supervision, direct practice, policy development as well as research and training activities (DeRue & Morgeson, 2007). Despite these historical connections between the two, children welfare agencies fail to recruit sufficiently qualified staff of social workers due to low salaries and poor working conditions in these agencies (DeRue & Morgeson, 2007). Therefore, child welfare programs and services continue to play an important role in the field of social work (Fansel & Shinn, 1978). Social work has taken measures to respond to the problem of increased cases of child abandonment as well as the inadequacy of skilled workers in the area of child welfare. One way that it seeks to respond to this is to customize its classes as offered to include more detailed teaching on the specific needs of child welfare services. These are tailor-made to fit the requirements of the typical child welfare societies as well as to reflect the revolutions and evolutions that have been and that continue to be experienced in the field of child welfare (LaLiberte, Lightfoot & Ellett, 2012). Social work has also responded to these problems by offering their free services at child welfare centers. A number of child welfare centers are run privately, meaning that they get their funding from individual personalities or from welfare institutions such as churches. This makes it difficult for the agencies to afford professional social workers as often as they would like. Consequently, the social workers are made to opt to work in other institutions that can pay them higher salaries. In response to the dire need for their services, social workers are now offering their services in these institutions free of charge. In other cases, the social workers take their time and effort to train workers in these agencies who may not be as qualified as they are. They train them on the essential areas and impart on to them the necessary knowledge that they need to enable them to carry out their activities in the agencies as effectively as possible (Urie, 1996).
This response by social welfare has played a great role in increasing the efficiency of the children welfare services, which have taken on a more professional outlook than it did in the past. Workers in the agencies are more equipped and enabled to handle even the most complex issues that the children under their care face. They are also able to articulate effectively various issues and challenges that these children face and offer the most appropriate solutions that serve to address and respond to the core principles and guidelines that form the basis of a child welfare practice (DeRue & Morgeson, 2007). I strongly believe that the response by social work to the needs of child welfare programs is the most sincere one that is aimed at providing the best and the most suitable services to the children in these agencies. Social workers have taken it upon themselves to ensure that the agencies are run well and professionally, despite the fact that most of the agencies cannot afford to pay them as adequately as they should. Training the other workers in the agencies on effective intervention strategies has worked to ensure that the services offered in the facility are professional and able to reflect the core needs of the clients (LaLiberte, Lightfoot & Ellett, 2012). Social work and social workers should continue providing courses that are highly reflective of the needs of the children in these agencies so that they can meet the changing needs of the agencies characterized by the changing trends in family problems. These efforts by the department can be considered a manifestation of care and concern for humanity among the public and the efforts as well as sacrifice that people are ready and willing to put forth in order to ascertain the best interests of children are met, and that their growth and development into useful members of society are ensured. The involvement of social work and social workers in the child welfare programs is a reflection of a high degree of social control. Social control in this context is reflected in the manner that the society through the social workers has come together to ensure that it offers the best possible services to the needy children in helping them meet their familial desires. The efforts that the social workers also put to ascertain that the children in child welfare programs achieve the best possible care shows a high degree of social control, where the children are trained on the best possible forms of living that will enable them to achieve the status equal to that of other children in normal families (Julie & Steen, 2011). Through the programs, the children are taught against anti-social behaviors that are considered to be a wayward, and thus impart in them a strong form of social control. Through the programs, the society’s culture and norms are passed down through the children generations as reinforced by the social workers.
The responses by the social workers were highly reflective of the prevailing conditions of the time. Social work has revolutionized its interventions from the form they took in the past to reflect the changes in the causes of family breakups as well as the various reasons concerned with the fact that children today find themselves in need of child welfare services. In the past, for instance, single motherhood was not as rampant as it is today. Therefore, in order for the services to reflect this changing trend, the interventions to deal and respond to the problem of single motherhood and the resultant effects were designed. In this way, the programs have ways of dealing with children in the programs from single parents, which are different in their approach to those used for children with both parents (Julie & Steen, 2011). The approach by social work and social workers is a great way for helping the society and the children, most of whom are helpless in the hands of their parents. The social workers have identified the needs of these children as well as the gap in the provision of effective services to the children in order to enable them to grow normal as effectively as possible. In offering their services at lower or no process at all and training the care givers in these institutions so that they can empower them to offer better and more professional services to the children, they are helping the young individuals and the entire society. They help children to get the best possible treatment and assist the society in dealing with the increasing number of cases of needy children, thus reducing possible incidents of crime and other wayward behavior that is likely to result from these children if they are left unattended. The services by the social workers also help to reduce criminal activities in the society as well as other forms of loss such as suicide and homicide cases. The services also contribute to the decrease of incidents such as sicknesses and other forms of illnesses that could result in disease caused by stress and depression in the children and their parents, which could put a strain on the society’s social services (Marmot & Wilkinson, 2007).
Another emerging trend is that concerned with the rise in the use of technology in a variety of applications and activities undertaken by the programs. Therefore, technology has been adopted by the programs, which apply the concept on a number of their activities and the various interventions they use. Using technology, the programs are able to offer better training and education for the children using video simulations. Using technology, the programs are also able to keep more comprehensive and updated tracks of the children in their databases as well as the various adoption homes that they end up. This makes it easy in the running of the institutions, as the agencies keep all records for safe keeping and any form of future reference on the children in their care. This serves to reduce the incidents of malpractices and ensures the safety of the children, as the foster parents from the adoption homes know that they have provided their records and they can be tracked down in case they fail to offer the child effective care (McMurray, 2007).
Another trend that these services are aimed at is that of the increasing number of sexually transmitted diseases that are a major threat for these children. Such diseases as HIV/Aids are increasingly becoming popular, and, thus, it is important and necessary that the programs as offered reflect these issues in their services. It is for this reason that today’s programs have special offers for these children, specifying between the male and female children, whose needs and challenges are differentiated due to their gender discrepancies. The programs then tailor their teachings to address these problems as they are eminent in posing a major threat to the successful transitioning of children to adulthood. Besides diseases, the services bear in mind the changing needs in the job market, so that they use this information to inform the kind of programs that they offer the children as they make their transition to adulthood. The programs perform a study on the trending job market so that they teach the children effective skills that will enable them to obtain working opportunities and make a living on their own.
Conclusion
The problem of children in child welfare programs is the one that has existed in the past and the one that will continue existing in the present and the future as the marriage and family institution goes on experiencing different kinds of hardships. It is this need that has made it necessary for the government and other agencies to employ efforts to ensure that these children are accorded the best possible care. Therefore, it is important that social workers put on more efforts to address the changing needs for the children to equip them with the best possible forms of knowledge and skills to give them an opportunity to adapt to the world. This will go a long way in improving the lives of the children and making it possible for them to lead normal lives.
References
DeRue, D.S., & Morgeson, F.P. (2007). Stability and change in person-team and person-role fit over time: The effects of growth satisfaction, performance and general self-efficacy. Journal of Applied Psychology, 92(5), 1242-1253.
Fansel, D., & Shinn, E. (1978). Children in Foster Care: A Longitudinal Investigation. NY:
Columbia University Press.
Julie A. & Steen, J. A. (2011). Organizational Configurations of American Child Maltreatment Reporting Systems. Journal of Public Child Welfare, 5(5), 471-480.
LaLiberte, T., Lightfoot, E. & Ellett, A. J. (2012). Child Welfare and Disabilities. Journal of Public Child Welfare, 10(7).
Maas, H., & Engler, R. (1959). Children in Need of Parents. NY: Columbia University Press
Marmot, M., & Wilkinson, R. (2007). Social Determinants of Health. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
McMurray, A. (2007). Community Health and Wellness: A Socio-Ecological Approach.
Sydney: Mosby Elsevier.
Urie, B. (1996). Ecology of the family as a context for human development: Research perspectives. Developmental Psychology, 22(6), 723-742.
Happy Times Daycare Society
Introduction
The increased problems within families in the US have led to a similar increase in the number of children in need of child welfare services. The most common factors that have led to this increase include the loss of income, catastrophic illnesses, substance and drug abuse, divorce and incarceration of the parents. These problems lead to a great disruption in the life of these children who miss out on the love and guidance on the part of their parents. Parents are supposed to play an active role in the growth and development of their children. In spite of these problems, it is important to note that the best form of care that a child can get is from his own parents, …show more content…
especially the mother. It is for this reason that many institutions have joined hands with the government and other well wishers to provide the best form of treatment for these children to ensure their proper growth and development.
These agencies provide a wide range of activities to the children through social welfare services some of which include assisting families to live with their children in spite of the situations and circumstances that may be prevailing, assisting the reunion of children with their parents after times or periods of separation.
They also place the children in foster care in situations where they cannot stay with their parents as well as managing adoptions. These programs also provide the young adults who may be transitioning from foster care to adulthood a means of living independently through various programs such as useful life sustaining skills. The agencies work in liaison with the government, the local courts, local community, and many local institutions that may deal with children such as churches and educational facilities that provide services to the …show more content…
children.
The purpose of this paper is to explore the issue of children and child welfare services by defining the issue in depth and determining the relevance of this issue to social work and social welfare. This paper will also consider the development of child and children welfare services through history, and assess various policies and social attitudes that have affected and that continue to affect the provision of these services through history. In addition, the response of social work to the problem of child welfare will be evaluated, and my personal opinion on the effectiveness of the response by social work toward the issue will be provided. Apart form this, the extent to which this response is effective in achieving the core goals and objectives of the program will be studied in the paper. The study will also take a close look at the extent to which this response is effective in achieving the core goals and objectives of the program (DeRue & Morgeson, 2007).
Children and Child Welfare Services Child and children welfare programs are programs that are designed with the principle intention of giving services to children from broken families. These services are aimed at enabling the children to lead lives that are as close to normal as possible. These programs range from simple forms of assistance that enable the children stay with their parents to having the children removed from their homes and accorded care in foster homes and in charity centers where they receive a proper guidance and treatment from professional caregivers. Child welfare programs are created according to and guided by the following basic principles:to prevent the separation of children from their parents and families;to protect children that may be identified as dependent by providing them with emergency and long-term living alternatives besides their families; * to reunite children placed in foster care with their families after the issues in their families are sorted out through the correct channels; * to provide permanent placement of the children in foster homes when chances of reuniting them with their families are not possible or would not be in the best interest of the child;to help the older children move out of foster homes and safely transition to a life of self-sufficiency. The purpose of the programs is to ensure that children who meet these criteria are accorded the best form of care in a safe, healthy, positive and educational environment. These programs offer the children an atmosphere that enhances positive development so that they can grow up like normal individuals as those who grow up in normal homes with their families. This increases their chances of transitioning safely into adulthood.
The History of Child and Children Welfare Programs in the US
The issue of child permanency in the US gained prominence in the 1950s, with a number of research studies being conducted to determine the efficiency and effectiveness of child and children welfare programs on the wellbeing of the children involved (Urie, 1996). The research studies were aimed at unveiling the effects of a long-term foster care and separation of the children from their parents and families in the process of their growth and development. As years progressed, the child care programs continued with their support and treatment for the children with an emphasis being put on the need for the permanency of these services. In the 1980s, most studies showed that adoption would provide a better option for permanency for the children, where the children would move from the foster care homes to adoption by new families. Adoption ensured that the children were raised as if they were in their own families. The adopting parents were required to take up the children and treat them like their own biological children. This led to the enacting of the ground-breaking Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act of 1980. This act made foster care a temporary and transitional service, after which the children would be reunited with their original families or get adopted in new homes in which they could stay for the rest of their lives (Maas & Engler, 1959).
In 1997, the Adoption and Safe Families Act was passed (Maas & Engler, 1959). This act sought to ensure the safety of the child in his or her adopted home (Maas & Engler, 1959). This also served to emphasize the importance and need for accountability for the child welfare services, which required that the foster care services and the adopting parents act with a lot of care and concern toward the adopted child and ensure his or her safety at all times. Today, a number of agencies continue offering needy children assistance in the form of foster care and other permanent home programs that are aimed at ensuring the comfort, safety, and proper development for the children.
Policies and Social Attitudes to Child and Children Welfare
The issue of child and children welfare is an integral issue in the US. The government and other social agencies make an effort to ensure that the children under the program receive the best possible treatment. In this way, the government and policy makers have implemented a number of policies that are aimed at ensuring that these agendas are met with efficacy. These policies are geared towards protecting the children from all forms of abuse by the caregivers and other members of society and ensure the effective development of these children while in foster care and homes. These policies also ensure that proper procedures and protocols are followed through the adoption stages to avoid incidents of criminal activities and malpractices in the adoption process.
One such policy is confined to the state laws on child abuse and neglect (DeRue & Morgeson, 2007). This law addresses the processes of reporting incidents of child abuse and neglect to the respective authorities in respective states (DeRue & Morgeson, 2007). These laws also seek to protect the children from all forms of domestic violence and abuse among many other related issues. State laws on child adoption address the processes that should be carried out when a child needs to be put on ‘out-of-home’ care (DeRue & Morgeson, 2007). These processes include the proper planning of the cases, putting a reasonable effort to ensure that the child is reunited with his or her parents after they are considered fit to raise the children and all other issues pertaining to child placement (DeRue & Morgeson, 2007). State laws on adoption deal with the issues related to domestic adoption, inter-country adoption, and any post-adoption problems that may emerge after the adoption process regarding the safety and the well-being of the child (Fansel & Shinn, 1978). The Social Security Act outlines a number of major policies that have been passed with regard to child welfare services. These include the Child Welfare Services and Promoting Safe and Stable Families programs, the Adoption Assistance Programs, the Chafee Foster Care Independence Program, and the Social Services Block Grant among many other state and federal legislations (Fansel & Shinn, 1978).
Throughout the history, the communities in the US have harbored both positive and negative attitudes towards the child welfare services in the country.
Although there have been mixed attitudes with regard to these services, a majority of the attitudes have been positive and supportive with relations to the programs. The public has independently taken initiatives to support these programs through well wishers ' initiatives and through the government by encouraging legislations pertaining to these services. However, there have been exceptions in public support of these programs as the need for the programs continues to increase amidst hard economic times. This is especially the case when a number of children in need for these programs are from minority races. For instance, there have been allegations and concerns that African American parents create an unnecessary need for child welfare services by engaging in high-end criminal activities. This is shown in the studies that indicate that a high number of children in foster care belong to such parents. The parents are usually incarcerated or negligent as they engage in drug and substance abuse among other forms of criminal activities. Despite this setback, the child care programs continue gaining a lot of support on the part of the public and other social avenues and institutions that provide all sorts of support for the
programs.
The Relevance of Children Welfare Programs to Social Work and Social Welfare The children welfare programs are an integral component in social work and social welfare programs (Fansel & Shinn, 1978). These two programs are co-existent and are related in a number of ways so that one cannot exist without another. Child welfare professionals are essentially social workers, who get their professional training on social work and related programs (Fansel & Shinn, 1978). Achild welfare program officer is one of the career options that social workers can pursue and use the knowledge and skills that they gain from their classes in social welfare. “The delivery of agency-based child welfare services is historically rooted in the social work profession” (Fansel & Shinn, 1978). Social work professionals continue to play major roles in the field of child welfare including administration, supervision, direct practice, policy development as well as research and training activities (DeRue & Morgeson, 2007). Despite these historical connections between the two, children welfare agencies fail to recruit sufficiently qualified staff of social workers due to low salaries and poor working conditions in these agencies (DeRue & Morgeson, 2007). Therefore, child welfare programs and services continue to play an important role in the field of social work (Fansel & Shinn, 1978). Social work has taken measures to respond to the problem of increased cases of child abandonment as well as the inadequacy of skilled workers in the area of child welfare. One way that it seeks to respond to this is to customize its classes as offered to include more detailed teaching on the specific needs of child welfare services. These are tailor-made to fit the requirements of the typical child welfare societies as well as to reflect the revolutions and evolutions that have been and that continue to be experienced in the field of child welfare (LaLiberte, Lightfoot & Ellett, 2012). Social work has also responded to these problems by offering their free services at child welfare centers. A number of child welfare centers are run privately, meaning that they get their funding from individual personalities or from welfare institutions such as churches. This makes it difficult for the agencies to afford professional social workers as often as they would like. Consequently, the social workers are made to opt to work in other institutions that can pay them higher salaries. In response to the dire need for their services, social workers are now offering their services in these institutions free of charge. In other cases, the social workers take their time and effort to train workers in these agencies who may not be as qualified as they are. They train them on the essential areas and impart on to them the necessary knowledge that they need to enable them to carry out their activities in the agencies as effectively as possible (Urie, 1996).
This response by social welfare has played a great role in increasing the efficiency of the children welfare services, which have taken on a more professional outlook than it did in the past. Workers in the agencies are more equipped and enabled to handle even the most complex issues that the children under their care face. They are also able to articulate effectively various issues and challenges that these children face and offer the most appropriate solutions that serve to address and respond to the core principles and guidelines that form the basis of a child welfare practice (DeRue & Morgeson, 2007). I strongly believe that the response by social work to the needs of child welfare programs is the most sincere one that is aimed at providing the best and the most suitable services to the children in these agencies. Social workers have taken it upon themselves to ensure that the agencies are run well and professionally, despite the fact that most of the agencies cannot afford to pay them as adequately as they should. Training the other workers in the agencies on effective intervention strategies has worked to ensure that the services offered in the facility are professional and able to reflect the core needs of the clients (LaLiberte, Lightfoot & Ellett, 2012). Social work and social workers should continue providing courses that are highly reflective of the needs of the children in these agencies so that they can meet the changing needs of the agencies characterized by the changing trends in family problems. These efforts by the department can be considered a manifestation of care and concern for humanity among the public and the efforts as well as sacrifice that people are ready and willing to put forth in order to ascertain the best interests of children are met, and that their growth and development into useful members of society are ensured. The involvement of social work and social workers in the child welfare programs is a reflection of a high degree of social control. Social control in this context is reflected in the manner that the society through the social workers has come together to ensure that it offers the best possible services to the needy children in helping them meet their familial desires. The efforts that the social workers also put to ascertain that the children in child welfare programs achieve the best possible care shows a high degree of social control, where the children are trained on the best possible forms of living that will enable them to achieve the status equal to that of other children in normal families (Julie & Steen, 2011). Through the programs, the children are taught against anti-social behaviors that are considered to be a wayward, and thus impart in them a strong form of social control. Through the programs, the society’s culture and norms are passed down through the children generations as reinforced by the social workers.
The responses by the social workers were highly reflective of the prevailing conditions of the time. Social work has revolutionized its interventions from the form they took in the past to reflect the changes in the causes of family breakups as well as the various reasons concerned with the fact that children today find themselves in need of child welfare services. In the past, for instance, single motherhood was not as rampant as it is today. Therefore, in order for the services to reflect this changing trend, the interventions to deal and respond to the problem of single motherhood and the resultant effects were designed. In this way, the programs have ways of dealing with children in the programs from single parents, which are different in their approach to those used for children with both parents (Julie & Steen, 2011). The approach by social work and social workers is a great way for helping the society and the children, most of whom are helpless in the hands of their parents. The social workers have identified the needs of these children as well as the gap in the provision of effective services to the children in order to enable them to grow normal as effectively as possible. In offering their services at lower or no process at all and training the care givers in these institutions so that they can empower them to offer better and more professional services to the children, they are helping the young individuals and the entire society. They help children to get the best possible treatment and assist the society in dealing with the increasing number of cases of needy children, thus reducing possible incidents of crime and other wayward behavior that is likely to result from these children if they are left unattended. The services by the social workers also help to reduce criminal activities in the society as well as other forms of loss such as suicide and homicide cases. The services also contribute to the decrease of incidents such as sicknesses and other forms of illnesses that could result in disease caused by stress and depression in the children and their parents, which could put a strain on the society’s social services (Marmot & Wilkinson, 2007).
Another emerging trend is that concerned with the rise in the use of technology in a variety of applications and activities undertaken by the programs. Therefore, technology has been adopted by the programs, which apply the concept on a number of their activities and the various interventions they use. Using technology, the programs are able to offer better training and education for the children using video simulations. Using technology, the programs are also able to keep more comprehensive and updated tracks of the children in their databases as well as the various adoption homes that they end up. This makes it easy in the running of the institutions, as the agencies keep all records for safe keeping and any form of future reference on the children in their care. This serves to reduce the incidents of malpractices and ensures the safety of the children, as the foster parents from the adoption homes know that they have provided their records and they can be tracked down in case they fail to offer the child effective care (McMurray, 2007).
Another trend that these services are aimed at is that of the increasing number of sexually transmitted diseases that are a major threat for these children. Such diseases as HIV/Aids are increasingly becoming popular, and, thus, it is important and necessary that the programs as offered reflect these issues in their services. It is for this reason that today’s programs have special offers for these children, specifying between the male and female children, whose needs and challenges are differentiated due to their gender discrepancies. The programs then tailor their teachings to address these problems as they are eminent in posing a major threat to the successful transitioning of children to adulthood. Besides diseases, the services bear in mind the changing needs in the job market, so that they use this information to inform the kind of programs that they offer the children as they make their transition to adulthood. The programs perform a study on the trending job market so that they teach the children effective skills that will enable them to obtain working opportunities and make a living on their own.
Conclusion
The problem of children in child welfare programs is the one that has existed in the past and the one that will continue existing in the present and the future as the marriage and family institution goes on experiencing different kinds of hardships. It is this need that has made it necessary for the government and other agencies to employ efforts to ensure that these children are accorded the best possible care. Therefore, it is important that social workers put on more efforts to address the changing needs for the children to equip them with the best possible forms of knowledge and skills to give them an opportunity to adapt to the world. This will go a long way in improving the lives of the children and making it possible for them to lead normal lives.
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