So, you think being a banker or real estate professional is tough right now? Oh, boo-hoo. Take comfort in knowing that you could have grown up to become a government child protection agency bureaucrat.

Such a descent into bureaucratic hell has no good side, beyond the health insurance imported from Sweden that is available to government employees. The child protection game is a waiting game; No news is good news and bad news is often a horrific death of a child at the hand of a crazy family member about whom you already knew too much, but chose not to intervene.

Your staff is a bedraggled assortment of professionals and paraprofessionals and 17 different classifications of social worker mystery – some of whom will make “home visits” to counsel or evaluate or ignore the crazy boyfriend sulking in the back room, generating ever-stronger hostility toward kids who are not his own – or to whom he feels no affection or responsibility, even if they are his own.

The evidence and the evaluations and the reports generated (or not) by your staff are often a hideous mess; the social worker work and sociology classes don’t necessarily teach your munchkins corporate organizational tricks.

And then, of course, there are the unions. Your team – even the professionals and managers—are often proud members of some hostile labor union, which is inclined toward work rules that might work for coal miners or truck drivers, but probably not for child protection employees who need to be flexible and motivated in a way that tenured sinecures don’t produce.

And finally, when the nightmare unfolds, when the dead body is uncovered and the politicians point their bony fingers directly at you, the journalists will pretend that your particular child protection agency is defective in a way unknown to modern man; that if only the agency had better leadership, or a bigger budget, then all would be well.

Not Alone

And so it is with the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families, which is going through what most government watchers call “turmoil,” with the social workers mad at the “embattled” commissioner (all DCF commissioners are “embattled”; it goes with the territory); and the politicians nervous about the commissioner; and the Supreme Judicial Court slapping around the agency for removing a kid from a weird mom, without sufficient evidence that she was really, really weird.

The possibilities are numerous and showy. The commissioner could be dumped; a federal judge could be appointed to “oversee” the department. (This is a favorite among politicians; the judge orders the budget to be increased and then it’s not the legislature’s fault.). Or, of course, the unions could be placated; the commissioner could get a public relations makeover; and nothing much might change at all.

However it turns out, the important strategy is to ignore the street theater and recognize that child protection agencies are a messy, ticking time bomb – not much different in Massachusetts than in a dozen or so other states.

Even as we speak, Wisconsin is absorbing a package of legislation intended to improve child welfare and protection services, after a series of embarrassing newspaper stories suggested all was not well. And at this very moment, Texas is shrugging at statistics that indicate almost half of the state’s kids killed by abuse had already been investigated by Texas Child Protective Services.

This summer, the Prince Williams County social services bosses in Virginia promised to do much, much better, after a horrific death of a young girl whose mother did everything but put up billboards identifying herself as crazy and dangerous – not that the case workers paid any attention at all.

Also this summer, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors promised to investigate very, very hard to determine what in the world is going on with child protective services, after the deaths of three children from families already known to the social workers. One of the girls was decapitated by her crazy mother.

Last year, the Massachusetts Legislature approved an Office of the Child Advocate, to provide advocacy and oversight. That will make everything all better. Nothing could be easier than fine-tuning child protection services. Just look around.