Decoupling Seattle Family Law and Divorce Blog

In the first two parts of this five-part series, I discussed 1) The fight between DSHS and Poca’s foster family; and 2) Some vital questions the media is mostly ignoring on this case.

Today, in part three, I explain why DSHS and the courts tend to prefer reunification with biological parents.

Nationwide statistics show that when children leave foster care, 54% are reunified with their parent or primary caretaker, 18% are adopted, and 11% go to live with another relative or guardian.

It can be hard to understand why the state often works so hard to reunify children with heavily damaged biological parents.  This is an incredibly difficult subject area, one that often places social workers and courts in the position of finding the least awful solution where no good solutions are available – in part because we as a society are willing to devote so few resources to help vulnerable children and their families.

Historically, children were placed in poor houses and orphanages when it was not possible or advisable for them to stay with their parents. In the last hundred years, the trend has been to place children instead with foster families, based on the belief that “children are better off, emotionally and psychologically, in a home environment, with someone filling the role of a parent.” Despite a few recent calls for a return to orphanages, most people agree that foster homes are, in general, a better solution.

One commentator explains:

While foster parents are encouraged to connect emotionally with the children in their care, foster families are not meant to be permanent replacements for biological families. In most cases, the ultimate goal is to reunite children with their biological families, as soon as the family is able and fit. This could be as short as a few days or as long as a few years.

Failing family reunification, the ultimate goal is to find adoptive parents who will take on all the emotional and legal responsibilities of birth parents. In the eyes of the law, adopting a child is pretty much the same thing as giving birth to them. Fostering a child, on the other hand, doesn’t give the foster parents any major authority over the child’s life.

On occasion, foster parents will eventually adopt foster children in their care, but more often, the foster home is a means of returning the child to his or her birth parents or a stop on the way to another home. Unfortunately, many children end up bouncing from foster home to foster home, never finding a permanent family. In this regard, the foster care system is clearly imperfect, since it often adds more instability to a child’s life.

The fundamental mission of the foster care system, then, is very simple. Actually putting it into action is another matter. Foster care involves a lot of hard work on the part of administrators, social workers, parents and, most importantly, foster children.

MIT economist Joseph Doyle notes:

“For decades, the issue of family preservation versus foster placement has been a thorny one. In the 1960s, the number of children in foster care increased from 200,000 to 600,000, and then fell back to 200,000 by 1980. Currently, more than 500,000 children are in care and we’re again seeing an emphasis on family preservation.”

A recent study by Doyle finds that states may be placing too many “marginal” children (that is, children in homes that have serious problems, but no instances of severe abuse or neglect) in foster care. Doyle’s study shows that a “marginal child placed in foster care is 10%-20% more likely to be arrested, 10-20% more likely to become pregnant as a teenager, and 10% less likely to be working when they become an adult than the marginal child who was not placed in foster care.” While this study deals with issues of removing children from their homes and placing them in foster care in the first place, the trend towards favoring letting children stay with their biological parents is clear.

A 2003 study summarizes recent trends towards reunification (before then pointing out strong negatives in reunification):

The presumptive course of action, then, was to promote reunification of children in foster care with their biological parents before considering an alternate permanent placement. This policy has largely been driven by philosophical beliefs that children are vulnerable to poor developmental outcomes when they have less contact with their biological families (Gelles, 1993; Maluccio, Abramczyk, & Thomlison, 1996). Furthermore, reunification efforts were hoped to diminish the threat of a generation of children growing up in foster care, experiencing instability and repeated losses in the form of multiple placement changes (Newton, Litrownik, & Landsverk, 2000).

In 1997 Bill Clinton signed the Adoption and Safe Families Act into law. AFSA “marked a fundamental change to child welfare thinking, shifting the emphasis towards children’s health and safety concerns and away from a policy of reuniting children with their birth parents without regard to prior abusiveness. As such, ASFA was considered the most sweeping change to the U.S. adoption and foster care system in some two decades.” The Act also:

“establishes a permanency planning hearing for children in care that occurs within 12 months of a child’s entry into care. At the hearing, there must be a determination of whether and when a child will be returned home, placed for adoption and a termination of parental rights petition will be filed, referred for legal guardianship, or another planned permanent living arrangement if the other options are not appropriate.”

While the laudable goal is to reduce the number of children in limbo, thus giving the children greater stability, in practice this rushed timetable makes it even more difficult to achieve reconciliation with troubled parents – even when it may be the right thing for the child.

Here is a brief, 20-point guide to why reunification is the default stated goal of DSHS and the courts:

1. Everybody agrees that kids need stability more than just about anything else.
2. When parents can’t handle being parents – often because of mental illness, substance abuse, poor health (usually with no health insurance), poverty, or some combination of the above – Child Protective Services steps in and finds foster parents to look after the child temporarily.
3. The clock is always ticking against the child because temporary placements by their very nature do not promote stability (they’re temporary).
4. Therefore, in order to restore stability the courts have just three real long-term options:
5. – Reunify the child with the biological parent or parents;
6. – Convert the foster home into a permanent guardianship or adoption;
7. – Place the child into another legally permanent family – often a family member of one of the biological parents.
8. Figuring out the best alternative would be dizzyingly complex even if our system was properly funded (it’s not).
9. Foster parents are asked, as part of their role, to support reunification with biological parents who have lots of problems (if they didn’t have problems, their kids probably wouldn’t be in foster care).
10. During this process, some foster parents come to believe that they themselves would be a better permanent placement for the child.
11. This belief, though it is of course sometimes correct, can make it almost impossible for the foster parents and the biological parents to work together, because they have such different end goals – that is, different permanent placement – in mind. When it comes to permanent placement, there usually isn’t a lot of room for negotiation.
12. Social workers and mental health professionals get caught in the middle regularly – and have to decide how to balance the credibility of conflicting reports they receive from parties who have a vested interest in making the other parties look bad.
13. Often the child is too young, or just too confused, to give reliable information to social workers or other professionals.
14. Although foster families (and possible alternative permanent families, such as an aunts & uncles or grandparents) generally have less obvious social problems (drug use, violent and/or illegal behavior, mental illness, etc.) than biological parents, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the child will be better off staying in foster care.
    
15. One of the problems is that situations that involve social workers are inherently chaotic, and tend to involve people with less resources – poor people.  Rich people with drug and other problems just don’t usually end up in the system.
16. So the crux of the dilemma is often whether society will expend resources to help keep a family together, or give up on that family, and spend resources creating a new permanent placement for the child.
17. The natural corollary question is whether the factors that led to the child’s removal in the first place were more due to a lack of resources or to serious parenting inadequacies.  The two are obviously quite intertwined, and the fact that rich (or even middle class) people rarely end up in the system shows just how important adequate resources can be. Rich and middle class moms don’t, for example, have to worry that if their car breaks down and they can’t get afford to get it fixed, they might lose their job, then become homeless and have to take their kids to live with their sister, who smokes crack.  As a society, we’re set up to deal with the ultimate result of the kids living with a crack smoker (kids to foster care at a cost of many thousands of dollars per year) but we’re not set up to buy a poor family a new fuel pump for their car at a cost of perhaps $200.
18. Even where there are serious inadequacies, resources and social services may help improve the person’s ability to be a parent enough to make it worthwhile to support reunification.
19. There is a financial side to this as well: the state pays foster parents, but not biological parents. So if children can be safely returned to their parents, it also saves taxpayer dollars. Of note, although the law, in theory, requires a permanent placement plan quickly, and even though foster parents sometimes wish to adopt their foster children, there is a direct financial disadvantage for them to do so – once they adopt, they no longer get paid a monthly stipend by the state. So while everyone agrees that long-term foster placement is bad for children, because it is temporary, it is in fact financially better for foster parents.
20. Not surprisingly, there is plenty of scholarly work both pro- and anti- reunification. The most striking flaw in the foster care system is that between 25% and 50% of children in foster care become homeless after they “age out” of the system.

Because there are so many inherent risks in both biological homes and foster homes, DSHS is often in a real Catch-22, caught between conflicting mandates and contradictory stories from biological parents, foster parents, other family members, therapists, treatment providers, schools, health care providers, and anyone else with an opinion. In this maelstrom, kids can get hurt in a variety of ways, wherever they are.

DSHS, for the most part, just does its best to minimize the risks. There is tremendous pressure for the agency do something whenever a case worker receives potentially damaging information about a foster family, adoptive family or the biological parents – such as the tip into where Taylor was living in this case. The pressure to act – and remove children – once an investigation reveals dangers in their current home directly undercuts the agency’s attempts to increase stability in the life of the children.

It’s easy to criticize any decision after the fact, especially after a dramatic tragedy.  But the reality is that yanking kids too quickly from any home – biological or foster – does real, tangible damage. Sure, if we took kids out of every home that had a drug problem, for example, we’d eliminate some tragedies, just like if we reduced the highway speed limit to 40 MPH we’d reduce traffic fatalities. It’s important to recognize that most cases are not easy, and involve carefully balancing a variety of dynamic factors.

But as a society we tend to demand action, even if we don’t want to pay for it.

Thus we tend to blame an agency less for taking action, even when that action is known to increas

So what about Little Girl Poca, who may go home to ex (we hope) druggie parents after nearly four years with her foster parents, the Langleys?  The Langleys wanted to keep Poca, knew how to meet her special needs and argued (probably rightly) that they were the only home she knew.

One thing that all the reunification vs foster care experts would agree on is this:  there is just no good reason for a little girl to spend three and a half of her first four years of life in foster care, no matter how good the foster home might be.  The system is supposed to offer kids permanence, and the law says that permanence in the form of either return home or adoption should happen within two years of entering the system.  I don’t know why this didn’t even come close to happening in Poca’s case.  I don’t know if the Langleys wanted to adopt her (with all the financial commitment that implies), or if they just wanted to continue to foster (continuing to receive fostering allowance and state medical coverage and so on).

If the Langleys did not want to adopt, I don’t know why Poca’s social worker didn’t find another family who did.  It’s hard to beleive that there weren’t adopters out there for a little girl of two or three, even one with some special needs. Two year old girls are, generally, very easy to find adoptive homes for.

And this kind of  scenario (refered to by academics who study foster care issues as “drift,”) is another example of why we ought to be trying to keep kids from entering the system in the first place.

Tomorrow, in part four, I offer an attorney’s perspective on dealing with DSHS.

Written by Christopher Rao, with help from Katy Banahan.