Diagnosing Liberal Resistance to Needed Child Welfare Reforms

The symposium1 from which this Issue emanates was highly unusual in design and realization. In a typical law school conference, speakers analyze substantive issues, citing legal sources, social science, and perhaps some theoretical work, and then the audience challenges them on interpretation of those sources, conclusions they draw from the sources, and so forth. The focus of this conference was instead on the role that ideology plays in arguments and positions that people (scholars, government officials, social workers, etc.) take with respect to child welfare law, policy, and practice. Moreover, speakers were asked to focus specifically and narrowly on "prevailing liberal thought," which I and some other conference participants have come to see as a great obstacle to positive child welfare reform, especially for children in the most impoverished families and communities, which happen to be disproportionately of minority race.2This concern about liberal policy is not, however, the familiar complaint about excessive welfare spending creating permanent dependency. Nor, importantly, is this focus on liberal thinking meant to imply anything about any other group of people involved in policy-making or practice regarding child welfare. There is also a familiar complaint against conservatives-that they cold-heartedly oppose spending on programs that could lift people out of poverty and help them recover from adverse experiences-but that complaint was also simply not intended to be part of the conversation. Whatever truth there might be to either of these familiar ideologytargeting criticisms, they are simply not what the conference was about, and there was no intention to compare different groups and determine whether one is better than another on child welfare issues.The aim was instead simply to figure out what is going on with "most liberals" who participate in the policy or practice of child welfare and protection. Some of us proponents of child welfare reforms, probably most of whom self-identify as liberals, have been repeatedly frustrated in our child welfare advocacy by resistance from other liberals. For those of us who are liberals, this conference therefore amounted to a kind of "in-house critique" of liberal policy. To be clear, though, not all participants identified as liberals, and the selection of speakers was not based on political affiliation; invitations were issued to people who, regardless of their politics, could be expected to take an objective, child-centered view of what children need in order to have healthy development and avoid harm. They were asked to speak about the kind of resistance they encounter to their views, with particular focus on how most liberals react.I would characterize the some of us, who are not "most liberals," as pragmatic child advocates. My brand of pragmatic child advocacy proceeds from several assumptions:1. America, in general, has little appetite for increased welfare/social services spending.32. In any case, more spending would do little or nothing for children born today into the worst circumstances-that is, those whose birth parents are incapable of adequate parenting and live in areas of concentrated poverty, because social reform programs take years to effect change and there are some problems that money cannot overcome.43. We do not know how to fix deeply damaged people, at least not within a time frame consistent with children's developmental needs.54. Children, like adults, are entitled to the best among options available to them in the world as it is.These realities create a dilemma for liberals. We are committed to: (1) substantive equality of opportunity; (2) liberty; and (3) corrective justice. We believe that the existence today of impoverished, dysfunctional communities and a large number of unfit birth parents is a result of great past and ongoing injustices;6 however: (1) giving all adults an equal opportunity to parent means denying some children an equal opportunity for adequate parenting (which, unlike being a parent, is truly a fundamental interest); (2) giving priority to the liberty of damaged people who have children in their custody puts those children at serious risk of becoming badly damaged themselves; and (3) treating children as compensation for past injustice itself constitutes an injustice. …