An Interview with Peder Sather Grantee Dr. Jill Duerr Berrick
By Ellie Andersen
The mission of the Peder Sather Grant is to support ongoing innovative research between faculty from UC Berkeley and from the consortium of eight participating Norwegian academic institutions. Dr. Jill Duerr Berrick is a six-time recipient of this prestigious grant. Her research focuses on child welfare and service systems across 193 countries, primarily in Norway and the U.S. Her work delves into the intersection of poverty, childhood development, parenting and the service systems designed to address family well-being. Her approach is grounded in the accounts of consumers or providers of service systems, and aims to establish how social problems and social service solutions impact family life. With more than 30 years of experience and research in the field of child welfare, her contributions to the field of child and family welfare and dedication to UC Berkeley have made her a foundational faculty member. Dr. Berrick is the co-founder of Berkeley Hope Scholars, a program supporting students at UC Berkeley who have experiences with the foster care system. She has also served as chair of the Committee on Undergraduate Scholarships, Honors, and Financial Aid and as chair of the Admissions, Enrollment, and Preparatory Education for the UC Berkeley campus, and is the current chair of the undergraduate major in the School of Social Welfare. We spoke with Dr. Berrick to learn more about her research and her work.
How did you get interested in children’s rights and state protections, and how have your interests within this field changed over time?
Jill Berrick: My interest in children’s protection goes way back to when I was an undergrad and shortly thereafter when I was doing work with intimate partner violence survivors. I was touched by the women’s experiences and was deeply affected by their children. I knew that the harms that were sometimes being done to kids at such an early age were preventable, if families could get the support they needed, which of course they did not. This got me thinking about how to support families early on and make sure that kids get a better start. Those early experiences oriented me toward child welfare, which is the only system we have in the U.S. to support families and children. I’ve been studying child welfare in the U.S. for over 30 years. About a decade ago, I became interested in international comparisons. How do other countries take care of children who have been harmed by parents? I also became interested in whether or not we have legal structures in place that allow children to have a right to a healthy or safe childhood. My interests have evolved over time, but they all come back to the same central questions about children’s safety, and their rights to a safe childhood.
Much of your research on foster care and child welfare has focused on Norway and the U.S. until recently; what are some of the cultural attitudes that were revealed by your research in each place?
Jill Berrick: Norway and the U.S. are remarkably different countries with different histories, demographics, characteristics, and constitutional structures. One of the conclusions from the studies that have been funded by Peder Sather suggests much more ambivalence in the U.S. toward the notion of children’s rights. Children’s rights are complicated. At a surface level it is easy to agree that kids should have rights. But children’s rights, how they should be articulated, and at what age children should have agency are difficult questions. Norwegians have a much clearer sense that children should have some rights, and that their wants and needs should be considered. In the U.S., we generally find that a large portion of the adult population is oriented toward a parents’ rights perspective, assuring that parents retain decision-making authority over children. We can see these ideas playing out in recent polarizing discourse in the U.S. regarding whether or not parents should have a say in what children read, or the kind of health care children can receive. In Norway, parents would likely give children more agency to make personal choices. These issues animate ideas about child protection as well. For example, in our research we’ve found that American adults would be more willing to allow parents the freedom to parent their child without restraint, even if their parenting harmed the child, compared to Norwegian adults.
In regard to your research on child welfare systems in other countries, how might increased wealth inequality have an impact on child welfare needs? As your research has progressed, have there been any notable connections between increases in wealth inequality and need within child welfare systems?
Jill Berrick: There are dramatic differences in the ways that states attend to child protection and to the kids who need it. In the Global South, those differences are stark largely due to resource constraints, in addition to cultural differences and religious and political choices. We recently did a study looking at the constitutions of 193 countries across the world. Children and children’s rights are specifically mentioned in 92% of the constitutions; of these, about half of the constitutions include provisions to protect children against maltreatment, including in the Global North and the Global South. But in some countries, children’s rights to protection are articulated clearly, with an accountability mechanism for ensuring children’s protections; this is, in part, because some states have resources as well as the political will to create structures that serve the interests of children. In other countries, children’s rights are described in aspirational terms yet there is no identified strategy for their assurance. As wealth inequality widens between countries, we may see these differences sharpen. In countries that are struggling to ensure access to clean water, to reduce hunger, or to provide basic health services, child protection might not be the highest priority amongst these other pressing needs. The Nordic countries have the privileges of their resources as well as a history of social protection; they have a welfare state that has a relatively thick social safety net with largely destigmatized social services and family support. Of course, some children get hurt in spite of these provisions, but the framework of prevention is robust.
For countries with less comprehensive social welfare systems, what are the primary pathways for improving child welfare, such as through policy or through social work?
Jill Berrick: Much of what I have learned through international comparisons suggests that there are certain things policy makers do not have control over. There are much larger forces at play shaping culture than policy or policy makers. It is crucial to look at the more material aspects of countries that can be amplified or reduced to move the country in a positive direction for children. For example, we do not have a rich universal framework for services in the U.S. But we do have our version of a social safety net. It includes SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), the EITC (Earned Income Tax Credit), cash assistance programs, Medicaid for families, and the minimum wage. We now have a variety of studies that have shown through experimental design that if you increase the amount of any one of those pre-existing programs, we see reductions in child maltreatment. A very modest difference of less than 5% in a SNAP benefit has notable impacts on child maltreatment rates and foster care entries. We do not need a revolution or to become a Nordic country, but instead we need to figure out ways to increase the value of the pre-existing benefits in place. Recent conversations at the federal level to reduce Medicaid and SNAP are worrisome as reductions in these programs could have negative impacts on family life. On the other hand, substantial improvements in these programs would likely result in notable decreases in maltreatment. If we could figure out what we do well and do more of it, we would see substantial improvements for children.
I see that you have written or co-written over 121 articles and books on topics related to family poverty, child maltreatment, and child welfare, which of these was the most rewarding to work on for you?
Jill Berrick: The most fun and interesting to work on was my 2018 book The Impossible Imperative. It was the most fun because I have been teaching at Berkeley for over 30 years, and one of the classes I teach is for Master’s students who are preparing to become child welfare professionals. They are going to do this really hard work of knocking on doors and offering support and services at a time when families are at their lowest. It is a complicated and emotionally taxing job. Trying to support families and offer robust services, when there are not many robust services available, is difficult work. I have been teaching these students for decades. For The Impossible Imperative I reached out to my former students and asked if they wanted to join me in writing a book. I had several students write up cases they had worked in that were emblematic of the average day in the life of a child welfare worker. The situations social workers deal with are often highly ambiguous, and you have to make decisions in an information constrained environment. The book is designed to highlight the challenges of being a child welfare professional, and the ways that good professionals have to navigate very difficult circumstances, bureaucratic and risk averse systems, and a lack of resources. Professionals have to prioritize and make very principled decisions about family, safety, culture, etc. In each case the principles they are trying to prioritize often conflict with another highly prized principle. The book was fun because it was designed in collaboration with students, and it made the work come alive for current students and others in the field. It showcases why this field is unique and why you have to come into it with your eyes wide open and your heart ready to be full of love and maybe broken at the same time.
We want to thank Dr. Berrick for her time answering our questions, and wish her luck with the rest of her study. You can learn more about the research and findings conducted by Dr. Berrick and Professor Skivenes as part of their 2021 Peder Sather Grant in their article Parental Freedom in the Context of Risk to the Child: Citizens’ Views of Child Protection and the State in the US and Norway published in 2022. A full list of Dr. Berrick’s publications can be found here.