‘Kinship care’ the latest way to game the social welfare system–and it is the children who will pay the price

Here’s a riddle: How can a child’s mother become his sister, and his grandmother his mom?

Answer: By government edict in America’s newest welfare trend, “kinship care.”

Thanks to a biased social service system, welfare recipients anxious for more benefits, and gullible elected officials, the nation’s burgeoning foster care system is being used to discourage adoption of at-risk children and to keep them tied to parents with records of abuse. And under legislation before the U.S. Senate, the problem may grow worse.

It’s all done in the name of family preservation, but it really is another monument to the phenomenon of unintended consequences. Laws meant to help children in many cases damage them.

This bad idea started as a good one. When violent or addicted parents cannot be trusted to care for their children, it occasionally makes more sense to place the youth with relatives than with regular foster care families. That is especially true if the relatives are able to meet minimal foster care standards and the children have a real chance of being safely returned to their parents or responsibly adopted by the relatives. The concept is called “kinship care” and it is becoming the dominant foster care option in many parts of the country.

The trouble is that there is money involved, often three times what a family could get on welfare. It therefore becomes financially advantageous for relatives to take in the children and collect the benefits. Instead of a child getting a permanent home, and the government getting out of the picture, various relatives can now acquire “kinship guardianship” or even “kinship adoption” that only marginally changes the child’s real situation but qualifies for subsidies.

It’s not hard to see how this system can be manipulated. For example, there often is nothing to prevent a drug-addicted parent from hitting up a “kinship care” grandmother for drug money, making unauthorized visits to the child or even taking back effective control of the child and continuing the pattern of abuse. This is not a theory. The press is full of revolting stories of children who have wound up dead or in the hospital. In some cases, poorly monitored foster care kin are as dismal and pathetic–and dangerous–as the original abusive parents.

In the absence of a permanent plan for a child, subsidized “kinship care” deals also can lead to what Judith B. Sheindlin, supervising judge in New York City’s Manhattan Family Court, calls “bizarre configurations” of contingent relationships–like the one in my riddle.

Think of a grandmother who takes in grandchildren under the subsidized “kinship adoption.” She now “becomes their mother,” in the eyes of the law, Judge Sheindlin noted recently in the New York Times. “Then their biological mother becomes their sister and their aunts and uncles become their siblings.”

Some kinship care, I repeat, makes sense, but too often it means returning de facto control to parents whose custody was so dangerous as to have had them removed in the first place. Too often it provokes scams in which children can be passed around from relative to relative and the foster care payments enjoyed as a kind of super-welfare benefit–for the relatives.

An overburdened social welfare system cannot be counted upon to supervise kinship care situations adequately, even though agencies typically get a generous payment to do so. It presently is not in the law or in the interest of the system to put the well-being of a child first anyhow. Whether children go to relatives or regular foster care, the system gets its fee. But it loses that fee–and the psychic satisfaction of nominal control–when a child is placed for adoption. So the adoption option is neglected and each year 15,000 children “age-out” of the foster care system as adults who have never known a permanent home. The pathologies of such youth are written across the rolls of America’s jails and prisons, mental and addiction hospitals and homeless centers.

The social welfare lobby remains piously resists all change that reduces its power. The Clinton Administration is cowed by it, and is looking the other way as welfare reform is subverted by the new trend in gaming the system. The House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed sound legislation that would make the best interest of children, rather than nominal “family preservation,” the guiding light of foster care. It would encourage adoption and limit the time a child can remain in foster care without a permanency plan being implemented.

But, the Senate version of the bill, sponsored by Sen. John Chaffee of Rhode Island, a Republican, downgrades the adoption option and raises the prospect of still more kinship care, and, indeed, provides millions more to support it. There is a one-year limit on setting a permanency plan, but another year is allowed for appeals. (Two years in the life of a kid is a long time.)

The bill even includes a provision that would allow the state to send children to live with “kin”–abusive parents, usually–in residential drug treatment facilities or half-way houses. Such places are a dandy environment, apparently, for raising kids. Regardless, the Chaffee bill is favored to pass, particularly because the House seems to lack much passion on the subject.

There was a funny song in the ’40s entitled “I’m My Own Grandpa.” Foster care in the ’90s is becoming just as ridiculous, but who can laugh?