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Stress and Child Welfare Work

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Contemporary Issues in Child Welfare Practice

Part of the book series: Contemporary Social Work Practice ((Contemp. Social Work Practice))

Abstract

Child welfare workers speak of the satisfaction of knowing they have made a critical difference in children’s lives; at the same time, there is also the difficulty of dealing with the stressful aspects of working in this field. Some level of stress is inherent in child welfare work, and this affects both individuals and organizations. Exposure to details of the suffering of maltreated children is a job requirement for child welfare workers as they carefully investigate maltreatment allegations and interact with people who often do not want to see them and who may threaten them or try to hurt them. In addition to their day-to-day responsibilities, child welfare workers may also have to face the news of a child’s injury or death that they could not prevent. The combination of all of these factors can certainly be extremely taxing, and severely stressful events can result in negative effects on functioning in child welfare workers, such as traumatic stress, depression, and anxiety.

Child welfare organizations can suffer from traumatic stress in ways that are analogous to the suffering of individuals. Organizations face the stress of using increasingly scarce resources in trying to meet great need. Severe budget cuts and the assignment of additional tasks without receiving additional funds only add to the stress inherent in child welfare work for an already overburdened workforce. In addition, environmental stressors are added to the mix for both individuals and organizations, such as lack of understanding of the work of child welfare by the general public. Child welfare workers are required to protect child and family privacy, so the many successful cases in this field rarely come to public attention in the way that cases involving disastrous outcomes often do. Child welfare administrators are prohibited from speaking about specific cases, such as the death of a child, and can only respond in very general terms. Child welfare workers thus have little voice in addressing public perceptions and cannot explain or defend the decisions they must make.

Workers may have pre-existing risk factors and face the likelihood of both primary and secondary exposure to traumatic stressors in the course of their everyday work. Any resulting traumatic stress is likely to involve significant suffering and potentially affect work quality and staff turnover. Approaches to the problem may occur at the client level, the worker level, and the organizational level. Since the problem affects an entire organizational system and all its members, organizational-level approaches, while time consuming and initially costly, may be the most promising in providing relief from suffering, and may be more cost effective in the long run. Significant research evidence exists concerning the risks for and potential impact of worker traumatic stress and materials providing approaches are becoming increasingly available. Evidence of effectiveness of these approaches is beginning to emerge and will hopefully continue to grow, showing the way forward in dealing with one of the major concerns in the field of child welfare.

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  1. Child Welfare Education and Research Programs, School of Social Work, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

    Elizabeth A. Winter

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Correspondence to Elizabeth A. Winter .

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  1. Child Welfare Education and Research Programs, School of Social Work, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, USA

    Helen Cahalane

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Winter, E.A. (2013). Stress and Child Welfare Work. In: Cahalane, H. (eds) Contemporary Issues in Child Welfare Practice. Contemporary Social Work Practice. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8627-5_9

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