The Family First Act opens an opportunity for states to use Title IV-E foster care funds in ways that have not previously been available except through the IV-E waiver process. Well over 90 percent of the federal budget that the Administration on Children, Youth and Families (ACYF) is responsible for administering comes from Title IV-E foster care and adoption funds – that’s almost $9 billion of a $10 billion budget.
These funds offer very little flexibility beyond paying for foster care and adoption assistance payments for children removed from their parents’ care after bad things happen and the associated administrative, training and information systems costs.
In stark contrast, a miniscule percentage of ACYF funding is devoted to the primary prevention of child abuse and neglect, meaning the prevention of the initial occurrence of maltreatment through strengthening families, and not the prevention of re-occurrence of maltreatment after a child becomes involved with a state or local child welfare system. Under the Community Based Child Abuse Prevention provisions of the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA), ACYF has close to $38 million to distribute among 50 states, the District of Columbia, and the territories designated for primary prevention activities. If we distributed the funds equally among states, which we do not, that would average about $670,000 per jurisdiction.
The Family First Act provides a very positive first step in changing a profoundly unbalanced and frankly illogical funding situation. The Act identifies a specific population that can benefit from the state option to use Title IV-E funds for prevention purposes, specifically, only children who are classified as “foster care candidates,” meaning they have already come to the attention of and are involved with the child protection system, and are deemed to be at imminent risk of entering foster care. Typically, that means they have already been determined to be victims of abuse or neglect and, with services, might be helped to avoid placement in foster care. Note that Family First also allows prevention services for pregnant or parenting youth in foster care who, by definition, are already involved in the system. The Act also specifies that federal Title IV-E funds to support those children and families can only be used for a few specific services that have a research-supported evidence base, and it limits the amount of time they can receive the services.
Again, let me emphasize that this is a positive step in the right direction. I commend Congress for taking this important first step. I, and my federal colleagues in child welfare, sincerely welcome the opportunity to use federal funds to help children who have been abused or neglected avoid unnecessary separation from their families and placement in foster care, along with the accompanying trauma that entails. But, I must emphasize that this is only the first step.
While it is critical to help children who become known to the child welfare system avoid unnecessary separation from their families when services can be offered to keep them together, it is even more important to help families and children avoid the situations that lead them to child welfare in the first place. When a report is made to a public child welfare system, it usually means that the harm has already occurred, a child has been abused or neglected, trauma has been inflicted, and any interventions from that point are remedial rather than preventative.
Add to that the fact that most parents who mistreat their children, intentionally or not, were mistreated themselves and their trauma was never resolved. When we choose, as a child welfare system, to intervene only after abuse or neglect has occurred, we are complicit in perpetuating that inter-generational cycle of trauma and maltreatment.
 We can change that.
 We must change that.
 Now.
Imagine with me for a moment what the world would look like if the public health system’s major strategy to combat a serious disease such as polio was to invest in wheel chairs and crutches for patients after they fell ill, instead of investing in vaccines to prevent the illness; if car makers invested in jaws of life and ambulances to get victims out of mangled cars and to hospitals faster as their primary means for addressing automobile safety, rather than developing seat belts, air bags, warning systems and other safety features to prevent injuries in accidents; and if the primary way to deal with baseball or football injuries was to buy more icepacks, neck braces and slings as opposed to requiring players to wear helmets and shoulder pads.
Now, imagine this with me. Imagine that our country’s primary way of keeping children safe, protected and emotionally healthy was to invest nearly all of our money in placing children in homes other than their own, and in therapy to fix the trauma after they have been abused or seriously neglected, instead of investing in helping their parents to care for them safely before they are abused or neglected.
What would it look like if that were the case? It would look like 437,000 children in foster care – a 10 percent increase in the past five years. It would look like 4 million reports of child abuse per year, because that is the case. It would look exactly like what we have now; it’s what we do.
If we have any serious hope of stemming the ever-increasing demand for foster care; of committing ourselves to strengthening families’ capacity to care for their own children rather than committing to recruiting more and more foster homes; to reducing the numbers of children traumatized by abuse, neglect and family separation; and of breaking inter-generational cycles of trauma and maltreatment, we have to put our money and our efforts further up the river before families go over the first waterfall.
That requires a re-imagining of what public child welfare is all about, and this is the moment to do it.
The President’s proposed budget includes a provision that will allow states to opt into a flexible funding approach to use Title IV-E funds under a capped allocation, very similar to the existing IV-E waiver flexibilities that can be used to strengthen the protective capacities of families long before child welfare services are needed. In short, this will allow states to work with families earlier, to get them what they need and to prevent bad things from happening to children.
States, counties and communities know their families’ needs and their communities’ capacities, and we have to trust that they can take advantage of increased flexibilities that will benefit their citizens without restrictive laws that tell them which services they may or may not use to help a particular family or child.
We have marvelous examples of effective, well-conceptualized and implemented programs across the country where this kind of community-based, primary prevention, family-strengthening approach is working to keeping families strong and intact – notably, Live Well San Diego, the Harlem Children’s Zone, the Center for Family Life in Brooklyn, the Communities of Hope funded by Casey Family Programs across the country, in addition to specific county initiatives in places like Allegheny County, Pennsylvania; Jefferson County, Colorado; and Los Angeles County among many others. We would be remiss not to learn from these examples and do all we can to bring the primary prevention of maltreatment and family separation to scale as a major federal child welfare priority.
With the Family First Act we have reached one more step in the continuum of services to children and families in the United States. We now have prevention of foster care placement for those children brought to the attention of child welfare agencies, a limited population but a critical one in the continuum. That adds to the existing array of child welfare services that includes foster care and reunification support services, adoption services, and emancipation and transitional living services for youth exiting from foster care.
What remains missing is the ability to use substantial federal funds to strengthen families before maltreatment creates lasting, usually life-long trauma to children. We also lack the ability to provide strong community-based, universal family support services to families. Absent such services and support, many of those families will inevitably knock on the doors of public child welfare and cost us infinitely more in federal foster care dollars and in remediation efforts that could so clearly be avoided.
Failure to redefine the system to stem the tide of children entering care and keep families strong comes at great expense to everyone. Those costs are financial and societal. It’s an expense that is paid in inter-generational cycles of trauma that affect all sectors of our society. The family is the foundation of American society; we must treat it as such.
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http://www.ncsl.org/research/human-services/foster-care-bill-of-rights.asp


https://www.childwelfare.gov/topics/systemwide/youth/resourcesforyouth/rights-of-youth-in-foster-care/

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http://instituteforattachment.ong/
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https://raisingdevon.com/2018/03/15/college-for-foster-care-alumni/
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Sunday here at Jayden's Joy is washing, sorting, separating by age and sex and packing up so the clothing is ready for foster kids who need it.  As we get more donations, the closet will continue to stock.  We also hoping that very soon we will be able to ship across the state of MS via priority shipment, depending on our funding.  But if your in Desoto County we are here and will work around your work schedule.


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​“The Jigsaw Puzzle Child” By Eileen Mayers Pasztor, DSW Every adult who interacts with children in foster care must understand average, expectable, or “normal” child development principles, and the often devastating impact of neglect and physical and sexual abuse on child well-being. As a foster care caseworker who grew up to become a foster and adoptive parent, here are two stories about child development that demonstrate what happens when caseworkers don’t have grounding in child development, and offers a tool that helps look at child development from a more realistic perspective. My decision to be a child welfare worker was not a career calling. I sought any job where a college diploma was required, and the county welfare department (as social services was called a long time ago) was seeking college graduates. With the qualifications of only a bachelor’s degree in history and a driver’s license, I was hired as a foster care caseworker. I didn’t even know what foster care was because I was fortunate to grow up in a family with nurturing parents. On my second day at work, I was sent to see a foster mother who had been fostering for more years than I was old. We had a disagreement about the age of a child in her care. According to the case record, the child was about one year of age. The foster mother said the child was three years old. I did see the child, but I didn’t stay long. When I returned to the agency, I told my supervisor, who recently earned a masters in social work, about what happened. My supervisor asked me what the child was doing, as a way to determine who was correct: the case record or the foster mother. I told my supervisor that the child was riding her tricycle most of the time. Everyone but myself was astonished that I didn’t know a one-year-old couldn’t ride a tricycle... I didn’t learn that as a history major. Years later, after I gained some experience in child development and of course much more, I returned to the agency and ran into that foster mother. She told me that I was the dumbest case worker she had ever met. Think of the mistakes that are made when basic information such as child development is not known. Many years later, after having the privilege of working with literally thousands of wonderful foster parents and child welfare professionals around the country, and becoming a foster parent, my husband and I decided to add to our family by adopting a child with special needs. He was chronologically ten years old, and had been in two residential facilities since the age of six. My parents were thrilled Reprinted with permission from The Foster Parenting Toolbox, edited by Kim Phagan-Hansel, published by EMK Press www.emkpress.com info@emkpress.com 16 Mt. Bethel Road, #219 Warren, NJ 07059 732-469-7544 732-469-7861 fax A Benefit of Membership Foster Parenting Resources and Information from NFPA at the addition of who would be their only grandson. But it didn’t take long for them to be frustrated with his behaviors, least of which was his “excess energy” and inability to focus on any activity for more than a few minutes. Try as I might to prepare them that he was going to be “different” from other ten year olds, we were all struggling. So I invented the “jigsaw puzzle” activity to show them how he wasn’t really ten years old. The Jigsaw Puzzle Tool Children have eight parts to their development: their age in years; appearance age; IQ age; academic age (grade in school); emotional age; social age; whether they are an ethnic match with the family they are living with, and how many years of customs, values, and traditions they share; and their life experience age. Most people – like my parents – were expecting that a ten-year-old would look between 9 and 11 years of age, would be in the fifth grade, would be of average or above intelligence; would be white like us, and would share our family values and traditions. Children who have experienced the tragedy of abuse and neglect and sexual abuse have fragmented pieces. See the puzzle below – that’s the puzzle for a child born with the blessings of good genes and good environment. The next puzzle – that’s my son. He was 10 years old in years, but he looked eight (small for his age). He processed information like an eightyear-old according to his IQ test and, academically, he didn’t read or write when he came to us: not one word. So he was academically preschool age. Ten Year Old Good Genes Age in Good Environment Years: 10 IQ Age: 10 Appearance Age: 9-11 Years of shared customs, values, traditions 10 Emotional Age: 10 Social Age: 10 Life Experience Age: 10 Ethnic Match= yes Academic Age: 10 The Typical Ten Year Old Pg. 2 Jigsaw Puzzle Child by Eileen M. Pasztor, from the Foster Parenting Toolbox (EMK Press 2012) Regarding trust, why should any child who has been abused or neglected by adults trust any of us? We think of families as safe havens. Children coming into the foster care system typically see families as places where children get hurt. Mom neglects you when she is high; her boyfriend abuses you because you’re just a reminder that she had sex with someone else. Families can be scary places. This can be especially true if you’ve lived with many previous foster or even adoptive parents who started off by saying, “I love you,” and then called for your “removal” (like you were garbage or snow) when your behaviors acted out your normal feelings of fear and anger. Socially, after living in a residential setting with other challenged children, our son could do parallel play but not interactive play, which made him socially at the preschool age. We were an ethnic match, but we had zero years of shared customs, values, and traditions. He wanted to sleep with us because that was what he had been taught before he was sent away to residential; and he wanted to be sure we wouldn’t abandon him in the middle of the night. As another example, when our foster daughter came to live with us, she had the custom of sleeping with her shoes on her pillow. That’s because, where she used to live, she never knew who would try to molest her in the middle of the night; she used her shoes as a weapon or to run. To assess the “life experience” age, you look at the range from the youngest age to the oldest age of functioning. In my son’s situation, this would place his youngest age of functioning at his emotional age, which was “birth through two” – when basic trust is established. For most children who have been abused or neglected, typical attachments and trusting relationship are suspect. His oldest age of functioning I list as 18 plus years of age. This is because children who have been sexually abused have experienced activities that many people don’t know about until they at least go to R-rated movies or have had some of their own more “grown up” or intimate relationships. How Does This Work? In every child welfare class I teach, in every workshop I do, in every keynote I give, I demonstrate the “jigsaw puzzle child” activity. I usually do it with two pieces of flip chart paper. First I diagram the “typical” ten-year old. Then I diagram my son. And then I rip the pieces apart and throw them on the floor. This is because the child welfare and other “systems” don’t typically deal with children in foster care from a developmental perspective and in a unified way. The case record documents the date of birth or chronological age. Anyone who meets the child sees the appearance age. Schools interact with a different piece of the child, and so on. And if a foster parent has three children in their care, that’s actually 24 different ages and stages to protect and nurture. Pg. 3 Jigsaw Puzzle Child by Eileen M. Pasztor, from the Foster Parenting Toolbox (EMK Press 2012) Age in Years: 10 IQ Age: 8 Academic Age: preschool Ethnic Match= yes Appearance Age: 8 Years of shared customs, values, traditions 0 Emotional Age: B-2 Social Age: 4-5 Life Experience Age: B-2 to 18 Ten Year Old Genetic Challenges Abuse/Neglect My “Ten” Year Old Son Consider the risk factors for children whose pieces of their jigsaw puzzle do not fit together. What are the risks for a girl who is emotionally, socially, and cognitively 12 but looks like she’s 16? What are the risks for boys who look older than their abilities? And for young people of color, the risks are greater. Latino and African American males tend to get referred to juvenile corrections while Anglos are more likely to go to mental health facilities. What happens when these “jigsaw puzzle children” turn 18 years of age and the alarm on their independent living clock rings? Now, at the chronological age of 18 years, they are supposed to be “emancipated.” They “age out.” Listen to how awful those words sound, how unnatural they are. What do they sound like to a child? How can we expect safe and responsible behavior from someone who is 18 in years only, but socially, emotionally, academically, and cognitively much younger? And here’s another critical question: Who is responsible for putting all the “pieces” back together again? From now on, every time you think about a child in your care, your caseload, your classroom or even the courtroom, think of all the pieces of the puzzle. Put a jigsaw puzzle diagram in their records. Discuss the “jigsaw puzzle” pieces when getting ready to place children. It may be that the placing caseworker does not know what all the pieces are. It may be that some children have to live with foster parents for a while before their foster parents can determine what the “ages” are. Tell the judge. Remember, when you are considering sending children back to their parents, the parents have jigsaw puzzles pieces, too. It’s just their chronological ages are higher. Otherwise, their pieces look a lot like those of their children. How do we ensure child safety, well-being, and permanency when we send “jigsaw puzzle” children to live with “jigsaw puzzle” parents? Fast forward the clock: Our son is now in his thirties. He is a client of county mental health services. He cannot work; my husband and I help him with most of his tasks of daily living. He has a wonderful relationship with my 90-year-old parents, who accepted him many years ago, once they put the pieces of the puzzle together. I didn’t expect to be a mom to someone who is thirty-something in years, but emotionally and socially much more like a 14-year-old. However, I am humbled that, through his challenges, and those of my foster daughter, I was taught the lessons that enabled me to create and share these activities. I would have preferred, of course, that they had not had the experiences. But our adult “children” are safe, and we’re still a family. I hope this “jigsaw puzzle” tool will help facilitate safety, well-being, and permanency for the children in your care and in your caseloads, too. Adapted from: Child Welfare League of America. (2009). Foster PRIDE/Adopt Pride – Preservice Training for Foster and Adoptive Parents, Trainer’s Guide. Washington, DC: Child Welfare League of America, p. 243. Pasztor, E.M. & McCurdy, M. (2009). When work comes home and home goes to work – child welfare social workers as foster and adoptive parents. In E. Grise-Owens & K. Lay, (eds.), Reflections – narratives of professional helping. Special Issue: Inside Out – Reflections on Personal and Professional Intersections, Spring, Volume 15, #2, 95-105, p. 95; and p. 98. Pasztor, E.M., Polowy, M., Leighton, M., & Conte, R. (1991). The ultimate challenge: Foster parenting in the 1990s. Washington, DC: Child Welfare League of America. Eileen Mayers Pasztor, DSW, is experienced as a public agency caseworker and supervisor; as a curriculum developer and trainer; and as a foster and adoptive parent for children with special needs who, now as adults, continue to require her support. She teaches child welfare and social policy advocacy courses at the School of Social Work at California State University, Long Beach (CSULB), and edits the journal Reflections – Narratives of Professional Helping, and she continues to consult and train nationally