Children at the crossroads. (need for welfare services to collaborate to ensure the well-being of children from welfare-dependent homes with chemical-dependent parents)

Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, child welfare, and alcohol and other drug treatment agencies must collaborate to meet the goals of welfare reform and to ensure the well-being of children standing at the intersection of the three systems.

There is growing evidence of an overlap among parents in the welfare, child welfare, and substance abuse treatment systems. For these parents, use of, abuse of, and dependency on alcohol or other drugs (AOD) affect both their parenting skills and their ability to get and keep a job. In response to the evidence of this connection, there has been a dramatic change in the attitudes of child welfare practitioners and welfare administrators in the past five years. These practitioners and administrators had considered their clients' drug and alcohol problems as someone else's responsibility, but they are now recognizing that it will take much closer ties among child welfare services (CWS), including family preservation, foster care, and adoption; welfare agencies; and AOD agencies to achieve results for the clients they share.

Now, however, it is time to move beyond a recognition of the need for closer ties to decisive action that will implement links among programs through methods and models that work. The information in this article is drawn from our experience over the past several years, during which we have worked with some of the sites in the nation with the most innovative approaches to addressing AOD issues in the child welfare and welfare systems. Through participation in an executive session on the future of protective services held during 1994-1997 at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University; in work with Sacramento County, California; and in a series of structured sessions supported by the Stuart Foundation with five California counties' CWS and AOD administrators, we have observed dedicated professionals who are trying to make effective new connections between agencies for their clients. At the same time, we have had an intensive experience with these systems in the past four years, during which we became foster and then adoptive parents to two children, who are now 5 and 6 years old.

This article describes the problems of overlapping child welfare, welfare, and AOD systems; the reasons for the difficulties that these systems have in working with one another; a framework for building stronger ties among the systems; eight models of those connections and new practice; and the outlines of the new system that would be created by linking these three systems.

Review of Existing Data

Data on the overlap of families who are in all three systems - Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), child welfare, and AOD treatment - are scant. Those that exist build on data-matching studies and have been conducted in several states and localities. In addition, the "overlap" among these populations is often underestimated: because there are many parents who should be in multiple caseloads, but are not (their AOD issues, for example, may not have been identified), the numbers cited in the caseloads do not accurately reflect the extent of the problem.

There are several recent studies that have estimated the need for AOD services among TANF recipients and parents in the child welfare system. Generalizing about either the welfare or the child welfare population, however, is a risky business because members of these groups have a wide variety of characteristics, and some parents are much harder to serve than others. In the TANF population, for example, more detailed assessments have made it increasingly clear that the clients who are least likely to find the earliest job placements are those who have AOD problems. Similarly, in moving from the total child welfare population to the subpopulation of parents whose children have been placed in protective custody, it is clear that this smaller group has a higher proportion of AOD-related problems.