Barriers to Authentic Youth Engagement

The QIC-EY engaged in meaningful research to explore engagement in permanency planning, identify barriers impacting successful child and youth engagement, and create changes that could be made to improve outcomes. Key highlights from Barriers to Authentic Youth Engagement include the identification of the biggest obstacles to progress as well as solutions for both services offered as well as important culture shifts needed within the broader system. Barriers to Authentic Youth Engagement is a promising publication that combines real world examples with thoughtful discussion points. The following are some takeaways that professionals throughout child welfare can use as they work towards the shared goal of creating healthy and sustainable permanency plans.

Barriers Identified

This report identified eight of the most commonly identified barriers to successful outcomes from professionals and youth. These include:

Time Constraints
Policies and Regulations
Lack of Resources
Youth lacking psychological safety

Worker bias
Youth ill prepared
Youth not feeling listened to by workers
Power imbalance between professionals and youth

In the report, professionals and youth provided examples of how these challenges play out regularly in child welfare. The most common examples of barriers identified by professionals and youth were lack of time, worker turnover, and legal regulations.

Lack of Time

Workers corroborated the perceptions of people with lived expertise. Many indicated that there was no time in their day to even see youth, let alone meaningfully engage them. The time that workers had with youth was necessarily dedicated to triage support and meeting regulatory requirements.

Worker Turnover

Worker turnover was also a significant barrier to authentic youth engagement. “Our workforce is so diminished right now. Everybody’s doing triple duty, so it’s really hard to hold caseworkers to a high standard for engagement with youth when they’re doing three other jobs at the sametime.” When workers are in survival mode, it is challenging to do the slow and subtle work required to build trust and engagement with youth. People with lived expertise felt the impact of having multiple workers in rapid succession.

Legal Regulations

Workers struggled to engage youth in decisions about their case due to agency, state, and/or federal policies and court orders. Decisions related to visitation, placement, and permanency were often dictated by court order and getting a hearing to request a change to the court order could take months. Many workers felt that they had to choose between spending time with youth and sacrificing the regulatory requirements of their job, or spending less time with youth but meeting the regulatory requirements.

Three things professionals can do with this report:

Have members of your team take specific sections to read and invite everyone to share three insights from their section.
Take each of the eight barriers identified in the report – time constraints, policies and regulations, lack of resources, youth lacking psychological safety, worker bias, youth ill prepared, youth not feeling listened to by workers, and power imbalance between professionals and youth – and think about which barriers exist for your work with engaging children and youth.
Once there is clarity on which barriers are most acute for your youth engagement work, take each element and find even small ways to chip away at them.

Worker turnover and legal regulations are both bigger systemic issues that will require higher level changes and a tiered approach to solutions. However, cultural changes to the work of child and youth engagement overall can help to address both as well as the other barriers that stand in the way of professionals and youth co-creating healthy permanency plans.

The most important piece to remember is that both professionals and youth want to see changes made. The enthusiasm is there, what is critical now is to harness that positive energy to ensure authentic engagement and empowerment of children and youth in child welfare throughout the U.S., especially in relation to permanency decisions.

View and Download the Report

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