Foster kids do best when placed with extended family

Jane

A couple who adopted nine boys through the Connecticut Department of Children and Families (DFC) has been charged with sexually assaulting two of the boys, reports The Hartford Courant. George Harasz and Doug Wirth had been certified as foster parents, and a private adoption agency had recommended the adoptive placements to DCF. The two men also ran a puppy breeding business in the basement of their home and put the boys to work in it. In 2009, Harasz was cited for cruelty to animals when an animal control officer found 50 dogs in the basement. “Police said the room had inadequate ventilation and the smell of urine and feces was overwhelming.”*

This is just one of many stories of children being abused, even murdered, in foster or adoptive homes that appear daily in the media across the United States.  

Back in the 1970’s as a young lawyer in Portland, Oregon I represented parents whose children had been taken from them by the state Children's Services Division (CSD).  I soon recognized that, for the most part, these parents were not bad people; they had done things, often because of poverty, and, in some cases, ignorance, that the state and the courts considered neglectful. As a birth mother, I had a lot of sympathy for these parents.

Oregon followed what I came to call the “washing machine” philosophy of child welfare: place children in a “neutral” setting, far from their homes, where they would be “cleansed” from the taint of their biological family. CSD workers occasionally allowed parents to visit their children under supervision, but often cut off visits at the insistence of the foster parents. They complained that children cried when their parents left and were hard to settle down, demonstrating, according to CSD workers, that the parents were a negative influence. CSD workers also routinely dismissed parents’ complaints that their children were mistreated in foster care.

TWISTED GOALS OF CHILD WELFARE

Several years later I went to work for the State of Oregon as a budget analyst, and, as chance would have it, my first assignment was CSD. I learned that a driving force behind child welfare policy was the political power of those who provided “services” to children. Foster parent associations, group home operators, residential agencies--all had tremendous clout with legislators. When CSD proposed reducing out of home care due to budget constraints, providers showed up in full force, filling legislators’ heads with horror stories about children murdered by their parents. CSD administrators supported the providers, aware that currying favor with providers was necessary to stay in their job. Legislators responded by reducing funds for in-home services and increasing them for out-of-home services. (No child was going to die on their watch.) A sad note: years later I read that the directors of two prominent residential agencies sexually molesting children over a lengthy period of time.

I came to realize that to some extent CSD was not in the business of protecting children in their homes but in the business of supplying providers with children to keep providers in business. Child welfare operated much like our infant adoption system which has been twisted from its original purpose of finding families for children into finding children for would-be parents.

Although my career took me in a different direction, I kept an eye out for news stories about child welfare. In 1999, I was visiting my daughter who lived in Seattle at the time and happened upon an article about the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform (NCCPR) and its efforts at reforming the system that so appalled me years earlier. NCCPR is a non-profit, tax exempt corporation whose directors read like a who’s who of child welfare experts. Here’s NCCPR’s “Quick Read” on child welfare. Things haven’t changed much since the 1970's:

“The failings of America’s child welfare system can be summed up by the very rationalization often used to justify the way it works, an approach that can be boiled down to ‘take the child and run.’ You’ve probably heard it many times: Sure adults may suffer when their children are needlessly taken away, but it is claimed, we have to ‘err on the side of the child.’ In fact, there probably is no phrase in the child welfare lexicon that has done more harm to children than ‘err on the side of the child.’

"When a child is needlessly thrown into foster care, he loses not only mom and dad but often brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, grandparents, teachers, friends and classmates. For a young enough child, it can be an experience akin to kidnapping. Other children feel they must have done something terribly wrong and now they are being punished. One recent study of foster care ‘alumni’ found they had twice the rate of post-traumatic stress disorder of Gulf War veterans and only 20 percent could be said to be ‘doing well.’

..."A second study, of 15,000 cases, is even more devastating. That study found that even maltreated children left in their own homes with little or no help fared better, on average, than comparably-maltreated children placed in foster care.

..."All that harm can occur even when the foster home is a good one. The majority are but the rate of abuse in foster care is far higher than generally realized and far higher than in the general population. …That same alumni study found that one-third of foster children said they’d been abused by a foster parent or another adult in a foster home.

…"Furthermore, the more a foster care system is overwhelmed with children who don’t need to be there, the less safe it becomes, as agencies are tempted to overcrowd foster homes and lower standards for foster parents. …

"But that isn’t even the worst of it. Everyone knows how badly caseworkers are overwhelmed. They often make bad decisions in both directions—leaving some children in dangerous homes, even as more children are taken from homes that are safe or could be made safe with the right kind of services. The more that workers are overwhelmed with children who don’t need to be in foster care, the less time they have to find children in real danger so they make even more mistakes in both directions. That is almost always the real explanation for the horror-story cases that make headlines.  

… "The only [child welfare] systems that succeed emphasize family preservation.”**

KIDS DO BEST WITH EXTENDED FAMILY
Besides overusing foster care, Oregon’s CSD preferred to place children with strangers rather than relatives---although relatives were willing and able to care for the children or adopt them if their parents had had their rights terminated. More of the washing-machine philosophy. The rational was that “the apple doesn’t fall from the tree” and relatives can’t be trusted not to return children to their bad parents the minute child welfare worker turns her back. When the state did place children with relatives, it paid them at lower rates than it paid stranger foster parents. 

Eventually legislators had heard enough complaints about child welfare and passed a law in 2007 requiring CSD (now Department of Human Services, DHS) to make diligent efforts to find a child’s relatives and give preference to relatives for placement. The underlying rational is that "kinship care is as old as humankind, and family connections are truly deep in our DNA," wrote Lois Ann Day, director of Child Welfare program, in The Oregonian. Earlier in the year, we reported on this kind of placement in St. Louis that found that older kids (ten and up), kids with special needs, and hard-to-place family groups are likely to fare best when they are placed with extended family members. ***

The success rate for these kinds of in-family adoptions is huge. Relatives are likelier than strangers to be unfazed by a kid's special needs, such as being bipolar, because it's probable that the disorder runs in the family and the great aunt considering the adoption is already familiar with the condition because Cousin George has it too. Consequently, the family not only knows how to deal with it, but is willing to. Cultural connections and religion are likely to stay the same. You don't need to be a genius to understand that people do best, and are the most comfortable, when they grow up among their own kind and can recognize physical traits and talents in the people around them.

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 *Connecticut couple charged with sex assaults of 9 kids

**The NCCPR Quick Read: Family Preservation is SAFER than Foster Care

Child welfare: Family connections more stable for displaced kids
***Homes for foster children: Find the real family first
Desperate moves of parents who lose custody