Sylvia Mignon: Child Welfare in the United States: Challenges, Policy, and Practice

In Child Welfare in the United States, Sylvia Mignon attempts to present the child welfare system as it was in the past, as it is currently, and as it might be with future innovations. The result of such broad ambition, as one might expect, is that Mignon is forced to rely on statistics and numbers to paint the picture of a system made up of children and their families. She combats what could read as a dry recitation of dismal numbers, however, with various text-boxes of personalized anecdotes and narrative detours on almost every other page. These opportunities to take a break from the research and engage with the specifics of a certain case, a personal experience, or a single program allow the reader the mental space to humanize the statistics. …