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To me, CYC and Social Work have long under-emphasized the complexity of what it means to care. We are good on examining our intentions (usually finding ourselves pure) and caring strategies. We are not so good at making good decisions, on deciding whether someone really needs our care, and we rarely systematically look at the consequences of our care. There is work on the sexy big issues, like racism, but not much work on the little decisions that add up to big problems.
There is yet another death of a child in care in B.C., and heads have already rolled, despite the reality that people who lost their jobs have very little to do with actual events. The Representative for Children and Youth, a CYC graduate, at the time I write this has not committed to doing a report or investigation. Prior to the death the Indigenous child was removed from the family and then sent back to the extended family by a delegated Indigenous agency.
Everyone claims to care about the child and be shocked by the tragedy, yet these events keep happening despite all the caring. Social Workers claim to care, CYC professionals claim to care more than anyone else, yet maybe we need less performative caring and more thinking about how bad decisions lead to big tragedies and to the smaller but still important everyday troubles encountered by children.
We are at a historical moment when the factors contribute to good or bad outcomes are increasingly known but also increasingly complex, perhaps too complex for individual professionals to manage, especially because we are not educating professionals to manage complexity. There are pilot projects out there that use artificial intelligence to supplement human decision-making, and it is likely that these will uncover the flawed decision-making used in much of professional practice and expose the random ways that care plans are designed and implemented.
I have written before in CYC-Online about the research with counselors that finds practitioners are overconfident about their own decision-making and prediction abilities. They have designed some nice ways to track one's own record and increasingly provide advice about how to avoid these errors. Not surprisingly, this turns out to be a very human problem, as numerous studies and books in recent years have documented. In Noise, Kahneman, Sibony, and Sunstein describe numerous examples of both noise and bias in our everyday decisions, including a surprisingly high error rate even in fingerprint analysis. We are often wrong, and we rarely acknowledge it. They also describe strategies for improving our decisions, and we rarely work think about these. We are overconfident.
Here are a few examples of some recommendations from researchers.
We can select better decision-makers. This is probably controversial in CYC, but there is plenty of evidence that smarter people make better decisions. Almost anyone can be taught to care, but not everyone should make decisions about other people's children.
For any important decisions, e.g., treatment plans, decisions about placement, advice to parents, diagnostics and assessments, and referrals, we should decide in advance what types of data are important and provide that data to independent observers who examine the data and make a recommendation independently from each other. The outcome will be a decision that reduces "noise."
We can use a Delphi procedure in which recommendations are made independently and anonymously by stakeholders, and then the results and the reasons for individual's decisions are provided in successive rounds and individuals are allowed to modify their own choices.
Before decisions are made, we must know the base rates relevant to our decisions, the proportion of youth actually helped and harmed by previous decisions, for example. We might want to collect data about our own past successes and failures.
We must learn to think about problems analytically, breaking them into smaller, subsidiary problems and to think through the consequences of each smaller problem.
The goal is 'perpetual beta,' committed to updating one's beliefs and self-improvement. 'What makes [superforecasters] so good is less who they are than what they do - the hard work of research, the careful thought and self-criticism, the gathering and synthesizing of other perspectives, the granular judgements and relentless updating' (Kahneman, Sibony, & Sunstein, 2021).
CYC is not the only profession with this problem; our allied professions suffer from the same inertia. Many people claim expertise about children and youth, without much evidence. Perhaps this is why many are disenchanted with experts and expertise. If supposedly educated people make decisions that lead to a child’s death, what is the use of that education?
Reference
Kahneman, D., Sibony, O., & Sunstein, C. R. (2021). Noise: a Flaw in Human Judgement. Little, Brown Spark.
