Adoption option too often neglected in state foster care mess

Conna Craig is a former foster child, and adoptee, who heads the Institute for children in Cambridge, Mass. She describes a teenage present-day foster child who observed, “Everywhere I go, someone makes money by keeping me from having a mom and dad.”

How can that be? How can the child welfare system that is supposed to protect and serve kids wind up keeping so many from benefitting from safe, permanent homes?

News stories of children who have been tortured or abandoned by their parents are reported with numbing frequency. But so, too, are accounts of children in public care who suffer from official neglect. Some are victims of poor health care, or of foster care abuses. More are simply the silent, cumulative burden of a social welfare system unwilling to make hard choices.

There are roughly 600,000 kids in foster care nationally, an increase from 434,000 in 1982. There are 10,000 in Washington state. Half will be reunited with their parents within a year. But the other half will languish while public welfare officials make desultory efforts to rehabilitate parents with anti-social behavior, such as drug addiction. State law specifies a one-year period for this process–18 months for parents of youths over 10. A year is a long time for an infant or toddler, or any child who desperately needs a lasting, loving home. But in practice, courts often grant “continuances” to public agencies who extend the process far in excess of a year. Ninety thousand kids nationally have been in the system for three or more years. some spend their whole childhood there.

The cost to the child is the devastation of hope, the immeasurable loss of love and trust. To some, the cost is still higher. Of the roughly 2,000 children in America each year who die from abuse and neglect, half already are known to the child welfare system.

Meanwhile, there also is a cost to the taxpayers. To keep a child in foster care takes upward of $17,000 a year. And the children neglected by both their parents and their government are later disproportionately represented among adults in the welfare system, the mental institutions, the homeless shelters and the prisons.

Let’s be clear. On, foster care serves a genuine need and no criticism is intended here for foster parents (I have been one, in fact); two, no child should be denied a reasonable chance to be raised by his biological parents, as the law rightly recognizes.

But when the chance of a safe family reconciliation is not reasonable, the best choice is often adoption. According to the National Council for Adoption, there are more than 2 million parents desirous of adopting. Some may want to take advantage of a new federal law that gives adopting parents a one-time $5,000 tax credit, and more when they adopt a child with “special needs.” But most adoptive parents do not require any financial assistance. They gladly provide for a child throughout his or her childhood and youth, just as other parents do.

If you were to devise a system to deal with the growing public caseload of abused and abandoned kids, would you organize it like the costly, overburdened one we have? Or would you accord adoption a bigger role?

Kansas has decided to start over altogether. That state has just privatized its foster care and adoption services. And, instead of merely providing social agencies with funds for each child they hold on to, which creates an incentive for inertia, the new Kansas law rewards agencies financially for each successful permanent arrangement made for a child, including adoption.

Other states are approaching the need for reform differently, trying to make the public system more responsive. Unfortunately, the ideology of family reunification at all costs has stymied many innovations. For example, a bill by Sen. Pat Thibaudeau, D-Seattle, to expedite termination of parental rights in cases of sustained drug addiction recently died–little noted–in the Washington State Legislature.

Local officials and the private sector are trying to speed up the adoption process on their own. King County Superior Court Judge Bobbie Bridge is leading a judicial effort to crack down on systemic delays. And the Kellogg Foundation has made Washington state one of its national pilot projects for Families for Kids, a public-private partnership to promote adoption.

Thanks largely to Families for Kids, placements of foster care children in adoptive homes have risen from 80 two years ago to 143 last year. That is still a small number compared with the population of potentially adoptable kids, and the welfare system has been slow to complete the adoption process for even those already placed.

At the federal level, Republican Dave Camp of Michigan and Democrat Barbara Kennelly of Connecticut are trying to get the House to pass a bill to terminate parental rights when a child under age 10 has been in foster care for 18 out of 24 months. It would not increase net public spending on foster care services, as would an unnecessary pricey alternative in the Senate that is backed by President Clinton.

We already are approaching a $6 billion annual price tag for foster care and it is not at all clear that the problem is lack of money. The problem, rather, is lack of political leadership, and a public demand for it.

Meantime, the children wait. And many suffer.