Interview with Joseph Goldstein.

• Author: Goldstein, Anne
• Position: Yale Law School professor - Interview

AN INTRODUCTORY NOTE

This interview originally appeared in a 1984 symposium issue of the New York University Review of Law & Social Change entitled "The Impact of Psychological Parenting on Child Welfare Decision-Making." (1) The issue published nine of the papers [hat had been given at a conference held on this topic at Rutgers Law School in the spring of 1983. The purpose of the conference, which involved participants from a range of disciplines, was "to examine critically the impact of the theoretical positions and proposals advanced by Goldstein, Freud, and Solnit on cases involving state intervention in parent-child relationships." (2) I was an editor of the issue and, although my father was not a participant in the conference, he agreed to be interviewed by me for the Review.

Like so much else that has happened in my life, the interview took place in our large, sunny living room in Woodbridge. As I recall, my father sat on the small couch beneath the window, and I sat in a nearby chair with a tape recorder, trying to be appropriately dispassionate and professional. What was my role here, what were the limits of my role? I see now that these questions could form the basis for a chapter in certain kinds of books. But at the time, my role seemed relatively straightforward.

I was here to interview Joseph Goldstein, the author of some very controversial ideas about child custody and placement. I was a law student working on a law journal and he was a law professor. As far as I knew then and know now, there are no other published interviews with him. In print, he is represented by carefully crafted, polished prose. Although I do not know if he ever had occasion to refuse an interview, the fact that I was his daughter may have helped persuade him to grant this particular request.

As I look at the interview now, I see that the questions I asked were not only direct but sometimes confrontational. I recall that at the time, I felt there was a lot to be challenged and that I wanted to pose the most difficult, provocative questions I could. Perhaps the biggest advantage I had in my role as daughter-interviewer was that I felt no trepidation or reluctance to ask questions that spared the niceties and went right to what I saw as the most troubling issues raised by critics.

My father was a man whose feelings showed in the set of his mouth, the expression in his eyes. During the interview, he was serious, professional, at times critical, but he did not hide his evident pleasure in being interviewed and even challenged by his daughter. Though this did not make my job as interviewer any easier, I did not expect nor would I have wanted it to be otherwise.

THE REVIEW: How do you respond to the criticism that in practice your theories serve to encourage childcare workers to prolong temporary placements so that stronger ties are formed with a foster family whom the worker perceives as "better" than the child's natural family, and that this eventually facilitates a permanent placement with the foster family?

PROFESSOR GOLDSTEIN: If this is the effect, it is certainly contrary to everything we propose. First of all, we say that it is an obligation of state agencies to make every possible effort to maintain children in their own family setting. Second, we urge that every effort be made to maintain the continuity of ties with the family from whom the child has been removed. It is--or at least it should be--a function of foster parents to keep alive these ties and bonds, because the primary goal of temporary placement is to restore a child as quickly as possible to the family from which she came.

If foster care were really temporary and used as preparation for early return, many of the problems associated with it would not exist. But if the reality is that foster care is not temporary in the eyes of a particular child because of the passage of time, depending upon the age of the child and the extent to which the agency maintains the ties, the least detrimental alternative may be for that child to remain with the foster family. A contradictory problem in the system is that children are moved from one foster caretaker to another, in part to protect the opportunity to return the child to her biological family. Each time the child is moved, depending on her age, there is damage done to her capacity to establish meaningful relationships, to feel secure about herself.

At some point, yes, it is true, there are going to be hurt parents and disappointed parents who don't have their children returned to them. But if the societal choice is between hurting one set of parents over another and doing as little harm as possible to the child, we, as citizens, not as childcare experts, prefer a policy that safeguards the child's well-being. No matter what decision is made, there is likely to be in these situations one set of disappointed parents and one set of pleased parents. The purpose of affirmative action here is to serve the interests of the child, not those of the competing adults.

THE REVIEW: How does a child know that a placement is temporary?

PROFESSOR GOLDSTEIN: Now that is a very important issue. It goes directly to the meaning of continuity and a child's sense of time. Much depends, of course, on the age of the child. An infant is not going to know a placement is temporary at all. A toddler, a school-age child may be helped to understand that it is temporary. Older children can expect and hope that it will be temporary if they have had a long and continuing relationship with their parents. It is precisely because the younger child may not be able to understand, that ties develop without regard to any prior relationship. The less extensive the prior relationship, the more difficult it is to establish temporariness for the child.

For example, consider a child of three years who has been living with her parents. Because of an emergency, the child is removed from her home. At the time the child is removed, possibly at the request of her parents, there is every expectation that things can be righted in the next six or ten or twelve months. What does a worker do to maintain the prior ties?

First of all, the child ought to be placed as close to wherever the parents reside as possible, so that it is convenient for the parents to see the child frequently. The foster parent must encourage the family to retain as much contact as possible. In addition, foster parents should understand, for example, that it is important to work very hard to keep a school-age child in the same school district, the same neighborhood, to reduce the extent of the break between that child and her classmates and neighbors.

Maintaining the prior ties means little things that one can only hint at, because interpersonal relationships as they develop are so complex. It may be that the rattle or the toys in the crib or the crib itself are moved from the home to the foster home to minimize the strangeness of the new setting. If the natural parent sings certain songs to the child at night before she goes to bed, or whatever, the foster parent should try to do likewise. The foster family should continue to rear the child as closely as possible in the ways of the original family. This may well mean that in selecting the foster parent, care should be taken to seek people with a similar outlook and background, to reduce the extent of change and make the transfer to and back as easy as possible. That does not mean that in the eyes of the child it is easy; it will be very difficult, but at the very least there should be a conscious recognition of the difficulty and an attempt to make it easier.

One of the things that was done with the children who were removed from wartime London and placed in a residential nursery with Anna Freud and other workers was always to make sure that the child's hairstyle did not change. When the mother or father visited, there was a kind of instant recognition. At the same time the parents who had to remain in London while the children were evacuated were encouraged not to change their hair.

A comparable situation arises when a child is placed in a hospital. In the old days, hospitals would not allow parents to stay with young children because the nurses and doctors did not want that burden, that kind of intrusion. It was a terribly painful experience for children who missed their parents. Now we recognize that it is desirable in most cases to allow patients free access to their children in the hospital so that ties can be maintained.

THE REVIEW: How do parents, childcare workers, and judges know when short-term care has become long-term care?

PROFESSOR GOLDSTEIN: In the first book we intentionally avoided setting any specific periods of time. We thought it would be much better to try to work out on a case-by-case basis what would be a permissible separation in terms of each individual child. But it is unfortunately true that a large percentage of the workers in the field are ill-equipped to do the job and have much more work than they can do sensibly. In the second book we set out guidelines because we recognized that more harm would be done by a free exercise of discretion than by providing some guidance in relation...