Kansas Group Helps Dads with Adoption and Child Welfare Systems
"Fathers aren't always looked at as the caregiver for the children in the family," Mans said. "(People) look towards the mother. That's a lot of what our group is focusing on trying to overcome."
Here's a good article about a group of men in the Wichita, Kansas area that are helping other men to battle the child welfare system there (The Wichita Eagle, 3/18/09). As the Urban Institute discovered in its study entitled "What About the Dads?" child welfare caseworkers routinely ignore fathers as placement alternatives for children perceived to be at risk by the child welfare system. That's true even though 88% of fathers have been identified. Other studies emphasize (and criticize) the per diem arrangement states have with the federal government that rewards placement of children in foster care and penalizes placement with fathers or other relatives.
The Urban Institute study also found that attitudes of caseworkers affect whether they will seek out a child's father as a placement possibility. The Wichita Eagle article reports that 81% of child welfare caseworkers are women according to the National Association of Social Workers. And that turns out to matter in how men are treated by child welfare employees. As one Wichita man said, "You obviously feel marginalized, like fathers are not important in this equation."
That's why he and four other men started an organization called Dads Dare to Care that helps men deal with issues relating to adoption, child welfare and foster care. In addition to counseling fathers, they provide advisory services to the child welfare system to improve the way the system interacts with dads.
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