They Persist: Parent and Youth Voice in the Age of Trump
| Date | 01 April 2018 |
| Author | Jane M. Spinak |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/fcre.12349 |
| Published date | 01 April 2018 |
THEY PERSIST: PARENT AND YOUTH VOICE
IN THE AGE OF TRUMP
Jane M. Spinak
1
In recent decades, parents and youth involved in the child welfare and foster care systems have created myriad ways to have
their voices heard and their concerns appreciated, including through collective self-advocacy efforts. New forms of individual
and communal advocacy have emerged, including with supportive professionals, that acknowledge the centrality of parents
and youth in every decision being made about their lives and about the systems that control their lives. Nevertheless, studies of
youth and parent engagement identify the numerous individual and systemic barriers to meaningful participation and self-
advocacy efforts and the challenges to overcoming those barriers. This essay explores how empowered parents and youth can
surmount those barriers with the assistance of their professional allies. Ultimately, this individual and communal engagement
will strengthen a family-oriented child welfare system and a more responsive government in these uncertain times.
Key Points for the Family Court Community:
Parents and youth are developing effective ways to participate in case proceedings and systemic reform efforts in the
child welfare and foster care systems.
Professional practitioners must understand the advantages and challenges of greater client autonomy and voice in case
proceedings and systemic reform efforts.
Systemic barriers to parent and youth engagement include poverty and racism, multiple chronic stressors, trauma, and
marginalization.
Effective parent and youth engagement in case processes and systemic reform efforts can lead to improved individual
and familial outcomes and systemic reform.
Keywords: Advocacy Strategies; Client Autonomy and Voice; Professional Conduct; Rebellious Lawyering; Systemic
Reform; and Youth and Parent Engagement.
I. INTRODUCTION
On August 4, 2015, Sandra Killett testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Finance, chaired
by Senator Orin Hatch. Ranking Democrat Senator Ron Wyden was about to introduce legislation to
expand the use of preventive, home-based services as an alternative to unnecessary foster care.
2
This
hearing was part of a long bipartisan approach to child welfare reform that Hatch has championed.
Killett was the first witness. She proposed realigning federal funds to support community-based,
early intervention services to meet the immediate needs of families at risk of their children entering
foster care. This would be part of a supportive, nonpunitive approach to strengthening families, while
their children remained safely at home. One aspect of this approach that Killett highlighted she called
“Parent Partners,” the employment of parents who had previously experienced the child protection
system to help parents currently involved in the system to navigate through the complexity of serv-
ices, requirements, and administrative and court processes. Killett had become one of those Parent
Partners after her elder son entered foster care. She had found her way to a New York City group
called the Child Welfare Organizing Project (CWOP), where she realized that she was not alone in
struggling to maintain her family. Over time, Killett was trained to be a CWOP parent advocate,
assisting other parents as she had been assisted, “teaching and encouraging them to advocate for
needed services for themselves and their children in order to reunify with their children as quickly as
Corresponding: spinak@law.columbia.edu
FAMILY COURT REVIEW, Vol. 56 No. 2, April 2018 308–330
V
C2018 Association of Family and Conciliation Courts
possible...[and] to exercise their rights as a parent.”
3
By the time Killett testified, she had already
served as CWOP’s board chair and was now its executive director.
4
The same summer that Killett testified, Jessica Maxwell was celebrating a breakthrough achieve-
ment by the “Making College Success a Reality” campaign of the Foster Youth Success Alliance to
expand access to Educational Opportunity Programs at public and independent colleges and provide
critical financial aid to offset the gaps between the cost of attendance and current financial aid pro-
grams for foster youth in New York. The New York State budget would allocate $1.5 million for fis-
cal year 2016; the following year, the amount was doubled.
5
Only twenty-seven years old, Maxwell
was a registered lobbyist in New York and a skilled negotiator whose inspired and dogged leadership
for several years was essential in securing the funding. Maxwell was also a former foster youth.
6
Two decades ago, it would have been hard to imagine a parent accused of maltreatment would be
testifying before Congress as the leader of an effective parent organization or a young adult who had
aged out of foster care would be skillfully maneuvering the often dysfunctional New York State leg-
islature to secure millions of dollars to support foster youth in college. Their experiences build on
two steadily growing movements—one of parents and one of youth—to engage not simply as the
objects of the child protective and foster care systems but as full participants. A body of research and
scholarship has grown alongside these movements to help define and examine their effectiveness. In
this essay, I draw on that literature and the experiences of parents and youth involved in the child
welfare and foster care systems to explore how participation in its myriad forms has empowered
them not only as individuals but as part of the circles of communities around them. In doing so, I
hope to reinforce the necessity of parent and youth participation and self-advocacy in maintaining
and strengthening a family-oriented child welfare system and a more responsive government in a
time of great uncertainty, the age of Trump.
II. FROM VOICELESS TO ADVOCATE
The Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) has been a touchstone in examining the mean-
ing of voice and participation for the child. The CRC enshrines a basic level of voice by protecting a
child’s right to free expression as well as the right to participate in all matters affecting the child,
including judicial ones.
7
The international movement to ensure that children are able to use their
voices and participate meaningfully in all aspects of their lives—processes directly affecting them as
well as public debate about broader community issues—repudiates earlier constructions of children
as property or as always in need of protection. Instead, children are understood to be “separate
human beings with individual needs, wishes and feelings deserving societal recognition.”
8
From this
reconceptualization of children has emerged significant efforts to encourage child participation and to
study both the challenges and the successes of those efforts.
9
In giving agency to children, the CRC
did not, however, diminish the role of family in the child’s life. The CRC equally enshrines the prin-
ciples that children will develop and flourish best with their own parents and families, in their own
communities, with their own cultures and beliefs.
10
Parents are considered to have the best interest of
the child as their primary concern.
11
One of the state’s central roles is to provide support—material
as well as socio-political—so that parents are given every opportunity to fulfill their ability to ensure
their children’s best interests.
12
Understanding child participation in the context that children flourish best when their own fami-
lies nurture their developing capabilities not only diminishes tensions between so-called parent’s and
children’s rights but supports enhancing the abilities of parents to speak and act on behalf of their
children. Child participation does not weaken parent participation and parent participation does not
weaken child participation. Together they are most likely to secure what is best for the child as part
of a family. That in any individual matter, the child or the parent may not secure what they want
does not warrant reducing the opportunity to participate. To the contrary, as efforts to enhance both
children’s and parents’ voices have grown, so has the well-being of more families.
Spinak/PARENT AND YOUTH VOICE IN THE AGE OF TRUMP 309
To continue reading
Request your trial