Abstract
Cathleen Lewandowski’s book, Child Welfare: An Integrative Perspective, might best be titled, Child Welfare in the United States: An Overview. In 320 pages, Lewandowski describes child welfare as both a concept and a set of interrelated systems attempting to respond to the needs of the whole child amid changing policies, practices, and perceptions of what it means to promote the safety and well-being of children. The content, though relatively uncritical and atheoretical, is germane to social workers who devise policy, those who practice in agency-based settings, and those falling somewhere in between. The book provides some content on the profession’s origins in child welfare work.
Lewandowski lays out an integrative, or multisystemic, approach to the topic in three parts: the history of child welfare in the United States, child protective services, and the future of child welfare. The book provides helpful details and contextualizes each subtopic with a table of key events and legislation at the beginning of every chapter. The author is helpfully clear in defining her terms and framing the issues at hand. Given the book’s content and structure—including discussion questions, sometimes with brief case examples, and suggested readings at the end of each chapter—the book seems best suited as a course text for beginning social work students interested in child welfare work. Instructors should be prepared, however, to supplement outdated policies, practices, and references that are inherent to any book discussing present-day conditions. For example, the age at which children “age out” of foster care already varies in at least one state considered in the text. States’ child welfare policies and practices are quite varied and regularly must adapt to fluxes in funding and policies, thus making an up-to-date presentation of facts challenging.
While Lewandowski should be applauded for the comprehensive breadth of her work, Affilia: Journal of Women and Social Work readers should not expect to find in its pages a critical, feminist, womanist, or heavily social justice bent. The mother–father dyad or single parenthood is assumed, with parents in same-sex relationships missing altogether. Occasionally, Lewandowski only references mothers, which conspicuously de-emphasizes the role of fathers in child welfare. Rightfully, the author frequently spotlights differential treatment of children and families of color, as well as class issues, present throughout child-serving systems. However, the mere presentation of racism, sexism, and classism in relatively gentle terms leaves the critical reader wanting more. At one point, the author even goes so far as to claim that “overt discrimination in child welfare has largely been diminished” (p. 14). I fear many families would disagree from experience. The author later refers to “negative role models” policy makers point to as reasons to disparage welfare; this reference seems like a missed opportunity to call out the unfairness and inaccuracy behind the label “welfare queens” (pp. 49–50). One might argue that an overview text is not intended to function as a critical piece, to which others might call for a more forceful assessment of the ways in which systems are used to reinforce power and privilege.
Certainly, Lewandowski achieves her goal of maintaining a whole-child approach and rightfully acknowledges the ways in which child-serving systems collectively succeed and fail. Her integrative approach to the topic may be what distinguishes her book from other overview texts on child welfare; its broad scope seems intended for a variety of systems that must learn to interact well with one another to be effective for children and families. I would share her book with colleagues interested in an overview of child welfare in the United States, but I would direct them elsewhere for international perspectives, theory, or content that grapples with social justice more critically. Ultimately, this book will remain on my shelf as a handy reference and source of foundational material.
