Marlowe says even if caseworkers know that a child came from a home with abuse or neglect, what they can tell potential foster or adoptive parents is limited by privacy laws.
“We have to keep in mind that both the child and biological parents have a legal right to privacy,” he says. “We can only begin to give out this kind of information when a foster parent expresses interest in a child and begins to become involved in the child’s life.”
The changing nature of mental health conditions creates another obstacle for caseworkers, Marlowe says, because it makes prediction of dangerous behavior very difficult.
“Mental health conditions are not like a broken bone or an infection,” Marlowe says. “They are ever-changing and difficult to define, let alone treat. Even if a full and accurate assessment of a child is done at one point, a year later, that assessment may be utterly wrongheaded – not because of a problem with the first assessment, but because the child has changed. That’s particularly true in adolescence, where so many forces are changing a child’s body, brain and behavior.”
More broadly, he says, casework itself is a “tremendous challenge” because each situation is unique.
“We have specialists and supervisors to support our workers, but human beings are complex and ever-changing,” he says.
Marlowe addresses the perception by some families that DCFS caseworkers hold back information that might scare off potential parents by saying that’s simply not the case. DCFS went from having more than 52,000 children in its care in 1997 to just more than 15,000 now, he says, but the rate of disrupted adoptions has not increased as the agency has shifted toward more permanent placements.
Marlowe’s own parents adopted six foster children with varying degrees of emotional disturbances when he was growing up. He says that experience prepared him to be a foster parent himself, but every parent must ask themselves what they’re willing to deal with when adopting.
“When my wife and I came to it, I was able to honestly say I’ll take on the most severe psychological issues you’ve got,” he says. “However, medically complex cases blow my mind. I couldn’t be that kind of parent for five minutes. I think every parent has a unique ability to help certain kinds of children.”
Contact Patrick Yeagle at [email protected].
