Marc Parent worked for four years as a caseworker for Emergency Children's Services in New York, acting as the final protector of children from abusive parents, as "the one on the front line--the last hope for a kid in trouble." His job was to make house calls and decide if a child needed to be removed at once. He has selected eight cases illustrating the extreme pressures of the work and indicating why it is that the system so often fails in its mission. He recounts unsparingly how three years into his job he made a fatal mistake, failing to recognize the plight of a little boy who later died of starvation. This compelling account is an important documenting of the weaknesses of the child support system.


From Publishers Weekly
In this outstanding work of social commentary, Parent describes the harrowing conditions he worked under and the brutalization he witnessed during the four years he was employed as a caseworker by New York City's Emergency Children's Services. His job was to respond in the night to calls made at those hours regarding children in life-threatening situations. He would then visit their homes and decide whether the children should be removed. Inadequately trained and without sufficient supervision, he and his co-workers were forced to balance dangerous situations against taking often unwilling children from their homes into tenuous foster-care arrangements. Among other horrendous encounters during his tenure, Parent dealt with an eight-year-old with venereal disease and a mother who threw her child out the window. Believing that child abuse can happen in rural as well as urban areas, Parent convincingly argues for public scrutiny of child welfare agencies as well as a societal commitment to protecting children. Author tour. Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Parent, an advocate for child protection, has written a poignant account of his four years as a caseworker for New York City's Child Welfare Administration. This book reflects his belief that our society should not abandon powerless children and that small things can make a positive difference in a deprived child's life. Working the graveyard shift and often having to remove abused children from their homes in the middle of the night, Parent learned firsthand of the trauma in these children's lives. Perhaps the most important aspect of his book is his ability to show the children's emotions by placing the reader "inside" their heads. Also valuable is the insight into the weaknesses of the bureaucratic system of child protection, where poorly trained young caseworkers find themselves working in often violent and overwhelming situations. A personal rather than a scholarly work, this will be of interest to concerned lay readers as well as those working with children.-?Cynthia D. Bertelsen, Virginia Polytechnic Institute Lib., Blacksburg, Va.Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, Kathryn Harrison
... has an immediacy that makes it memorable ... The only weapon we have against failing our children is consciousness ... Turning Stones is an admirable step toward that consciousness.


From Booklist
They hit the headlines only when they make a horrendous mistake, but, away from the media spotlight, caseworkers who strive to protect the nation's children do heroic work. A bucolic small-town childhood and a degree from the University of Wisconsin did little to prepare Parent for late-shift duty at New York City's Children's Emergency Services unit, a 17-employee office responsible for all 5 boroughs' children from 4 p.m. until 8 a.m. weekdays and all day on weekends and holidays. Parent powerfully recounts the stories of some of the frightened kids and overwhelmed families he tried to help and traces the gnarled complexities of their problems. In four years as a field worker, Parent dealt with new problems every night. Examining his own behavior (and the reasons he failed one dying infant), Parent reminds us that--important as it is to study and address the root causes of child abuse--it is essential to intervene in time to save individual children's lives. Mary Carroll


From Kirkus Reviews
At once heart-wrenching and heart-lifting is this record of four years that the author spent riding to the rescue of abused and neglected children. Parent was an Emergency Children's Service worker in New York City's child welfare system, one of the men and women who on nights and weekends investigate calls about children in danger. Parent (yes, he took a lot of flack about his name) came to public prominence when a baby died after he and another worker had visited a family in a mice- and drug-infested building and missed identifying the child as at ``imminent risk,'' that is, in immediate danger of death or serious injury. Official blame was placed elsewhere, but Parent agonized over the judgment for weeks. This compelling book is the result of his self-scrutiny. It includes what the author considers the most tragic and dramatic of the hundreds of cases he encountered. Here is the story of a mother who, anticipating Armageddon, urged her five children to jump out a 23rd-storey window; two leaped before help arrived. Another woman, convinced that she was hexed and seeing blood on the walls and broken glass in the food, had barricaded herself and her hungry children inside their apartment. In another horror story, a nine-year-old had beaten his five-year- old cousin to death. Amid the sad tales are often humorous sketches of Parent's colleagues and telling vignettes of the primitive working conditions--among other things, no place for children removed from their homes late at night to sleep except a straight chair. In the long anecdote that provides the title for the book, Parent comes to believe that even in cases where child welfare workers can do little, the work provides ``an opportunity to touch a life at a critical moment and make it better.'' Riveting stories, tuned to the headlines, that also defend the much maligned caseworkers who must make snap judgments under often bizarre circumstances in the field. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Book Description
Why does an infant die of malnutrition? Why does an eight-year-old hold a knife to his brother's throat? Or a mother push her cherished daughter twenty-three floors to her death? Marc Parent, a city caseworker, searched the streets--and his heart--for the answers, and shares them in this powerful, vivid, beautifully written book.

WITH A NEW AFTERWORD BY THE AUTHOR


From the Inside Flap
Why does an infant die of malnutrition? Why does an eight-year-old hold a knife to his brother's throat? Or a mother push her cherished daughter twenty-three floors to her death? Marc Parent, a city caseworker, searched the streets--and his heart--for the answers, and shares them in this powerful, vivid, beautifully written book.

WITH A NEW AFTERWORD BY THE AUTHOR


From the Back Cover
"A revelatory and affirmative work, a grace note played against the darkest passages of family life."
--Newsday

"AN ABSORBING PIECE OF NARRATIVE NONFICTION . . . A rare glimpse of what it is like to man these front lines of the war on child abuse--and what it does to a person's soul . . . Devastating . . . Mesmerizing."
--Los Angeles Times

"Riveting . . . Combines humor and pathos, horror and joy . . . This book is not the observation of a journalist. This comes straight from the heart."
--Detroit Free Press

"Turning Stones is by turns discomforting, and painful, comical and hopeful. Marc Parent's unblinking honesty made me wince. His deft storytelling made me sit up and listen. And his love for the children--and yes, their parents--made me want to turn stones as well."
--Alex Kotlowitz
Author of There Are No Children Here

ANNOTATION

For four years, Mark Parent was a respected caseworker in New York City's Emergency Children's Services, a city agency created to cope with cases of suspected and actual abuse reported during the evening and nighttime hours. In his young charges Parent saw day-to-day bravery as well as some of the strangest twists the human soul can take. Shocking, illuminating, funny, lyrical, and above all searchingly honest, this book takes readers into a world that many would rather not contemplate.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

An 8-year old boy holding a knife to his younger brother's throat. Three small children who watch their older sister jump out of a twenty-third story window, following their mother's orders. Two boys whose mother believes they are all victims of a hex laid on them by her ex-husband. An eleven-year-old boy at a fashionable Manhattan address whose mother is so drunk she can't keep her robe closed when child welfare workers come to visit. These are the heroes of Marc Parent's Turning Stones, small and unsuspecting victims of a society, and of a bureaucracy, that do not know what to do with them. For three years, Marc Parent was a respected caseworker in New York City's Emergency Children's Services, a city agency created to investigate cases of abused children during the evening and nighttime hours. Parent applied himself to his work with devotion, and in his tiny charges he saw day-to-day bravery as well as some of the strangest twists the human soul can suffer. Eventually, however, Parent discovered what a thin line separates any of us from tragedy, especially when children are involved. Faced with the horror of a child's death he ultimately, inspiringly, rediscovers the feeling of making a difference in our world - if only by turning one stone at a time. There are no prescriptions or policies here, only the lives of human beings in a fearsome world, told with vividness, humor, honesty, and deep sympathy.

FROM THE CRITICS

Newsweek

"A revelatory and affirmative work, a grace note played against the darkest passages of family life."

Kirkus Reviews

At once heart-wrenching and heart-lifting is this record of four years that the author spent riding to the rescue of abused and neglected children.

Parent was an Emergency Children's Service worker in New York City's child welfare system, one of the men and women who on nights and weekends investigate calls about children in danger. Parent (yes, he took a lot of flack about his name) came to public prominence when a baby died after he and another worker had visited a family in a mice- and drug-infested building and missed identifying the child as at "imminent risk," that is, in immediate danger of death or serious injury. Official blame was placed elsewhere, but Parent agonized over the judgment for weeks. This compelling book is the result of his self-scrutiny. It includes what the author considers the most tragic and dramatic of the hundreds of cases he encountered. Here is the story of a mother who, anticipating Armageddon, urged her five children to jump out a 23rd-storey window; two leaped before help arrived. Another woman, convinced that she was hexed and seeing blood on the walls and broken glass in the food, had barricaded herself and her hungry children inside their apartment. In another horror story, a nine-year-old had beaten his five-year- old cousin to death. Amid the sad tales are often humorous sketches of Parent's colleagues and telling vignettes of the primitive working conditions—among other things, no place for children removed from their homes late at night to sleep except a straight chair. In the long anecdote that provides the title for the book, Parent comes to believe that even in cases where child welfare workers can do little, the work provides "an opportunity to touch a life at a critical moment and make it better."

Riveting stories, tuned to the headlines, that also defend the much maligned caseworkers who must make snap judgments under often bizarre circumstances in the field.