Critical Issues in Child Welfare

Begins with the issues facing at-risk children and families and then describes the intricacies of the child-welfare system and the role of protective services, family preservation, out-of-home care, foster care, adoption, and services for adolescents

Joan Foster Shireman is emerita professor in the Graduate School of Social Work at Portland State University and coauthor of Adoption: Theory, Policy, and Practice and Care and Commitment: Foster Parent Adoption Decisions. An established expert on child welfare policy and practice, she also writes on single parent and transracial adoption, foster care, and the experiences of workers and families in protective services.

Ruth McRoy, Boston College Graduate School of Social Work:
Joan Shireman's second edition is an excellent comprehensive resource on policies and practices impacting child welfare service delivery today, such as family preservation, permanency planning, child protective services decision making, open adoptions, transracial adoptions, kinship care, international adoptions, and service delivery to youth in transition and youth with disabilities. Shireman highlights the need for workers to know the communities from which families come; social justice issues, such as the disproportionate representation of children of color in the child welfare system; and the potential impact of subtle, sometimes unrecognized racial biases. This book should be required reading for child welfare courses and for training child welfare practitioners and other service providers working with children and families, as it provides a unique contextual look at the intersection between systems (juvenile justice, mental health, and child welfare) and social issues (poverty, substance abuse, and violence in the community).

Jennifer Bellamy, University of Houston:
Critical Issues in Child Welfare is substantive, historically and contemporarily. The book will serve as a solid go-to introductory text that will likely appeal to many social work programs.