By
Richard Wexler, Executive Director, National Coalition for Child Protection
Reform
KEY POINTS
● Yes, there is a
disconnect between the number of foster parents and the number of foster
children. But that’s not because we have too few foster parents. It’s because
we have too many foster children.
● The REAL foster care
housing crisis is the fact that study after study has found that 30 percent of
America’s foster children could be home right now if their parents simply had
decent housing. Fix that foster care housing crisis and the so-called shortage of
foster parents disappears.
● The REAL foster care
housing crisis is part of the biggest problem in American child welfare – the confusion
of poverty with “neglect” and the racial bias that goes with it.
● The so-called Chronicle of Social Change uses moderate
rhetoric to hide an extremist agenda. Part of that agenda is trying to
undermine efforts to curb the use of the worst form of “care” – group homes and
institutions. Obviously, if you want to stop a reform movement aiming to curb
the use of group homes and institutions, you have to hype an artificial
“shortage” of family foster homes.
THE REAL FOSTER CARE HOUSING CRISIS
1. Take more
children from their families.
It is because of this extremist agenda, and its suppression
of meaningful dissent, that we refer to the Chronicle
as the Fox News of child welfare. And it
is point #2, opposing efforts to curb the use of group homes and institutions, that is behind the Chronicle’s new
“report.”
Indeed, the real purpose of the report is summed up in this
paragraph, discussing proposed legislation to very slightly curb federal
funding for group homes:
in the
short term, limitations on congregate care placements might require some states
to rely more heavily on their available foster homes. And as this research
shows, many states are challenged as it is when it comes to foster home
capacity.
In fact, as is discussed below, the “challenge” is of these
states’ own making, and is easily fixable.
Indeed, promoting the use of group homes and institutions is the only reason to issue a “report” that is nothing but a rehash of what everybody
already knows: There are more foster children than there are family foster
homes for them. But the Chronicle almost completely ignores the real reason for this: It’s
not because there are too few foster parents. It’s because there are too many
foster children.
WHAT
THE CHRONICLE WON’T TELL YOU …
To understand the Chronicle’s
phony version of the foster care housing crisis, it’s important to understand
the real foster care housing crisis.
The real crisis is the one that ensnared Prince Leonard and
his family.
After Leonard
was injured at work,[*]
he and his wife and their six children no longer could afford to live in their
apartment complex. They lived in a shelter for awhile, but it wasn’t safe
enough for the children.
So the family moved into the only “gated community” they
could afford – a 12 x 25 foot storage unit. Leonard built a loft area and
shelves. The unit had electricity, heat
and air conditioning. The family lived
there, and the children did well, for three years. Then someone called Child
Protective Services. CPS removed the children on the spot – without lifting a
finger to help the family find housing.
A CPS spokeswoman insisted the children were not torn from
their parents because of poverty.
Rather, she said, they were taken because they were living in an “unsafe
living environment.” And, in a comment Anatole
France surely would have cherished, the spokeswoman added: “You could live
in a mansion and be in an unsafe living environment.”
Publicity – not CPS – ultimately led
to this family being reunited.
The only thing that separates this case from tens of
thousands of others is that publicity.
The biggest single problem in American child welfare is the confusion
of poverty with neglect – a problem compounded by the racial
bias that permeates child welfare systems.
And one of the biggest components of the confusion of
poverty with neglect is the penchant of American child welfare to take away
children because parents lack decent housing.
The
problem goes back decades …
· Families struggling to keep
their children out of foster care were stymied by two major problems:
homelessness and low public assistance grants, according to two New York City
studies.[1]
● Courts in New York City and Illinois found that
families are repeatedly kept apart solely because they lack decent housing.[2]
● In California, homeless children were given emergency
shelter only on condition that they be separated from their parents, until a
successful lawsuit put an end to the practice.[3]
· In Washington D.C., where the
foster care system was run for several years by the federal courts, the first
receiver named by the court to run the agency found
that between one-third and one-half of D.C.'s foster children could be returned
to their parents immediately -- if they just had a decent place to live.
…and it
hasn’t stopped
·Three
separate studies since 1996 have found that 30 percent of America’s foster
children could be safely in their own homes right now, if their birth parents
had safe, affordable housing.[4]
· A fourth study found that “in
terms of reunification, even substance abuse is not as important a factor as
income or housing in determining whether children will remain with their
families.”[5]
Compounding the problem: Child welfare workers sometimes are
in denial about the importance of providing concrete help to families. A study of cases in Milwaukee County, Wis.
found that housing problems were a key cause of removal and a key barrier to
reunification. But the researchers write
that while birth parents “see housing as a major source of concern …child
welfare workers are less attentive to this concern.”
They continue:
“Perhaps
child welfare workers in Milwaukee are more focused on parental functioning and
less attentive to concrete needs such as housing because of the principles
guiding agency practice and the workers’ education and training. Alternatively workers … may tend to ignore
housing as a problem rather than deal with the cognitive dissonance caused by
the recognition that they cannot help their clients with this important need.”[6]
Child welfare agencies even admit it (when it will get them money)
Many people are familiar with federal “Section 8” vouchers,
federal funds provided to impoverished families by local governments to help
those families find housing they can afford.
There is a small, special program within Section 8 called
the “Family
Unification Program.” As the name
implies, these vouchers are reserved for cases in which, as the Department of
Housing and Urban Development explains
lack
of adequate housing is a primary factor in:
a. The
imminent placement of the family’s child or children in out-of-home care, or
b. The
delay in the discharge of the child or children to the family from out-of-home
care.
But to apply for these vouchers state or local child welfare
agencies have to admit that such cases exist – notwithstanding their pious
pronouncements to press and public that they would never even think of tearing
apart a family because of housing problems.
Housing is just one part of the larger picture discussed
earlier: the confusion
of poverty with neglect. Another example is when children are taken because lack of adequate child care leads to “lack of supervision”
charges.
Indeed, the connection between poverty
and what child welfare calls “neglect” is so profound that one recent study
found that simply
raising the minimum wage by $1 an hour would reduce the rate of what those
systems label “neglect” by 10 percent.
Many more studies have drawn similar conclusions.
Another
study found that deducting an additional $100 a month from a parent’s
income adds six months to the average length of time her child will be trapped
in foster care. (Ironically, this study looked specifically at a particularly
obscene form of income deduction: forcing poor people to
help pay for the foster care.)
HOW IT HURTS CHILDREN
The consequences have been devastating for children.
· 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. He is cut loose from
everyone loving and familiar. For a
young enough child it’s an experience akin to a kidnapping. Other children feel they must have done
something terribly wrong and now they are being punished. The emotional trauma can last a
lifetime.
So it’s no wonder that two massive studies
involving more than 15,000 typical
cases found that children left in their own homes fared better even than
comparably-maltreated children placed in foster care.
· That
harm occurs 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. Multiple studies have
found abuse in one-quarter to one-third of foster homes. The
rate of abuse in group homes and institutions is even worse.
· But
even that isn’t the worst of it. The
more that workers are overwhelmed with false allegations, trivial cases and
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 all directions. Overloading the system with children who don't need to be there also creates an
artificial “shortage” of foster homes.
None of this means no child ever should be taken from her or
his parents. But foster care is an
extremely toxic intervention that should be used sparingly and in small
doses. For decades America has
prescribed mega-doses of foster care.
THE
FALSE NARRATIVE THE CHRONICLE OFFERS
INSTEAD
The Chronicle
report amounts to a molehill of truth embellished by a mountain of
misdirection.
The molehill is this: 1. There are more foster children than
there are foster family homes. 2. The
number of children in foster care is likely to grow over the next few years.
But the reason there are more foster children than foster
parents is not that there is a “shortage” of foster parents. We do not have too few foster parents. Rather, we have too many foster
children. Get the children who don’t
need to be in foster care back home (such as the 30 percent who are there
because their parents don’t have decent housing) and there will be plenty of
room in good, safe foster homes for the children who really need them.
Or, to put it another way, fix the REAL foster care housing crisis
and the foster care housing crisis created by the system itself disappears.
Then there will be no need to do what the Chronicle wants most – stop the reform
movement that is closing more and more group homes and institutions – the very
worst form of substitute care.
The report is probably correct when it notes that the number
of children in foster care is likely to increase for the next few years. Child welfare systems say that’s because of
the “opioid epidemic.” But the opioid
epidemic is not what is causing foster care numbers to rise. Rather, child
welfare’s knee-jerk take-the-child-and-run response
to the opioid epidemic is causing foster care numbers to rise.
That’s because child welfare is a field with almost no
learning curve. It learned nothing from using the same failed response during
previous “drug plagues,” such as crack cocaine. And as usual, children suffer because
of the system’s take-the-child-and-run mentality.
University of Florida researchers studied
two groups of children born with cocaine in their systems; one group was placed
in foster care, another left with birth mothers able to care for them. After six months, the babies were tested using
all the usual measures of infant development: rolling over, sitting up,
reaching out. Typically, the children
left with their birth mothers did better.
For the foster children, the separation from their mothers was more
toxic than the cocaine.
Similarly, consider what The New York Times found when it
looked at the best way to treat infants born with opioids in their systems.
According to the Times:
a
growing body of evidence suggests that what these babies need is what has been
taken away: a mother. Separating
newborns in withdrawal can slow the infants’ recovery, studies show, and
undermine an already fragile parenting relationship. When mothers are close at
hand, infants in withdrawal require less medication and fewer costly days in
intensive care.
“Mom
is a powerful treatment,” said Dr. Matthew Grossman, a pediatric hospitalist at
Yale-New Haven Children’s Hospital who has studied the care of opioid-dependent
babies.
It is extremely difficult to take a swing at so-called “bad
mothers” without the blow landing on their children. That doesn’t mean we can
simply leave children with hopelessly addicted parents. But it does mean that in most cases, drug
treatment for the mother is a better option than foster care for the
child.
Of course there are times when drug abuse by a parent does
require removing the child. But states and counties should be taking a long,
hard second look at all the other cases that don’t involve drug abuse, where
they have been rushing to tear apart families – such as those 30 percent of foster children who are trapped in foster
care now not because their parents are addicts but because their parents lack
decent housing.
And yes, it can be done. Instead of a panic-stricken race to
tear apart families, Connecticut is responding to the opioid epidemic by
bolstering home-based
drug treatment. Even in Ohio, which one story after another brands the
“epicenter” of the opioid epidemic, two counties have safely
reduced foster care. (One of them,
Montgomery County, did it by using a safe, proven approach that has been the
subject of a smear campaign led by, yes, the Chronicle of Social Change.)
Although it’s buried almost at the very end of the report,
even the Chronicle had to admit that
some of the increase in foster care is due to states taking away children
needlessly; they cited Arkansas. But that message is drowned out by the one about the artificial
“shortage” of foster homes.
WHY
CHILD SAVERS WON’T FACE UP TO POVERTY
The notion that poverty is confused with neglect is deeply
offensive to those in child welfare whose 19th century counterparts
proudly called themselves “child savers.”
So is the well-documented fact that the class bias that permeates the
system is compounded by racial bias.
Among other things, recognizing the role of poverty means less
prestige for child savers
Decades ago, Malcolm Bush explained why this happens in his
book, Families in Distress:
“The
recognition that the troubled family inhabits a context that is relevant to its
problems suggests the possibility that the solution involves some humble tasks
… This possibility is at odds with professional status. Professional status is
not necessary for humble tasks … Changing the psyche was a grand task, and while
the elaboration of theories past their practical benefit would not help
families in trouble, it would allow social workers to hold up their heads in
the professional meeting or the academic seminar.”[7]
Much more recently, Molly McGrath Tierney, former director
of the Baltimore City Department of Social Services, offered
a similar take.
Facing up to the confusion of poverty with neglect also
means America’s latter-day child savers would have to face up to the fact that
much of the “good” they’ve convinced themselves they are doing actually does
severe damage to children by consigning them needlessly to the chaos of foster
care.
And nowhere does the denial run deeper than at the so-called
Chronicle of Social Change.
MODERATE
RHETORIC HIDES AN EXTREMIST AGENDA
Part of the problem with the entire child welfare debate is
that everybody says the same things – but we all mean different things by those
same words.
No one ever says “Foster care should be the first resort of
the child welfare system” – everyone proclaims it should be the last resort.
Yet Alaska tears apart families at more
than quadruple the rate of Alabama, even when rates of child poverty are
factored in. (And it’s Alabama where
independent court monitors found that reforms emphasizing family preservation improved child safety)[†]
Similarly, nobody ever says “I’m so against prevention. If there’s one thing I hate it’s prevention.” But what constitutes prevention can
vary enormously – as can the amount people want to invest in it and the
priority it should receive.
So it’s easy to hide extremist positions behind moderate
rhetoric. Similarly, it’s easy to hide
the racial bias that permeates child welfare – indeed, many in the system hide
it from themselves.
That’s what Chronicle publisher
Daniel Heimpel does.
To understand the Chronicle
you need to understand Heimpel. And to
understand Heimpel you need to understand someone else: Elizabeth Bartholet.
Bartholet’s
ideas are so extreme that they include requiring every family with a young
child to open itself to mandatory government surveillance. (That’s not an
exaggeration. There’s a summary of her views in the
section of this post to the NCCPR Child Welfare Blog called “Harvard’s resident extremist” and
the details are in her own book, Nobody’s Children, pp. 170, 171).
Other
Bartholet proposals, if implemented, would lead to the removal of at least two
million children every year. (Again, see this post for how that figure
is calculated.)
Where Bartholet leads, Heimpel follows. When Bartholet and her allies gathered for a conference
attacking efforts to keep families together (with no dissenters invited), it
was Heimpel who wrote up the proceedings, in a paper called “Child Welfare’s
Parental Preference.”
Heimpel
also provided extensive help to Bartholet for a paper she wrote attacking
differential response, a safe, proven alternative to
child abuse investigations in many cases – the approach that is succeeding in
Montgomery County, Ohio. Then he promoted Bartholet’s findings in the Chronicle.
(He did disclose his role.)
He and
Bartholet co-authored an op-ed column attacking differential response in
Massachusetts – exploiting a horror story that never involved differential
response at all.
Bartholet
also is a leader of the movement that insists that child welfare is magically
exempt from the racial bias that permeates all other aspects of American life.
(For the record, study
after study shows it is not.)
Once again, where Bartholet leads, Heimpel
follows. He not only published but personally promoted a vicious column
that dredged up a pernicious racial stereotype. The
columnist in question, who has a history of denying the existence of racial
bias in child welfare and promoting institutionalization of children, was named
the Chronicle’s “blogger of the
year.”
And
just as Heimpel makes sure Chronicle
coverage is slanted against differential response, he biases it in favor of
“predictive analytics” a form of computerized racial profiling
embraced by Bartholet and other extremists.
CHRONICLE ♥ GROUP HOMES
Support for institutionalizing
children is another Chronicle bias.
The
research on this one is overwhelming: Group homes and institutions are the worst
form of “care” and there are far
better alternatives. So the only way
to justify “congregate care,” as it is called, is to claim that there is such a
dire “shortage” of foster homes that there is no other alternative.
As is
discussed in detail in this
post to the NCCPR Child Welfare Blog, the Chronicle has been doing this for years. The Chronicle runs story after
story bemoaning an effort by California to ever-so-slightly curb the misuse and
overuse of group homes and institutions. Yes, the stories include a quote
or two from a token supporter of the reforms. But that perspective is drowned
out by gushy prose about a particular group home or shelter that is now
supposedly at risk, and hand-wringing quotes from people who run the places and
their allies.
The
premise is always the same: Congregate care may not be the best option, the
story admits, but there simply are not enough foster homes. Group homes
and foster homes are presented as the only options. The idea that states could
solve the foster home “shortage” by taking fewer children needlessly is never mentioned.
Thus,
a typical Chronicle exercise in fear-mongering,
this one about one of the worst forms of institutionalization, first-stop
parking place “shelters,” is headlined “California Time Limits 30-Day
Shelters for Foster Youth in Midst of ‘Epic Crisis’ in Foster Parent
Recruitment.” That is, of course, also the
theme of the “Foster Care Housing Crisis” report.
Readers
dependent on Chronicle “news” stories would never know
that California tears apart families at
nearly double the rate of Illinois, where independent court-appointed monitors
have found that child safety improved. They would never know that Los Angeles
County takes away children at well over
twice the rate of New York City and more than triple the rate of metropolitan
Chicago.
Obviously,
if you want to stop a reform movement aiming to curb the use of group homes and
institutions, you have to hype an artificial “shortage” of foster homes.
YES, FOSTER CARE IS BROKEN
In his
most recent annual
report, Heimpel declares that part of his mission is to change the
fact that in the wake of a high-profile tragedy “people start to believe that
foster care is broken …”
It’s
certainly true that people often draw false conclusions from high-profile
tragedies – and, as noted earlier, Heimpel and Bartholet have encouraged that
in their own writing.
But
while most people who work in the child welfare system, including Heimpel, mean
well, the fact is the foster care system is
broken. We’ve already noted the studies showing that foster care is worse
than leaving children in their own homes in typical child welfare cases, and
even in many cases involving children born with cocaine in their systems. Another major study found that the system
churns out walking wounded four
times out of five.
In
spite of all that, sometimes conditions in a home are so bad that foster care
really is the least detrimental alternative. But it
takes an act of astonishing willful blindness to look at the American foster
care system and suggest that it is not broken.
Foster
care is broken. And we can’t fix it by
funneling more children into it.
[*]
Throughout this report we link to source material wherever possible. When
material is not available online, we provide information about the source in an
endnote.
[1]. Studies cited in Karen Benker
and James Rempel, "Inexcusable Harm: the Effect of Institutionalization on
Young Foster Children in New York City," City Health Report, (New York: Public Interest Health Consortium
for New York City) May, 1989.
● The REAL foster care
housing crisis is the fact that study after study has found that 30 percent of
America’s foster children could be home right now if their parents simply had
decent housing. Fix that foster care housing crisis and the so-called shortage of
foster parents disappears.
● The REAL foster care
housing crisis is part of the biggest problem in American child welfare – the confusion
of poverty with “neglect” and the racial bias that goes with it.
● The so-called Chronicle of Social Change uses moderate
rhetoric to hide an extremist agenda. Part of that agenda is trying to
undermine efforts to curb the use of the worst form of “care” – group homes and
institutions. Obviously, if you want to stop a reform movement aiming to curb
the use of group homes and institutions, you have to hype an artificial
“shortage” of family foster homes.
in the short term, limitations on congregate care placements might require some states to rely more heavily on their available foster homes. And as this research shows, many states are challenged as it is when it comes to foster home capacity.
Compounding the problem: Child welfare workers sometimes are
in denial about the importance of providing concrete help to families. A study of cases in Milwaukee County, Wis.
found that housing problems were a key cause of removal and a key barrier to
reunification. But the researchers write
that while birth parents “see housing as a major source of concern …child
welfare workers are less attentive to this concern.”
“Perhaps child welfare workers in Milwaukee are more focused on parental functioning and less attentive to concrete needs such as housing because of the principles guiding agency practice and the workers’ education and training. Alternatively workers … may tend to ignore housing as a problem rather than deal with the cognitive dissonance caused by the recognition that they cannot help their clients with this important need.”[6]
lack of adequate housing is a primary factor in:
a. The imminent placement of the family’s child or children in out-of-home care, or
b. The delay in the discharge of the child or children to the family from out-of-home care.
Indeed, the connection between poverty and what child welfare calls “neglect” is so profound that one recent study found that simply raising the minimum wage by $1 an hour would reduce the rate of what those systems label “neglect” by 10 percent. Many more studies have drawn similar conclusions.
The consequences have been devastating for children.
But the reason there are more foster children than foster
parents is not that there is a “shortage” of foster parents. We do not have too few foster parents. Rather, we have too many foster
children. Get the children who don’t
need to be in foster care back home (such as the 30 percent who are there
because their parents don’t have decent housing) and there will be plenty of
room in good, safe foster homes for the children who really need them.
Or, to put it another way, fix the REAL foster care housing crisis
and the foster care housing crisis created by the system itself disappears.
a growing body of evidence suggests that what these babies need is what has been taken away: a mother. Separating newborns in withdrawal can slow the infants’ recovery, studies show, and undermine an already fragile parenting relationship. When mothers are close at hand, infants in withdrawal require less medication and fewer costly days in intensive care.
“Mom is a powerful treatment,” said Dr. Matthew Grossman, a pediatric hospitalist at Yale-New Haven Children’s Hospital who has studied the care of opioid-dependent babies.
Where Bartholet leads, Heimpel follows. When Bartholet and her allies gathered for a conference attacking efforts to keep families together (with no dissenters invited), it was Heimpel who wrote up the proceedings, in a paper called “Child Welfare’s Parental Preference.”
He and Bartholet co-authored an op-ed column attacking differential response in Massachusetts – exploiting a horror story that never involved differential response at all.
Once again, where Bartholet leads, Heimpel follows. He not only published but personally promoted a vicious column that dredged up a pernicious racial stereotype. The columnist in question, who has a history of denying the existence of racial bias in child welfare and promoting institutionalization of children, was named the Chronicle’s “blogger of the year.”
[*]
Throughout this report we link to source material wherever possible. When
material is not available online, we provide information about the source in an
endnote.
[†]
A member of NCCPR’s volunteer board of directors was co-counsel for plaintiffs
in the class-action lawsuit that led to the reforms.
[1]. Studies cited in Karen Benker
and James Rempel, "Inexcusable Harm: the Effect of Institutionalization on
Young Foster Children in New York City," City Health Report, (New York: Public Interest Health Consortium
for New York City) May, 1989.
[2] New York: Decision of Justice Elliott Wilk, Cosentino
v. Perales, 43236-85, New York State Supreme Court, New York County, April
27, 1988. Illinois: Rob Karwath,
"DCFS Hit on Family Separation," Chicago Tribune, Jan. 19,
1990, Sec. 2, p.2. See also: Juanita Poe
and Peter Kendall, "Cases of Neglect May be only Poverty in
Disguise," Chicago Tribune, Dec. 24, 1995, p.1.
[3] 11. Memorandum of Points and Authorities in
Support of Motion for Preliminary Injunction, Hansen v. McMahon,
Superior Court, State of California, No.CA000974, April 22, 1986, p.1;
California Department of Social Services, All County Letter No. 86‑77
ordering an end to the practice.
[4] Deborah S, Harburger with Ruth Anne White,
“Reunifying Families, Cutting Costs: Housing – Child Welfare Partnerships for
Permanent Supportive Housing,” Child Welfare, Vol. LXXXIII, #5
Sept./Oct. 2004, p.501.
[5] Ruth Anne White and Debra Rog, “Introduction,” Child
Welfare, note 4, supra, p. 393.
[6] Mark E. Courtney,
et. al., “Housing Problems Experienced by Recipients of Child Welfare
Services,” Child Welfare, note 4 supra., p.417.
[7] Malcolm Bush, Families in Distress: Public, Private, and
Civic Responses (University of California Press, 1988).
