Social Work Appreciation

As I stood in line waiting to buy 100 tortillas for the social work appreciation breakfast, I had some time to contemplate the universe.

In a perfect world, child welfare social work wouldn’t exist. We’d all be clamoring for some real jobs because kids would have safety, permanency, and well-being without government intervention. That’s not the reality though.

People are pulled to social work. Every worker I know possesses the intelligence and skills to make an easier living. But they don’t. Everyone has their own reasons for doing the job. Some may have experience in the system. Some may have been those weirdos who as a child felt bad for the toys of theirs that didn’t get played with as much as others (eyeroll…it’s me). Some are drawn by the fascination with human behavior. Some want to fight the system from within. Nonetheless, all want to make the world a better place for someone.

There are variances as to what “better place” means, and how to work through “who’s place should be better” in a world of competing priorities. And then there’s those complications of system limitations and good ol’ client right to self-determination. For those non social workers, client right to self determination is best summed with the classic joke: how many social workers does it take to change a lightbulb? One, but the lightbulb has to WANT to change.

Social work is caught between camps that think, 1)we don’t do enough and 2)we do too much.

There’s a  new Netflix documentary right now about a child who was beaten to death by his mother and her boyfriend. 4 social workers were charged criminally for their role in his death. The Trials of Gabriel Fernandez is 6 hours of looking back on a horriific tragedy and trying to assign blame to someone other than the monsters who committed the acts. I’d love to think that it could have been prevented, but I also know that decisions are made hundreds of times a day in which the full impact won’t be known until the story stops somehow. Sometimes our help doesn’t help. We use tools at our disposal and shared decision making in an effort to prevent tragedy, but fully predicting human behavior does not exist. Sometimes, bad things happen despite the very best efforts. The show has caused feelings and conversations filled with critical thinking.

In ironic contrast to the position of the Netflix show, some kindly gentleman set up camp in front of our office to educate the public his belief that child welfare agencies are over involved. Just a little glimpse in to how hard it can be to find the perfect middle ground in intervention.

The external pressures and queries pale in comparison to the pressure the workers put on themselves.

Some social work decisions end up amazing. Others end up with an unofficial jury of your peers passing judgment on them. Others still end in bad things happening. Many end up with some version of okay. The yuck of it is, most decisions can land anywhere on that scale, and the social worker has no idea at the time.

Social workers want nothing more than to do the right thing. And when that’s not clear, or isn’t going to happen, it can be very hard.

God bless their people and pets for being there for them during tough times. They didn’t chose the social work life, but they still deal with the consequences.

if we were really fair, we’d include support pets and people in the hiring process. “Fluffy, what are your thoughts on having your human come home inexplicably crying and not meeting your cat needs as quickly as you’d like?” “Billy, sometimes mom is going to come home from work and hug you a really long time for reasons that aren’t yours to know. How will you deal with that?”  “What are you going to say when your husband tells people he’s a social worker and people at the barbeque suddenly act different toward you all?”

We don’t do that though. (Thank goodness, because I could never interview a cat. The last one I met bitch slapped me for trying to pet it like a dog. I didn’t know!). But, we do try to support each other. We try to honor the families that we serve by giving them our best work. And once a year we over eat breakfast burritos to commemorate the decision that we make every day to wake up and be a social worker.