What’s Best for the Children? : Child welfare: Experts seem increasingly unsure about how best to care for abused and neglected wards. Theories are plentiful, data is scarce.

The story is a familiar one to child welfare workers: A young girl is removed from the care of her emotionally unstable mother, but after only a few months of family counseling is returned, under the theory--and policy--that families should be swiftly reunified.

In this case, the theory proves to be too optimistic: The mother’s condition worsens, the child is abused and is removed from the home again.

Agnes Trinchero, executive director of Florence Crittenton Services, a treatment center for abused and neglected children and adolescent girls, relates the story of one of her former charges with equal amounts of anger and frustration. She believes that there would be far fewer bad outcomes if officials committed more resources to researching children’s needs.

For the most part, child protective services in Orange County, as elsewhere, function on hypotheses and hunches rather than on data based on research.

Is a child better served by foster parents or in a group home with a trained staff? Do children born addicted to crack cocaine require special treatment and monitoring?

Such questions are of growing concern not only to academics but also to agencies such as Crittenton, which increasingly are being asked to demonstrate the cost-effectiveness of their programs.

“We really haven’t done a lot (of research) on the child care level that is based on data and facts,” said Trinchero. “We have theories of what’s best, and then they’re practiced on the child.”

Other experts say officials are finally beginning to recognize that the present system isn’t working.

“The agencies are beginning to ask some of those tougher questions of themselves, questioning their missions,” said Sidney Gardner, executive director of the Center for Collaboration for Children, a newly established statewide group based at Cal State Fullerton.

Gardner said his organization and others like it around the country are attempting to establish more cooperation among researchers, children’s service agencies and local and state governments--and across the board the experts seem to be listening.

“There is beginning to be a realization that the way we are trying to solve problems is piecemeal, and it’s failing,” he said.

The Fullerton-based Crittenton center is about to embark on a project that will attempt to answer some basic questions about which treatments are most effective and which children are most likely to benefit from different approaches.

The study, which will be conducted jointly with USC, has enlisted the participation of the Orange County Children’s Services Department. It likely will mean altering some of the most fundamental tenets of child welfare, including the assumption that officials should reunite families quickly.

“How long do you go on trying to reunite a family?” asks Trinchero. “Maybe in those first critical months (after a problem has been identified in the home) a program of intensive treatment would be better. We can’t go on treating children like they were packages.”

Although situations vary, most children who become dependents of the county are treated the same way. For about 18 months, children’s services workers try to reunite the family by providing counseling and other services. If those attempts fail, the child may be placed in a foster home or a group home--sometimes repeatedly--or may receive intensive psychological treatment at a facility such as Crittenton. The last options are usually permanent guardianship or adoption.

What the Crittenton study will try to determine is whether some children would benefit by being placed directly in a treatment facility for a year or more, foregoing attempts at reunification.

Researchers will also try to determine earlier on whether a child needs, for example, a group-home type of experience, which offers more specialized services by trained staff in a campus-like setting, or foster care, where a child is placed with a couple licensed to provide a temporary home to one or more foster children.

Trinchero said USC researchers and Crittenton staff are in the process of designing the study and hope to begin assembling study groups within a few months.

Children’s services director Gene Howard said the project may yield valuable information that could be applied throughout the system. “I don’t think there would be any obstacle to implementing the findings if the research shows one approach is better than another.”

Howard said that the child welfare system has become more sophisticated about its approaches to children and their families.

But experts say a lack of funding and the relative low profile of children’s issues have hampered research efforts that might have provided answers to some of their questions.

“Kids don’t rank very high on the political agenda,” said Ferol Mennen, a USC professor of social work who has studied child welfare systems in Southern California. “There has been a lot of talk from the past few administrations about being pro-family, but they have not been very helpful in providing research funding for families.”

The child welfare system has also been jolted with burgeoning caseloads, reflected in the increase of reported child abuse cases. And children who enter the system come with more deep-seated problems, raising entirely new questions.

“The kids are more damaged, and as a result, it is more difficult to solve their problems,” Howard said. “So you have kids that remain in the system longer and it takes longer for treatments to work. We find that they repeatedly come back into the system after leaving it.”

Jacquelyn McCroskey, a USC researcher who has studied child welfare services in Los Angeles County, identified more than 90 problem areas--ranging from physical and mental deficiencies to family financial stress and inability to communicate--in one recent study of preventive services.

“Our preliminary finding is that these families are very troubled,” said McCroskey. “More than one-third had had children removed from the home in the past and or had a child who was currently in dependency.”

Experts are especially concerned about the explosion of children in the system who have been sexually abused or were born addicted to highly destructive drugs like crack cocaine. Because these problems only recently emerged, no one is quite sure how they will affect children in the long term or what treatments would be most effective.

Child welfare advocates are hopeful that research will lead to changes, but there is also concern that the kind of radical restructuring they envision will be impossible in a system that in many ways is as inflexible as any other bureaucracy.

“One reason no one has tackled the present service system is that it’s very political, very territorial,” said Trinchero. “There are tremendous protective sentiments about what everyone is doing--it’s protecting one’s turf.”

Child Welfare The number of children entering the child protective services system is growing yearly; more are suffering from physical, emotional and sexual abuse. Children in Protective Services: Orangewood: 172 Foster homes (includes adoptions): 1,731 Group homes: 562 Family maintenance: 1,780 Age Range: 0-4 yrs.: 803 5-8 yrs.: 459 9-12 yrs.: 344 13-17 yrs.: 642 18 yrs. & older: 45 Reasons for Referral: Emotional abuse: 22 Neglect: 1,123 Exploitation: 3 Caretaker absence: 298 Sexual abuse: 206 Physical abuse: 596 Other: 45 Orange County Child Welfare Budget: For the fiscal year 1991-92: $35.8 million ($20.8 million in state and federal funds; $15 million county funds) All figures for 1991 though Aug. 31 Source: Orange County Social Services Agency