You're known as an advocate for mothers and children, and especially for the most vulnerable among these. What led you to that area?

When I think of my younger days, younger days meaning all the way midway through college, I didn't really have any interest in children at all. I mean none. I was a freshman in Santa Cruz. I just didn't get it then, but through a variety of experiences in college, I was exposed to children-- very young children who were pre-school children, with their mothers. It was either in migrant labor camps or in battered women's shelters when I was working with pre-school age children, but it was in the context of the family. I became absolutely intrigued with very young kids and their moms. I totally shifted to this area and I still don't have the kind of enthusiasm I would like for all age groups of children (laughter).

Social work is more about a whole group of people who call themselves the profession caring about other people who they normally don't know. The social work profession is very much about a group of people who have a like consciousness or conscience. It is about serving others that are completely unknown and often very distant from themselves either by class, by race, by nationality, or gender or what have you. So part of what intrigued me about watching very young children's moral development is how do they get from the very primitive state of an infant, which is very much simply about a relationship between me and my mother and what about my needs are, to a place where it is not about my needs but it's about other's needs and other's needs go further and further pushing those boundaries. And so that development of moral development in young children has a lot of parallels to my interest in the whole field of social work. When you put the cognitive, physical and moral development all together in those early years, it is just this ripe time for exploration and curiosity that I just can't get enough of.

When you see various types of child abuse, do you ever say that I just don't want to deal with this ever again? It is just too painful?

Sure I do in lots of different ways, but that is part of the benefit of this job, which allows me to move from topic to topic. For example, years ago I studied child sexual abuse, and you know generally you don't study sexual abuse anymore. Now I am more interested in child neglect for a variety of reasons, but I don't imagine that will stay forever. When you get tired of something, you do something else. That is the whole idea. It's a good way of coping and the field is so huge that there is plenty to do. It is not as though it is a very small narrow field with only a few things that need to be studied.

Do students ever come in with a lot of preconceived notions of how they will change the world?

There is often a popular way of interpreting the world. That is the problem. I run into it among the students, but I run into it in the profession more than anywhere else. It is the profession that gets caught in that trap, because of the latest fad that comes along. Family conferences are the things today, or community-based decision making or neighborhood-based services, without a scratch of evidence that there will be any benefit. I like to encourage students to think about this differently, and to really analyze it critically.

Everyone has been becoming more comfortable with using information and managing volumes of information and trying to critically examine information, because we now are deluged with so many information from so many sources that we all have to be skeptical about what we have learned. So that has changed culturally and I think that has been a benefit to the profession, a benefit to student body.

I know you said you one of the things you enjoy about your job is being a teacher, and you have obviously been a mentor to many of our students. How would you describe your roles as teacher and mentor?

I think with masters students one of the things I attempt to do, besides teach, is bring my daily life experiences into the classroom so that they can understand my job. When I am standing up there, they are hearing information, they are participating with me in an intellectual endeavor. However, they can see that I don't just walk into school at 10:10 and start giving information and walk away at 12 and that is the sum total of it. Instead, I bring into the classroom the anecdote from what happened yesterday when I met with the legislature, or the anecdote of what happened the day before when I met with a state official and how the state official did or did not use information for making a good policy decision, or an anecdote from a meeting with a child welfare manager of a local agency who is trying to figure out a very sticky problem of how to manage scarce resources with a larger than life population. And how to distribute those resources equitably based on upon who might benefit most from the resources and who might benefit least.

I think having them hear that also explains why I am not as available as I would like to be at school. I am often out of the building working with life-- with staff, managers, and state official. I try to make what we talk about in the classroom real in the policy environment. I get students to brainstorm together about what would be a better way to design a particular policy around kinship care. Then I can not only take their ideas, which are very informative, come back the next week, and say that, at the kinship care taskforce last week, while we were developing new kinship care policy, these are some of the conundrums that we faced and these are some of the challenges that we were grappling with. What do you think that this group should do? And, so they've come in as active participants with me in what I am doing.

How does the work you do with the policy makers in California and the US influence what you teach? How does it effect your ideas of the role of a social worker? How do you balance the idealism and pragmatism?

First of all, I try to give students as many examples of policy makers who are really good policy makers, who are really inspirational, who care about the same things as we do. You can see them try over and over again, year after year, to present a platform to the legislature that is just good and clean and wholesome and right and true. It is helpful for them to see that there are people like that working out there and that they can be those people. They can support those people they can work for those people. It is not just about the evil and the sarcasm, there are good and effective people out there.

This year in February the Legislature sponsored a joint hearing on reforming foster care which was a great opportunity for my students to actually go to Sacramento. They spent a whole morning, got credit for doing this if they could work it in their schedule, and listened to 4 hours worth of hearings. I was a presenter so they got some data from me. They then could come back and talk about their impressions and I couldn't have set it up more beautifully myself. There were the true, good, solid and just legislator and another who was your worst nightmare. They were both wonderfully vocal and they came across exactly as the true essence of who they were. So, students could come back and say I had such horrible feelings about X, but then Y gave me such inspiration, and then we had to grapple with well why does Y do her job every day. How does she get up every morning and continue to fight the good fight right? And, if you participate in the policy making process you don't always have to work with X you can work with Y and you can work with X, but that isn't the sum total of it, it is bigger than that.

How do you work with all the many different doctoral students, coming from many diverse academic, social, and professional background? How do you help prepare them for academic careers?

Well, first of all, they all bring so much to me, from their experiences. Many doctoral students come from years in the field and have so much to teach me over and over again because my work in the field is from a distance. I have the perspective of an academic though I am probably in the field a lot compared to others in academia. But from the standpoint of a professional, I am nowhere near the field. Nor have I ever been. They bring so much to me about keeping my reality base grounded about what practice is and how you conduct a study in a real practice environment.

What to we have to offer to a prospective student who has been working in the field for many years? What do you have to offer them?

It is a question again of match. We have a lot to offer if you are interested in some of the things we do here. When you are a professional and you decide to leave that field and area, in order to become an academic and move in an academic world, it means that you are leaving something behind. It means that you are taking something on. And, you can't just keep the old banner of what you were and move to a different building. It means that you really have to do something differently. You bring with you a tremendous wealth of knowledge, but the role of an academic is different so you have to be open to learning a whole new variety of skills, a whole new way of going about spending your day while you are here. You don't have a case load, but you do have to manage your time-- in a very different way.

If I were going to change jobs right know and become a child welfare director or line staff member, I would expect there would be opportunities in my weekly work to infuse the things that I did or overlay the things I did with the knowledge and the skills that I would bring with me as an academic. But I wouldn't anticipate using those skills on a regular daily or hourly basis. I would expect that I would have to be trained and learn a whole variety of things that I might not even be comfortable with.

What do you think about the social work profession over the next decade, I know our Dean has thought that there will be a lot of changes in social work and he sees that the profession could be quite different. What do you think about this?

I think it is going to be a field in flux. Tremendous flux for the next 10 years, meaning it will put social workers in an awkward position of being very flexible. Many social workers I know like their comfort zone of the things that are known to them and have easy discomfort with the things that are unknown. In a period of flux when policies are changing, programs are changing, and funding streams are changing, it requires tremendous flexibility and tremendous willingness to go into uncharted territory. I think that is going to be a real challenge for many people who have been typically proud of this field. Its going to demand people who are willing to jump in and go places that make them very nervous, doing new techniques with families, techniques that have never been tried before, working with different families they never thought they would work with, working in different venues and across disciplines such as medical doctors, the corps, psychologists, nurses. They know they are bringing something unique to the cross disciplinary interaction.

Do you think the world is a harsher or crueler place today than it was 20 or 30 years ago?

I think family problems are more intense, they are more complicated. Rarely does a family show up just because of child maltreatment. The family instead is also involved in the criminal justice system or in drug or alcohol abuse; they may have mental health problems or domestic violence going on, or history of intergenerational abuse. You bring all of this to the table with a big family with lots of people and it means that you have to do some very creative work.

We sometimes need to think in terms of offering sustained services, not for everybody and not even for most people. But there is a very small group of people who have very complicated situations and who need extra help. Legislators often don't want to make long term commitments. The only long term commitment we have in the US is education from ages five to eighteen.

What would you say today to someone who is a junior or senior in high school or college, maybe someone who has been in the humanities, and says " I think that maybe social work might be for me". What would you say to that person? Is it a good idea to go into social work today?

I think social work is a wonderful field to go into, so I would jump at the chance to say go into it. But it wouldn't be so much my assessment of the field as much as my assessment of a person. For them to do their own self assessment of who they are and what they would bring to the profession, I would hope that people would be attracted to the field who obviously care about other people and want to do something for their community or for somebody else's community, it doesn't really matter. Every student who has ever walked through this door has always brought their heart to social work. But the self assessment I would ask the students to think about in their interest is whether or not they would also bring their head to social work. That's probably part of what makes Berkeley stand out somewhat from other schools. We are not only trying to nurture people's gift of helping, their heart and humanity, but we are really trying to help students do it with a critical eye.

Information on Professor Berrick can be found at the following link:
http://socialwelfare.berkeley.edu/faculty/berrick.htm