Child welfare solutions: Paging Captain Obvious

Two recent child welfare columns in the Chronicle of Social Change (the Fox News of child welfare) this publication make me wonder if Captain Obvious has taken early retirement.

1. IF THAT’S HOW THEY TREAT FOSTER PARENTS…

Jim Kenny has posted a series of columns on the appalling problem of false allegations of child abuse and lack of due process – for foster parents.

He makes some good points. So good that I’ve taken the liberty of reprinting most of three paragraphs from one of his columns, exactly as they appeared originally – except for the deletion of a single word:

In an understandable attempt to protect a child from abuse and neglect, our child welfare systems have placed foster parents in a difficult position. To encourage reporting of child endangerment, anonymity is granted to the accuser. Minimal standards of proof are accepted. Hearsay is allowed. Often, what the case manager believes to be credible is enough to initiate some action. The child may be removed …

 As the most vulnerable party, the child’s well-being is the number one priority. Yet the child’s needs are not necessarily contrary to those of the foster parent. In fact, an unexamined precipitous separation of the child from his foster family may be harmful. In many ways, the child’s best interests and those of the foster family are tied together. …

 Foster parents deserve better treatment than the substantiation of unproven charges based upon hearsay. We can still protect the child while providing fosterparents with all the rights that our legal system guarantees.

When foster parents tell me about their ill-treatment I always say the same thing: The system really needs you. If that’s how they treat you, how do you think they treat the birth parents?

Think about that long enough, and you might start to do what former fosterparent Mary Callahan did – start questioning what child welfare agencies told her about the children they were placing with her.

And then you might want to reconsider whether all those children really need to be taken away at all. You might even consider reforms like providing all parents with “all the rights that our legal system guarantees.” Because it turns out, that’s the best way to protect children.

 2. AS LONG AS YOU’VE GOT $31 MILLION FOR CHILD CARE…

Marie Cohen has a different complaint. She thinks this is the wrong way to spend $31 million:

The $31 million budget proposal would address the issue [of foster parents finding child care for their foster children] by setting aside money for six-month emergency child care vouchers for foster parents caring for children ages 0 to 3 … Navigators would help foster parents negotiate the state’s byzantine subsidized child care system and help them avoid childcare gaps.

 Ridiculous! says Cohen. Instead, spend the money paying foster parents to stay home with the children.

You don’t suppose, if we all think really hard, we can come up with a third option for spending that $31 million in child care funds – such as helping birth parents find child care? You know, for those cases where the charge that led to removal of the children was “lack of supervision.”  Or the cases in which parents stayed home with the kids, lost their jobs, got evicted and lost their children for lack of housing? Or the cases in which all the stress of finding child care and housing and food and medical care and on and on and on led parents to lash out at their children?

And if you’re wondering if such an obvious alternative could be sufficiently “evidence-based,” consider this study of the amazing transformative power of something even simpler: cash. [UPDATE: And this study, too.]

Please, Captain Obvious, come back soon.

Alexis Hutchinson, foster care and the perils of “deployment”

    By now the story of U.S. Army Specialist Alexis Hutchinson has made it all the way up the media food chain. Ordered to Afghanistan, she initially planned to leave her infant son with her mother. But her mother already had three sick relatives to care for and found she couldn't cope with an infant as well.

Hutchinson's lawyer said the Army's response was, in effect: Too bad. You're going to Afghanistan, and if you can't find anything else, your son is going to foster care. So Hutchinson didn't show up for deployment. She was arrested and, for two days, the boy was in foster care. He's now reportedly with his grandmother for the time being.

    This is not the first case raising similar issues. But it may be the first since the explosion in social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook. And that may explain how, in about 72 hours, the story made it from the alternative Inter Press Service, which first broke it, to the Associated Press, to more than 400 news outlets around the world.

    It is encouraging to read how many people understand how enormously harmful it is to an infant to throw him into foster care under such circumstances. (I particularly like the tweet from someone who suggested the Army have a "take your child to war" day.) People get that mom did not brutalize this child or starve him or torture him; she simply didn't have someone to take care of him.

    But the only thing unusual about this case is the fact that this single mom's job was about to be moved to Afghanistan. There are, in fact, thousands of children of civilian parents trapped in foster care when their parents didn't abuse them or neglect them either. Many of these parents, mostly single mothers – have what amounts to the same problem as Spec. Hutchinson.

    These are the mothers who are told: "We don't care if your child is sick, show up for work or you're fired." Mom knows if she's fired, she won't be able to pay the rent. She'll be homeless and child protective services can take the child because of lack of housing. So mom shows up for work. Someone calls child protective services. The child is taken away on a "lack of supervision" charge.

    Indeed, in many communities, "lack of supervision" is the single largest category for "substantiated" allegations of maltreatment. Sometimes, of course, that's entirely the parent's fault – maybe she left a child home alone to party, or do drugs, or all those other stereotypes that leap to mind about parents who lose their children to foster care.

But often, it's a mother whose child was sick, or who couldn't afford child care, or who couldn't get such care because she works odd hours. They may be mothers like Lillian Lucas-Dixon, whose story was discussed in previous posts to this Blog. Her seven-year-old son was held in foster care for months because she had to leave him home alone for an hour to get to her job before an adult sibling could get there to babysit. "My choice was, do I lose my job or stay home with my son?" Lucas-Dixon, told the New York Daily News.

Typically, we hear about "lack of supervision" cases only when the worst happens, and only rarely are the stories told with the sensitivity shown in this New York Times story.

    So I hope those who understand how wrong it was to subject Spec. Hutchinson's infant son to foster care for even two days will think about how many thousands of other children are trapped in foster care right now, while their mothers are "deployed" to their jobs here at home.