“The quality in youth care is deteriorating. Problems are getting bigger and there are more and more.” That reported News hour in May last year, but it might as well have been a text from decades ago. The problems in youth care were already major in the 1980s and the promises from politicians to solve them have hardly changed since then, according to research.
“It is always the same language. The grammar remains the same, only the vocabulary changes slightly,” says researcher Sharon Stellaard. For her PhD research at VU University Amsterdam, she delved into the history of youth care policy in the Netherlands. Boomerang policy, she calls the pattern she discovered. As a result, youth care hardly improves, if at all.
Deja vu op tv
The fact that the problems have been going on for decades and that the way in which they are discussed has hardly changed, as is evident from bills, among other things. The Youth Assistance Act of 1989 referred to a “cohesive offer tailored to the need”. In 2005, “an appropriate and coherent care offer” was the solution, in 2015 the law focused on “more effective help tailored to needs” and in 2020 “knowing the need” and “offer that matches the demand” were the answer to the problems.
News hour finds numerous TV fragments in the archive about the problems in youth care. For example, in a broadcast of Achter het Nieuws in 1987, a social worker says that cutbacks in youth care are causing problems. “As if you say to a child: you need a pair of new shoes, but it should not cost anything.”
Seventeen years later – in 2004 – Joke de Vries, then head of the Youth Care Inspectorate, tells the NOS Journaal in frustration about the organization of youth care: “It is of course crazy that so many social workers interfere with a family. That could be streamlined much better. become.”
Watch old TV fragments about (always the same) problems in youth care here:
The same problems in youth care for years
According to researcher Stellaard, these examples show that the reforms to improve youth care always come down to the same thing. She says it is astonishing that no new, effective solutions have been proposed in all those years. “These are images from before 2005. We’re almost in 2025 and we’re still having the same conversation.”
Long waiting lists
Another problem about which the alarm was already sounded in the last century is the enormous waiting lists. An employee of the crisis shelter in Rotterdam says in 1995 in the TweeVandaag program: “We are so often full. We receive 1500 registrations for the crisis shelter per year, but we can take in about 500 annually.”
‘Code Black’ is what youth protectors call the status of youth care in 2023. Due to a major shortage of youth protectors, children who need psychological help have to wait longer and longer. One of them is four-year-old Shane. He suffers from the eating disorder Arfid, which means he hardly eats on his own. He has been on the waiting list for specialized psychological help for more than a year. Mother Juanita Derksen feels powerless. “The longer you wait, the faster he goes backwards. Your back is against the wall.”
Paste plasters
Stellaard attributes the persistence of these kinds of problems to ‘sticking band-aids’: each new reform must solve the problems that the previous policy has caused. But that always fails. “The youth law of 2015, for example, focused more on light care to level off the heavy care. Now you see that the light help is precisely the problem: too much money is going to it and it is becoming unmanageable.”
“You see that happen repeatedly: our new solutions create new problems, but old problems also keep returning.”
She does not have a clear-cut solution, but she does advise the government to reflect on the policy of recent decades. “If you are critical of that, I think you would come to different insights.”
Closed youth care
New reforms have been negotiated since 2021, but municipalities, youth care, institutions and the ministry are unable to reach an agreement. The Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport recognizes the problems. In a response, State Secretary Maarten van Ooijen says that some intentions of the ministry have indeed remained virtually the same in recent years. “However, the context in which we make policy choices is different today. Some things we really do differently now and also better.”
The State Secretary cites closed youth care as an example. “For a long time it was customary to organize that care far away from society. Now we are moving towards small-scale, in the middle of society, as open as possible and as at home as possible.”
The State Secretary says that she will strive to reach a decision on the Reform Agenda this spring and that the Ministry would like to use Stellaard’s input in this regard. Read the entire response here.
