Caregivers
When a child has to be taken from their home, CYF's goal is to place them with a relative before considering any other form of care.
There are 3434 approved carers, 1801 of whom are whānau caregivers and 1633 non-family caregivers.
Mani Dunlop spoke with a family who are whānau caregivers to eight children, about what it's like dealing with CYF.
Dealing with CYF a daily nightmare - caregiver
Demanding and a daily nightmare. That's how one caregiver describes working with Child Youth and Family (CYF).
The woman has eight children in her house, ranging in age from one to 16. All up she has cared for 10.
She's one of 3434 approved caregivers nationwide, 1801 of whom are whānau carers, meaning they're related to the child in some way.
The woman, who can not be named to protect the children's identities, has been working with CYF for several years and was fostered as a child herself.
She and her husband had taken in nieces and nephews who could no longer live with their parents, and she said it was initially "a bit of a nightmare".
"I found I was doing all the work. I felt like I was a counsellor (and) a mum, trying to snap them out of their behaviours," she said.
Working with CYF had always been a battle for the whānau, with the woman feeling she had to drop everything and run if the agency told her to.
"I was doing a lot of that, going backwards and forwards, and I felt like I had to do it because I felt I was lucky enough to get the three kids that I did get," she said.
"I didn't really know the ins and outs of it, so I just wanted to obey them and follow their rules."
Need-to-know basis
Several years on and she was still trying to understand how the agency worked; the only constant was that it was never straightforward
The situation was compounded by CYF only ever letting families know what they felt they needed to know.
"Sometimes they could probably help the family and the ones that are in the firing line to understand a little bit more but they don't," the woman said.
CYF aims to place children with whānau, rather than putting them in any other kind of care, with the family member having to be approved by the agency.
One front-line social worker in South Auckland said it was an important part of the job that was not always easy.
"We have a responsibility to keep children with family because it's not about them being with people who they know," she said.
"It's about their own identity and that value that the whānau caregiver will place in maintaining that child, keeping that child safe, giving that child all the possibilities to thrive and to have a good future."
Chief social worker Paul Nixon said he accepted the frustrations of whānau and said CYF was looking at freeing up social workers so they could have stronger relationships with families.
"One of the things that's very clear when we speak to our clients, our customers, is they want a consistent relationship with a social worker, whether they're children or whether they're caregivers or whether they're parents," Mr Nixon said.
"So that's clearly an aspiration of ours, is to make a social worker available who can build a consistent, reliable relationship with them."
That's welcome news for the whānau raising eight children who said that, despite the difficulties with CYF, it was worth it to know their tamariki had a safe and secure roof over their heads.