Calculating the price of foster-care panic – in children’s lives and health

Researchers estimate that the foster-care panic in Santa Clara County will lead to anywhere from four to 12 foreseeable premature deaths, and a whole lot of serious illness, that would not have happened had the children been left in their own homes.

Their methodology can be applied to any foster-care panic anywhere, and to states that regularly tear apart families at rates far above the national average. 

KEY POINTS

 ● Researchers have examined scores of studies following millions of foster children around the world, showing the inherent harm of foster care placement. They were able to estimate the percentage of children who will have worse outcomes – including premature death – because they were taken from their families and placed in foster care. They were able to show that the harm to health and the premature deaths are directly attributable to the separation from their families, not anything their families supposedly did to the children beforehand. 

● Then they applied the findings to what is, proportionately, the nation’s worst foster-care panic, the one in Santa Clara County, Calif.  In that county, over the past two years, entries into foster care over the course of a year nearly tripled. Over that time, 399 more children were torn from their families than would have been taken had there been no panic. They applied their findings about harm to health and premature death to those 399 children. 

● Their conclusion: 42 children will suffer long-term illness and/or disability that they would not have suffered had they remained in their own homes. 

● Between four and 12 children will suffer premature death that would not have happened had they remained in their own homes. The researchers emphasize that the death estimate is conservative. 

● Their report, sent to the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors on Saturday, includes seven specific recommendations for making all vulnerable children in the county safer.

 Among the most popular pages on NCCPR’s website is one that summarizes some of the mass of evidence comparing what happens to children in foster care when compared to comparably-maltreated children left in their own homes. Over and over, the studies find that in typical cases,  the foster children do worse. 

Most recently updated last year, the page includes this prediction: 

Perhaps most intriguing, these studies suggest it actually may be possible to quantify the harm of a foster-care panic. 

Thanks to these studies, we now have an estimate of how much worse foster children do on key outcomes compared with comparably-maltreated children left in their own homes.  It’s also usually possible to calculate how many more children are taken away during a foster-care panic. 

So it should be possible to estimate how many more children will wind up under arrest, how many more will become pregnant and how many more will be jobless as a result of a foster-care panic. 

Now it’s time to update that page again. Because two researchers, Kevin Campbell and Elizabeth Wendell, founders of Pale Blue. and Family Seeing have done almost exactly that. 

Using some studies cited in NCCPR’s paper, and many more from all over the world, they not only calculated how many more children would suffer, they also calculated how much worse the suffering would be, depending on the type of placement.  The results should come as no surprise.

Source: Kevin Campbell and Elizabeth Wendel, "Health and Mortality Gradient: 
Child Welfare Placement Type, 30-Year Morbidity Trajectory, and Premature Mortality Risk"

For children left in their own homes, seven to 24 percent were likely to suffer adverse health outcomes.  In kinship foster care, by far the least harmful, that figure rose to 18 to 36 percent. For family foster care with strangers, even when it was a single, stable placement, the figure for adverse health outcomes rose to more than half  - 55%, and the proportion who would die prematurely was more than double the proportion among children left in their own homes.  By the time you get to the worst placement of all, institutionalization, a staggering 88% are likely to experience adverse health outcomes – and they are anywhere from four to 5.5 times more likely to die prematurely.  

Again, this is not because of anything that happened before placement – it’s because of placement itself.  So, as the authors emphasize, these are foreseeable outcomes. 

How, then does this apply to Santa Clara County? In the wake of two high-profile child abuse deaths, the Vice President of the County Board of Supervisors, Sylvia Arenas, and the San Jose Mercury News, in particular, reporter Julia Prodis Sulek, rushed to falsely scapegoat efforts to keep families together. That set off what is, proportionately, the worst foster-care panic I’ve seen anywhere in America in at least 40 years. 

In fact, of course, there were tragic child abuse deaths in Santa Clara County long before the county started trying to do more to keep families together.  There was another tragedy in April, - the death of Jaxon Juarez, long after the county was tearing apart families at a fanatical rate. Indeed, the panic may have made the latest tragedy more likely by overloading workers, so they have less time to investigate any case thoroughly. None of that has stopped Arenas or Sulek from continuing to throw gasoline on the fire. Neither has the massive study of more than 3.4 million case records and more than 24,000 child abuse deaths which found that increasing entries into foster care does nothing to decrease such deaths. 

What all this research tells us is that increasing foster care does nothing to save lives, but can, in itself, lead to premature deaths. 

Arenas seems to relish governance by humiliation and demanding that everyone else “reflect” on their behavior. Sulek seems to relish watching Arenas do it. In one story, Sulek wrote about how 

Last summer, after an epic takedown of [top county child welfare officials] during a board meeting, Supervisor Arenas demanded they each write a “letter of reflection” about their leadership failures that led to the child safety crisis.  

But now, Campbell and Wendel have applied their methodology to the Silicon Valley Foster Care Panic.

 Their conclusion: 

Among the 399 children taken because of the panic, 42 will suffer “limiting long-term illness and/or disability” that they would not have suffered had they been left in their own homes. Between four and 12 will die prematurely, who would not have died prematurely had they remained in their own homes. 

The death estimate is conservative. It assumes all 399 additional foster children stayed in the first placement. For each subsequent move, the risk increases.

Source: Kevin Campbell and Elizabeth Wendel, "Santa Clara County Foster Care Surge, 2024-2026

One doesn’t have to stop at Santa Clara County. One can apply the same methodology to the foster-care panic set off by the Miami Herald in 2014, by the Minnesota Star Tribune that same year, by assorted politicians in Maine in 2018 and New Mexico in 2023 (and probably again right now) and so many others over the years, and calculate how much more illness and how many premature deaths those panics caused. 

The methodology also can be applied to states that, even in the absence of a panic, regularly take away children at a rate far above the national average, states like worst-in-the-nation West Virginia, for example.

In Santa Clara County, there’s still a chance to stop the panic and reverse course – perhaps saving some lives, both short-term, by giving workers more time to find children in real danger, and long-term, by preventing some foreseeable premature deaths caused by the trauma of placement. 

That requires three steps: 

● First, of course, stop taking all those children needlessly. But also: 

● Do an in-depth review of every case in which a child is now in foster care, and see how many can be quickly reunited. Then, provide intensive support for the reunited family, because even a short-term removal does children long-term damage, and it takes intensive help to mitigate that harm. 

● Where placement genuinely is essential, make intensive efforts to place children with extended family members and genuinely support those family members. Kinship foster care placements typically are vastly less harmful than any form of stranger-care placement.  As we discussed in our first post about Santa Clara County, had Jaxon Juarez’s grandfather gotten that kind of support, Jaxon might be alive today. 

Now that the price of panic can be so clearly quantified, perhaps the supervisors and the reporters and editors at the Mercury News, and their counterparts across the country, will reflect on that.