Qualitative Inquiry and Family Therapist Identity Construction Through Community-Based Child Welfare Practice

Calculating All of Our Losses: Writing Real-World Therapy Experiences in Child Welfare

“…As feminist family therapists practicing in the child welfare system, we work with extended care providers (usually foster parents), caseworkers, attorneys, and extended family members (Jager et al, 2009). By using the narrative approach, we share the experiences of each therapist's account of working within a child welfare system consisting of various and sometimes competing goals and objectives (Chang, 2008).…”

“…With our client families, we have taken up the task of facilitating empowerment and advocacy for our families and parents while embracing a feminist and social justice informed perspective of family therapy (Jager et al, 2009). In the larger community, we have embraced our own version of "neutrality," which generally would not be accepted as a feminist practice in our field-but in the child welfare context, we disagree.…”

“…We must work to balance both of these competing, and at times conflicting, interests. We participate as therapists in a child welfare system that is known to cultivate some less than ideal foster care placements, additional losses, and loyalty conflicts inherent to fractured family relationships, and feelings of denial, anger, isolation, regret, and disempowerment for families who already have an abundance of stressors (Crenshaw & Barnum, 2001;Jager et al, 2009). We ask ourselves many questions about how we evaluate families referred to our therapy clinic.…”

The Permanency Plan Game Show: An Intersubjective Case Study of a Foster Care Child and Her Caregivers

“…Therapists often become involved with the child, the biological parents, the foster care parents, the court, the child welfare system, and foster care workers,and maintaining connections with all parties can become extremely overwhelming (Ehrensaft, 2005;Jager et al, 2009;Larrieu & Zeanah, 2004;Zukowsky, 2005). Due to the constellation of frequently inconsistent communication between child welfare and clinicians, the pressure imposed by the ASFA time limits to establish permanency, and the lack of permanency options that exist on a realistic relational spectrum, clinicians may find themselves losing an intersubjective perspective.…”

“…Clinical practice with children in foster care is marked by the inevitable intersection with larger systemic forces and the complex and often amorphous matrix of multiple caregivers and guardians (Ehrensaft, 2005;Gin, 2008;Heineman, 2008;Jager et al,2009;Wanlass, Moreno, & Thompson, 2006;Zukowsky, 2005). Given the current permanency planning guidelines outlined in the Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA) of 1997 (H.R.…”