The Pew Commission on Children in Foster Care was formed in May 2003. Supported by a grant from The Pew Charitable Trusts to the Georgetown University Public Policy Institute, the Commission is developing practical, evidence-based recommendations to improve outcomes for children in foster care. It will craft recommendations in two critical areas:
- improving federal funding mechanisms to help facilitate faster movement of children out of foster care and into safe, permanent homes, and to help reduce the need for foster care;
- improving court oversight of child welfare cases to promote better and more timely decisions related to children's safety, permanence, and well-being.
The Commission expects to release its recommendations in the spring of 2004.
Today, more than half a million children in the United States are in foster care, placed there by public authorities because they could not live safely with their own families. Foster care is vital to protecting seriously abused and neglected children. But too many children languish for years in foster care, moving from one temporary home to another. Federal financing mechanisms contribute to this foster care "drift" by restricting the majority of federal child welfare dollars to foster care and providing only a relatively small amount to other important services.
This report, commissioned by the Pew Commission on Children in Foster Care, examines the experiences of children in foster care as well as the experiences of parents whose children were placed in foster care and of foster and adoptive parents. It illustrates serious shortcomings in the nation's child welfare system—of which foster care is the largest component—as well as aspects of the system that are successfully helping children live safely in permanent families.
As part of the Pew Commission's work, its members listened carefully to those who know foster care intimately: young adults raised in foster care, parents whose children were placed in care and have since been successfully reunited with them, and foster and adoptive parents. In three focus group discussions conducted in September and October 2003, Commissioners heard stories of loss and limbo, struggle and survival. The focus groups represent a small but powerful sample of the individuals affected every day by the child welfare system.
Participants in each discussion group—eight former foster youth in Washington, D.C., thirteen parents in New York City whose children had been in foster care, and eleven foster and adoptive parents in Denver—offered different perspectives on how foster care works. But a number of common themes emerged. Together, they provided powerful glimpses of a system that often does not succeed in serving the children and families who need it most.
The Cost of Foster Care
We usually think of the "cost" of foster care in terms of dollars and fiscal implications. But those most involved with, and affected by, foster care made it clear that the system exacts a daily price on their lives. In six thematic sections, this report outlines the human costs imposed by a child welfare system that relies so heavily on foster care:
I. The Cost of Insecurity
II. The Cost of Poor Communication
III. The Cost of Inflexibility
IV. The Cost of Not Securing Timely Help
V. The Cost of Professional Burn-Out
VI. The Cost of Stigma
While foster care is intended to protect abused or neglected children and give them support and stability until they can return home safely or be adopted, the security children need often eludes them.
In a variety of ways, it is difficult for children in foster care to develop and maintain important relationships with adults and other children. Children may be separated from their parents, siblings, and other relatives without consistent recognition that contact with or knowledge about their families is critical to their healthy development. Contact with their extended family may also be discouraged or infrequent. Children may also be moved from foster home to foster home, without ever establishing strong social connections to adults or children in their new communities.
High turnover rates among child welfare workers often result in children having several different social workers during their stay in foster care. The youth in our focus group discussion reported that they often felt no connection with anyone and had no sense of even one person on whom they could count.
The emotional and social insecurity children experience while in foster care takes its toll. "To this day," said Lee, who spent six years in foster care, "each of us [in the focus group] struggles with security—it is like the bottom can drop out from underneath us, and it seems that disaster is just around the corner."
II. The Cost of Poor Communication
Members of all three focus groups sounded a common, painful theme: their voices were lost in a system that does not always speak or listen to those it most affects
Repeatedly, young adults recalled their bewilderment as children at being removed from their families and sent to live elsewhere with no explanation—or at least, none they could understand. They also spoke of the confusion caused by multiple service providers involved in a case, each with a different notion of what the outcome will—or should—be. "At the time I entered care," said Jackie, "I thought I would move back in with my aunt, whom I had been living with for the past two or three years. My aunt thought my mom was going to get rehabilitated and I would move in with her, and my social worker thought I was going to be adopted. And none of that happened. I think everyone thought they were on the same page as the others."
Parents and foster and adoptive parents spoke of their frustration in getting relevant, timely information about children, procedures, requirements and outcomes. Parents described even more confusion and inability to be heard once they entered the court system.
Foster parents suffer, too, from fragmented or unavailable information. "You have to rely on shattered, broken children to give you the information of their lives," said Alice, a Colorado Springs foster parent. Other foster parents recalled the frustration of trying to chase down the date of an important hearing, or of being the last to learn of decisions about children in their care.
III. The Cost of Inflexibility
Participants emphasized the individual nature of their situations and the failure of the system to respond sensitively to their unique circumstances. Their discussion proved what many child welfare professionals have known for a long time – one size does not fit all. Caseworkers must have a myriad of tools to respond to the complex needs of children and their families.
Parents whose children had been in foster care chafed at what they viewed as the inflexibility of agencies and courts. Nancy? recalled that she was not permitted to have the phone number of her children's foster mother. In violation of agency rules, the foster mother gave her the number. "She gave me...extra time...and leeway, but if the agency would have found out, she probably would have lost her license [as a foster parent]."
Foster parents and parents whose children had been in foster care spoke positively of the rare occasions when parents, guardians ad litem, foster parents, case workers, and others sat down face to face, had time to hear one another's points of view and, together, chiseled out a plan for the child and the family.
IV. The Cost of Not Securing Timely Help
Parents and former foster youth said that, in most cases, help came to the families too late—after the children had been placed in foster care, when the trauma of rupture had already begun. They said that earlier intervention might have prevented the need for foster care in the first place.
When services are introduced for parents, they are often part of a court-ordered reunification plan: the parents must complete a substance-abuse program, attend parenting classes, or follow other requirements. But gaining access to those services can be difficult. Substance abuse treatment centers may have a six-month waiting list; the only parenting classes may meet on the other side of town or during hours the parent is working. These delays can prolong a child's stay in foster care.
Children in foster care often have multiple and complex health, mental health, and special education needs that can be exacerbated when timely services are not available. Foster children do not always get the medical and mental health care they need because of difficulty in locating providers who accept Medicaid.
Foster youth, parents, and foster parents also there is a pressing need for follow-up services when children leave foster care.
V. The Cost of Professional Burnout
Participants raised several workforce issues that applied to social workers, attorneys, judges, and others in the child welfare system: unmanageable caseloads; the lack of access to ongoing, appropriate training; sometimes limited knowledge of child development; lack of good information systems to track and analyze caseloads; and barriers posed by differences in race and class.
Casey, a foster parent who has cared for 30 infants over the last five years, said that the training and information foster parents receive is limited and that they cannot always rely on case workers for accurate information about a child's needs. "A child shows up at your door," she says, "and [the worker] may have a name and a date of birth. . . It is so incredibly hard to receive a child, whether it's a newborn or any age, and not be prepared."
Not all focus group participants had grim stories. Some foster parents talked about welcoming, knowledgeable judges, compassionate social workers, adoptions that proceeded smoothly. One former foster child recognized that his foster home offered him more stability and loving care than his family of origin.
But everyone agreed that there is a need for smaller caseloads, for caseworkers to be able to tailor services to a family's needs so that time in foster care might be minimized, and for more training for social workers, lawyers, judges, and foster parents. They also recognized that low salaries for and low maintenance payments can discourage quality people from entering and remaining in this field of work.
All participants in the focus groups said that they feel stigmatized. Former foster youth even insisted that a new word be identified to replace "foster" because the image and its implications are so negative.
Parents whose children were placed in foster care feel vulnerable for other reasons. They know they have not provided nurturing care for their children. They feel sad and guilty and angry. But they also felt that social workers, attorneys, and judges judged them out of context, in the absence of accurate and complete information. They argued that they are not always given a fair opportunity to be heard or to receive the resources they need to turn their lives around.
Foster parents said they are hit equally hard by the stigma of foster care. They bristle at assumptions that they are "in it for the money." People don't understand, they protest, that even though foster parents receive a monthly check, the money is for the costs involved in raising a child. Sometimes those costs are extraordinary.
Lowering the Cost to All of Us
Former foster youth, parents, and foster/adoptive parents made it clear that they pay a price, but they are not the only ones affected by the limitations of the current child welfare system. Society as a whole pays a price when the system does not achieve the results that it should.
How do we begin to address this situation? The Pew Commission on Children in Foster Care is doing so by examining federal financing mechanisms and the quality of court oversight of child welfare cases. While every problem highlighted in this report does not tie directly back to these two areas, many have their roots there. The structure of federal financing encourages caseworkers and judges to place and keep children in foster care, sometimes for longer than is necessary, because they cannot (or cannot easily) secure other services that might keep or bring children safely home or move them more quickly to a new family. In the courts, limited information and crowded dockets also hamper judges and create delays for the children and families before them.
There is considerable acknowledgment in the policy arena that these two areas are in critical need of reform. The Pew Commission has taken on the job of developing evidence-based proposals for reform that can win the bipartisan support of policymakers at the federal, state, and local levels. The Commission expects to release those recommendations in late spring 2004.