At 4:30 on Monday, I sat Ian in front of the TV for a half hour while I made dinner. He had seemed a little out of it during the afternoon, but he’s always quiet, so it didn’t raise a red flag. And then it happened. He vomited on the floor. In the way that only small children can vomit. He just opened his mouth without warning or ceremony and two meals and a snack late in a gluttonous mess in front of him. Half chewed hotdogs bits still visible. Slight moan.
By Tuesday morning, there was nothing left inside of him. He was warm and listless, panting with slight dehydration. Tuesday at 11:00, the social worker was due to arrive.
As part of the school district’s evaluation of Ian, which was the necessary step before they gave him speech therapy, they required a visit from a social worker “to get to know the parents better.” Yeah, right. They wanted to make sure that I wasn’t a chain smoking, boozer who kept my kid in a closet.
I thought about postponing, but that would delay his services even further. So, in between coaxing Ian to drink fluids and keeping him company on the sofa, I was tearing around the house cleaning up and squeezing in a shower. At 9:00, with my hair in a ponytail, vomit on the toilet seat, and dirty dishes in the sink, things looked grim.
We rallied, and by 11:00, the house and myself were respectable enough. Ian was a mess, but there was nothing that could be done about that. Doris looked about and asked me questions about my pregnancy and birth. Information that I had already supplied three or four times. She asked about our education levels and occupations, which I am not really sure tells you much about my son’s speech problem.
I’ll have some post in the future fully detailing the horrors of receiving special education services from the local school district. But I just wanted to give a snippet of what they’re putting us through. The visit from the social worker was just one part of on going hostility, suspicion, and disrespect.
Apt. 11d 
“The visit from the social worker was just one part of on going hostility, suspicion, and disrespect.”
I feel bad for social workers, on a certain level; they’re put in a terrible bind by the conflicting demands of their daily work. But if I think there’s any kind of integrity at all to how Melissa and I raise and educate our children, I also have to challenge the way social work invariably treats the messy details of life with distant, antiseptic suspicion. Towards the end of his life, Christopher Lasch was writing a lot about this; how the “caring professions” often express (or are ultimately obliged to express, through the homogenizing force of the bureaucracy) an antipathy towards ordinary family life.
Hope Ian is on the mend. Alison was puking for the better part of a week; she couldn’t even keep water down, and became listless and somewhat dehydrated. After two days of nothing but pear juice (a few ounces at a time) and the occasional cracker, her stomach relented and she began to eat again. I don’t know how many loads of laundry we must have done last week.
LikeLike
I can’t recall how many times we’ve told the stories, as best I recall them, of youngest — prenatal to present-day. Nowadays, I have a tendency to just grab the detailed report that diagnosed her autism and includes all the backstory and pass it onto whatever new person from XYZ agency is meeting us for the first time.
Sadly, it’s now about three years out of date and so I’d still have a lot of talking to do. You’re right that it feels like hostile inspection, especially when it’s the third or fourth time in a year you’ve gone through the routine.
LikeLike
I’m shocked. is the evaluation to determine a level of services? can they decide that the clearly defined needs are part of a different problem? what a nasty position to be in.
hope Ian’s feeling better soon.
LikeLike
I too have been through that detailed history umpteen times (pregnancy complications? parent level of education? etc). I never took it personally, I figure they use it for their stats. This is how many people from this socioeconomic bracket we’re serving, etc. And the kid and pregnancy stats are an attempt to correlate the deficits with something tangible from the past (again, trying to see patterns from a lot of kids’ data).
Sounds like awful timing, though! And there is something tediously impersonal and chilly about it all. I guess you just get used to it. Sort of like you get used to losing your name and being called “Mom” by all your kid’s therapists. No, I take it back. Never have gotten used to that.
LikeLike
“education levels and occupations”
That’s a class thing, no? Wanting to find out where she stands in relation to you on the scale? How condescending can she afford to be with you?
Sorry about the experience: sounds miserable.
LikeLike
I supplied all that detailed history about my pregnancy and Ian’s birth three times in the past three weeks to the speech therapist, pyschologist, and neurologist. Doris marked it all down on a form that I could have filled out myself and mailed in.
No, the only reason she was here was to check us out at our home. It’s part of a NJ law that a social worker has to inspect the family before they get services. I would have taken it with better humor but they tried to hide the fact that it was really an inspection by telling me that they just wanted to get to know me better. They had no interest in getting to know me better when my first went to kindergarten. I hate having my time wasted and being lied to.
The social worker was actually very nice. She was just doing her job. And once she saw the house was clean and we were well educated, she was very warm and encouraging. I’m not faulting Doris. I’m annoyed at this system.
Russell, that Lasch piece sounds great. Where can I find it?
LikeLike
What did you expect? Why should this particular government agency happen to be nicer, more civilized than any other? Why shouldn’t your home be evaluated before the city uses money extracted from your fellow citizens to educate your son? What are your expectations about how *your* tax dollars are spent and what level of accountability do you expect from the people they are spent on?
What motivation does any government agency have to be any more enjoyable to deal with than, say, the DMV?
Elizabeth
LikeLike
I can’t think of any single piece, Laura, but a lot of it shows up in the collection of essays his daughter edited and published after he passed away, titled Women and the Common Life. His larger concern is the long-term effects of allowing social workers and “experts” to replace in our minds and habits the value of unpaid work (meaning mostly the work done by homemakers and parents), but he has a lot of specific things to say about the conflicting imperatives between bureaucracies and families as well. (Here is a good review by Mary Ann Glendon.)
LikeLike
Elizabeth, it’s not my blog, but I think your questions are a little bit odd. Shouldn’t we hold our governments and other agencies to a higher standard of politeness and honesty?
As for your question, “Why shouldn’t your home be evaluated before the city uses money extracted from your fellow citizens to educate your son?” — what is the purpose and relevancy of the home evaluation? Is it to determine that one is too rich to deserve services? (In which other means tests would seem to be a cheaper and equally effective screen.) Or is this a way of trying to put the blame for a kid’s lack of progress back on the parents by suggesting their parenting was substandard? (The latter seems more likely the case from how the system works and the historical contexts of the profession and bureaucracy which I have studied.)
In the end, the child’s needs for eduational services shouldn’t be predicated upon these home visits — especially when they are often very difficult to schedule and poorly articulated. I have to admit, it’s easier for me to both meet their demands (my academic schedule has flexibility) and to “game” their system since I have a Ph.D. and a close working relationship with the professors who’ve supervised most of these social workers through their own education. It doesn’t mean that I don’t keenly feel that we need to better deploy the resources and manage the system than simply throwing more underpaid social workers out to interview families without any clear goals.
LikeLike
Are you sure they don’t have defined goals?
Wouldn’t the plan for Ian look different from the plan for a child who was living in squalor, with uneducated parents, no books in the home, tv always on Fox, and child told to play either outside or in their bedroom with the door shut? That child might need more help at school, and the plan could not assume parental support which would then need to be made up by services at school.
LikeLike
The worst is that this is only the beginning. Oh, maybe not another inspection, but the tug-of-war will continue. Worse, you’ll probably have to stay on their case once he begins to get services.
A little human dignity would be nice, no?
LikeLike
Early intervention
The general consensus now is that children with any sort of learning disability or special needs generally benefit from services as early as possible.
LikeLike
I guess I also wonder whether as educated, middle-class people, we think we shouldn’t be subjected to the kind of scrutiny that “those people” undergo because of our privilege.
The reality is that a lot of learning problems and special education issues can be viewed in light of the home. Children who aren’t read to are likely to have reading deficits. Children who aren’t talked to or who live in homes with a lot of chaos often have language deficits. Children with emotional problems often live in chaotic, dysfuncational homes. These problems are often the result of child abuse and neglect, which the school and the state has a responsibility to assess.
The strategy for responding to these issues also involves how much support exists in the home.
Why ask for information multiiple times? People change their stories, the information has been written by someone else, people sometimes will say things they don’t write down. When many of your clients are illiterate, don’t speak English, or have little education, the information on written forms is often inaccurate or incomplete. Therefore, asking the same questions on the forms has some purpose.
LikeLike
Dan, I agree. In fact, my next post is along those lines. As a middle class person, I am insulted by the scrunity by the state. That’s why so many middle class parents are also rebelling against state mandated testing. We’re not used to being evaluated and probed. Less fortunate families are already used to this level of scrunity, inspection, and paternalism. To get food stamps, they have to attend classes on nutrition. To receive WIC, they must report to social services about their progress with their children and watch videos on parenting. If the state gives you something, then you have endure a lecture along with it? Doesn’t seem right. The puritanical streak in American political culture runs deep.
I’m not sure that there is that much thought put into the redundant bureaucracy that I’ve faced. The system is designed to slow down providing expensive services for the kids. It has been patched together, responding to many legal cases, rather than intelligently designed to provide the correct services as quickly as possible.
What’s good for the goose… If I’m put off by the lectures and sneaky inspections, then I believe that no one should have to deal with it. If there is no compelling evidence of abuse or neglect, then social workers should not be at our homes. They should not begin by suspecting parents of evil.
LikeLike
Laura, I spent a number of years representing poor people with AIDS. While middle-class people were worried about reporting their HIV status and concerned about privacy, poor clients often had a very different perpsective.
To them, their lives (and HIV status) were already part of the public reporting and thus were less concerned about privacy. Their housing was dependent on being HIV positive, their medical care was dependent on being HIV positive, their legal services were depenednt on being HIV positive. They had already lost anonymity, so couldn’t really understand why middle-class people were so concerned about privacy.
LikeLike
Laura, I have to say that I am extremely put off by your attitude towards this inspection. Angered, even. I’ve been trying to think about why. I’m not a social worker. I don’t have any personal experience here other than that I had one evaluation of my son done (for possible speech delays). (He was borderline but did not qualify for services.)
Talking it over with some friends, I think the answer is this. You don’t accept my assumption that there are some things we go through in order to promote the public health. I think that I would be thrilled to undergo an inspection by a state-appointed social worker because I would know that this meant that all families seeking services would have a visit, and perhaps problems that were not easily identified in a doctor’s or psychologist’s office could be identified by a trained social worker.
I think that the decision (by a social worker) not to make a home visit is too easily influenced by biases about social class. If you’ll forgive my language, the education level of parents means shit when it comes to predicting abuse or neglectful conditions. I think it’s easier for middle- to upper-class parents to hide neglectful or abusive behavior because of assumptions that smart, rich people just do not do that sort of thing.
I’ve thought of you as sympathetic to security moms (I’m too busy right now to look back through archives to double-check). Well, I see domestic abuse/neglect as another kind of terrorism, or maybe it’s better to say at a similar level of importance as terrorism. If we are all willing to undergo restrictions (patriot act, homeland security procedures in airports) in the name of preventing terrorism, then we should also be willing to undergo similar procedures in the name of protecting the public health, our children, our families.
LikeLike
Sorry to anger you, Wendy, but on these matters, I side with the libertarians. I don’t think that we should have to undergo unneccesary inspections by social workers looking for child abuse when no obvious signs have been shown. The restrictions on our freedom to prevent terrorism ought to be minimal.
LikeLike
Dan says, “The reality is that a lot of learning problems and special education issues can be viewed in light of the home.” — uhh, proof, Dan? Can you really validate that? Yes, low SES kids arrive at school years having fewer words in their active mastery vocabulary that higher SES kids, and that’s a problem, but it isn’t a SpEd problem.
Reading delays are one of two things:
1. a manifestation of a neurological malfunction (auditory processing disorder, specific reading disability or one of the other associated conditions.
2. educational institutions that do not know how to teach reading.(see Children of the Code –(http://www.childrenofthecode.org/cotcintro.htm)
Oh, wait, this isn’t my soapbox. I find Wendy’s attitude–that the state should have all-points access to our lives–chilling. I don’t see how a late-talking child is “a public health issue”.
Would Wendy be in favor of mandatory weekly urine testing for fertile age women, to make sure that those that might be pregnant aren’t using drugs? How would that be different from her attitude of welcoming state inspections of her home?
Personally, I find parents who (for example) refuse to vaccinate irritating at best — they are willing to ride on my vaccinations and my childrens’ vaccinations to avoid lethal diseases — but I am glad to live in a society that protects their freedom to make bad decisions.
Ooops. Off the soapbox again.
LikeLike