Child protection often plays out as a series of systematic decisions: someone decides whether to investigate an incident, whether to remove a child—and, if so, where to place them—and how to achieve permanency. These choices are consequential, and getting them right is critically important for the safety of children.
But children don’t experience their protection as a series of decisions: they experience a series of transitions. Responsibility changes hands among adults, while the child’s relationships, routines, and basic expectations all change. While adults may experience these moments as administrative milestones, children experience them as profound disruptions to their daily lives and sense of stability.
When children experience trauma, they need intentional, sustained support to adapt to that adversity. Research shows that children typically do better when they experience continuity, predictable routines, developmentally appropriate transparency, appropriate agency, and stable relationships. In the urgency to make decisions, these protective factors may be compromised or disregarded as of secondary importance. For children—who experience life and time differently than the adults making decisions that affect them—it’s not just the decisions that matter, but the transitions between them.
For many children, one of the most profound transitions is forever linked to a car ride. When children need to be taken into protective custody, they are often transported from the home they’ve known to their next destination in a caseworker’s car. This single car ride may separate a child from parents, siblings, school, pets, neighbors, and familiar routines. For infants and young children, it is experienced as an abrupt disruption of their primary relationship attachments. For some children, it’s their first experience being removed from home. For others, it’s unfortunately all too familiar. At the end of the ride, another transition awaits as responsibility shifts to a foster caregiver, who is often a stranger to the child.
By design, as a temporary intervention, foster care involves many transitions. Children may experience placement changes, school changes, visits with parents, reunification, adoption, or guardianship. Each transition is an opportunity either to preserve continuity or introduce additional disruption. Rather than a single event, children often experience child protection as a succession of transitions that together shape how they understand the experience.
Each of these transitions presents the opportunity to either bolster resilience or undermine a child’s sense of safety and stability.
Transitions matter. Excellence in child protection requires a commitment to strong, supported, and developmentally appropriate transitions. This means asking:
- How can this transition preserve relationships that are meaningful to the child?
- How can it maintain as much continuity for the child as is safe and appropriate?
- How can we help the child understand what’s happening and reduce uncertainty?
- How can we give this child agency?
These questions won’t eliminate the upheaval that comes with child protection, but they can help ensure that children experience as little disruption and loss as is safe and appropriate. The quality of child protection should be judged not only by the decisions it makes, but by how children experience the transitions between those decisions.