week 2 post 2

The use of storytelling and journalism can be beneficial for the use of culminating social change, particularly for children. Most people experience at least one adverse traumatic event (ACE) as a child which completely changes the way they perceive the world and their psychological needs. For some, this ace might be losing a loved one or a friend. For others, it can be dealing with the foster care system for the majority of their childhood, never really finding a nurturing place for their mind — the child welfare system swings on a pendulum between two ideologies. One being Family preservation and the other being child protection. This pendulum has continually swung back and forth since the early 1900s and has never fully reached either side of the pendulum. The issue with this system is that the continuation of children's relationships with a caregiver is essential to healthy psychological growth; however, the foster care system and adoption system typically does not do an excellent job of giving a child a stable home for an extended period of time; leaving these children stunted and held down by copious amounts of childhood trauma which drag into their adult life and hold them back from reaching their full potential. As this has been studied more, Congress has implemented its preference for adoption through financial incentives and mandates like ASFA. The main issue here lies in that people are not given the correct resources or money for these systems to be a quality solution. In order for this epidemic to be cured, the government must work on providing more funding and working on quality services rather than focusing on doing more with less. Implementing the use of psychological help in the foster care system is essential for multiple reasons. The main one being helping children see their personal destiny in life and the ability to see alternative options that they might not see without extra support. The unfortunate part of the system is that typically these children are stuck in foster care and enter adulthood through poverty, unable to get back on the right track because they were never given the correct support.

While this is very much a public policy issue, using storytelling and media is an essential part of moving this agenda in a positive direction. By using the stories of children who have persevered foster care, it is possible to incite empathy by creating a story where people can walk in the footsteps of the person and be sympathetic towards their position. The use of storytelling in an appropriate way will be useful to make the foster care issue an issue where people feel sympathy and see it as a valid issue. storytelling will help people identify with the feelings of others and it will help to get the trust of the listener.  It will help the most affluent people who do not know a thing about foster care, understand what it is like to walk through life in this complicated way. Then when that is combined with journalism, which is fact-based and solution-based, the facts will be able to verify the validity of the issue and continue to work for the betterment of this system and the children within it.