LOST CHILDREN

...In most social service agencies, that would mean a radical change—a much-needed radical change...

...It means that records frequently do not contain the most important elements of the case, and that no one assigned to the child knows the child...

...It sometimes seemed almost an afterthought that some day the child be returned to his parents," the researcher wrote...

...The real savings would be much greater if reduced administrative costs were included...

...If the law required that the agency's share of the funding be reduced gradually after a child had stayed in foster care beyond a given period, states would have an incentive to do what is necessary to return children to their homes or eventually place them in adoption...

...They must deal with heart-rending cases—children burned with cigarettes, scalded with boiling water, beaten with chains...

...Who Knows...

...Its policies are a major disincentive to states' reforming their foster care programs: The $175 million paid to the states in AFDC-FC funds in each recent year had to go for out-of-home care...

...There's this whole nebulous thing about emotional abuse...

...This failure causes removals that should never take place and casts the child into a drift that can last a whole childhood...

...Susan and her would-be parents know that she can be removed from their home at any time...

...In Limbo—A Study of New Mexico's Foster Care Children, available from New Mexico Department of Human Services, Santa Fe, New Mexico...

...The judges buy it...

...The subject is filled with tragic ironies...

...social workers' salaries and other administrative costs consume the rest...

...Because of his handicap, Michael qualifies for SSI [the Federal Supplemental Security Income Program for the poor, elderly, and disabled] and Medicaid now...

...A one-year experiment in New York (1974 through 1975), aimed at preventing and shortening foster care, resulted in savings of $500,000 the first year and an estimated savings of more than $2 million over the next five years...

...But most removals from the home are prompted and upheld by other, less benevolent factors...

...They twist the information...

...It is the easy way out administratively...

...Foster care was designed as a temporary last resort, the brief removal of a child while the agency helped solve the family's problems...

...A foster mother, testifying before a hearing by the National Commission, said she had been told by a social worker: "You're really getting too attached to this child, so we'd better consider a move...

...A study for the New Mexico Department of Human Services and another by the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (now the Department of Health and Human Services, which pays for much of foster care) came to essentially the same conclusion: "The longer the child is in foster care, the less likely there will be continuity of placement or of caseworkers...

...Wald's proposals would put the burden on the state to explain why the child should be removed from the home...

...In New York City, where the public agency contracts with a series of private agencies, most of them religious, foster care payments are as high as $2,000 a month per child...

...The project saved $800,000 in payments to foster families...

...After a child is put in foster care, the prevailing pattern is that the social agency abandons the natural family and its problems...

...Who Cares...

...In a further attempt to get more specific information, the same workers were interviewed by the researchers and, with permission, tapes were made of their sessions with clients...

...The department suggested that the child be sent to the family as a foster child so the county could continue to get Federal money...

...Privately the social worker told her, "You're right...

...I didn't know where I was going or that I would never come back...

...I never got to say goodbye [to the foster parent, with whom he had lived for several years...

...Government money pays for taking children away from their natural families, but it does not pay for solving practical problems that would permit them to return...

...Children Without Homes, available from Children's Defense Fund, 1520 Hampshire Avenue NW, Washington, D.C...

...Research for this article was assisted by a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism...

...I and every other social worker in the agency could decide that in each case...

...The most comprehensive blueprint for change in foster care comes from Michael Wald, Professor at Stanford University Law School...

...Many conditions are so severe they would not be covered by such insurance in any event...

...Such a job would be difficult under any circumstances...

...The result: Most kennels charge more to board dogs than states give families to house foster children...

...If he survives into adulthood he probably will have the adult version of his childhood problems...

...They wait—an expensive wait for taxpayers, and a painful wait for the family...

...Perhaps no one knows better than foster parents how deeply children are affected by "child-snatching," and how much they want a permanent home...

...That decrease, which meant that more children either stayed in their homes or were adopted, meant a savA resource Here are some valuable resources for readers interested in evaluating and improving local, state, and national foster child care policies and actions: Mary Lee Allen, Children's Defense Fund, 1520 New Hampshire Avenue NW, Washington, D.C...

...A California urban caseworker with a master's degree remembers his first day on the job: "I didn't know anything about child welfare work...

...A past director of the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect describes foster care as being among "the most pervasive forms of child abuse...

...At the same time, the families in the experiment had twice as many visits with social workers as did families receiving standard service, and they received many more services...

...Another result of caseworker un-preparedness is a turnover rate l about the same as that of dishwashers in a non-union restaurant, according to the National Commission...

...Though many agencies say they cannot place such children, in fact, there are many couples and single parents willing to adopt them—even though Federal policy subjects them to possible financial disaster...

...Wald suggests that intensive work to keep the family together or bring it together should, in most cases, span a year, with termination of parental rights occurring at the end of the year...

...In 1974, South Carolina spent $180,000 to establish the first effective citizen review board of a foster care system...

...Most family problems do not demand immediate removal for protection: The parents may simply be unable to cope because they have financial problems and, depressed, are not paying attention to their children or the condition of their house...

...A fifteen-year-old New York foster child explains, "I have an allocations worker, I have a caseworker, and I have my caseworker's supervisor...

...This last assumption is based on the proven premise that when sufficient, practical services are provided to families, most of them can solve their problems and keep their children...

...One-half of the agencies studied had no written policies on parent-child visits, which led some workers to discourage visits, making it unlikely that parent and child would maintain ties...

...With both private and Government researchers documenting the continuing damage of today's foster care programs, one might expect a massive move toward reform...

...I wanted to know what a minimally safe home was...

...The Saratoga County Department of Social Services refused to give up the child because, they wrote in a letter, the county would lose Federal supplements paid on behalf of the infant...

...Wiltse and Gambrill studied caseworkers in the San Francisco Department of Social Services in 1973...

...Once it is made, chances are that the child will never have a permanent home...

...All three children were placed in a foster home...

...It would have cost the welfare department $250 to repair the furnace, or even less to have urged the landlord to repair it...

...As long as the children are kept, the Federal subsidies keep pouring in...

...A surer system for harming children and wasting money could hardly be invented than that which has grown up, like a pernicious weed, in the operation of foster care," concluded the 1979 Report of the National Commission on Children in Need of Parents...

...The Child Welfare League of America recommends a caseload of twenty to thirty cases per worker, but seventy-five to ninety is the national average...

...The removals, too often, are'triggered by simple economics: The Federal Government gives money to social agencies as long as children are kept in temporary homes, and withdraws it if children are returned to their natural parents or placed in permanent adoption...

...Michael will still have cerebral palsy...

...Nobody argues with the tragedy of children kept perpetually as wards of the state—the parent-child relationship is devastated...

...I and a lot of people around me were making mistakes all the time...

...For starters, many of them are not trained for the work they do...

...But instead, the harmful system grows and prospers...

...Removing the child is punishment, not the beginning of help...

...That winter her furnace broke down...

...John Boyne, director of Spaulding for Children in Orange, New Jersey, had found a qualified adoption family for a mentally retarded, heart-damaged infant girl in Saratoga County...

...Barbara Chappell, Director, Office of Child Advocacy, 2221 Devine Street, Columbia, South Carolina 29204...

...Forgotten Children in Foster Care, the 1979 report of the National Commission on Children in Need of Parents, available from Child Welfare League of America, Inc., 67 Irving Place, New York, New York 10003...

...Nearly all studies of foster care show that most child welfare social workers work under terrible circumstances...

...The Los Angeles Bureau of Social Services reduced its foster care caseload from 15,670 in 1972 to 8,859 in 1977...

...Foster parents see it in the children's resistance to love, in their yearning for a permanent family...

...It is ironic that in a country where both the family and reducing taxes are part of the national credo, a system flourishes that has separated more than a half million children from their families and costs taxpayers more than it would cost to help the families solve their problems...

...This has a profound impact on all parties—the child, the natural parents, the foster parents, and the new social worker who has to pick up where the last one left off...

...And it is not unusual for schools of social work to offer no courses specializing in child welfare, though it is probably the most demanding work in the social welfare field...

...Agencies seldom admit this, but one in Saratoga County, New York, did...

...So the workers make everything—life styles they don't approve of, like lesbian mothers, cultural differences, dirty homes—fit under emotional abuse...

...In a sense, such confusion is understandable...

...agencies in reversing the horror of foster care—while saving families and money—has been largely ignored...

...Virginia Rader, Coordinator, Concerned United Birthparents, P.O...

...Still, they make up only part of the total problem...

...In another case, Susan, aged thirteen, has been living with foster parents who have wanted to adopt her since she was seven...

...A pilot project in 1973 involved 500 children already deep into the "drift" of long-term foster care...

...But those cases which call for quick straightforward removal are only a small minority...

...Another Federal program, Child Welfare Services, is authorized by Congress to provide $266 million for services to the natural families of the children—to prevent removal or to speed the child's return home...

...To remove the child, the agency would have to admit that it had failed to help the family and list the specific ways it had failed...

...But pilot project after pilot project has proven that this is one social problem where a socially beneficial solution saves money...

...They had no guidelines...

...list Kermit T. Wiltse, Professor, School of Social Welfare, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720...

...Except in rare instances, where families have resisted every attempt to help them, adoption would be seen as a serious failure by the agency...

...In essence...

...Nationwide, foster care already costs $2 billion a year...

...None of them ever met me...

...In our agency, we know exactly what we are doing, and among ourselves we call it child-snatching...

...Speaking of such a child, a witness at the National Commission hearings said: "I'm asking for some sort of insurance so that we don't fall into a financial disaster by choosing legally to adopt Michael...

...I will never forget her poignant reply, 'I'd like to call you Mommy, but I'm saving that name.' " Until child welfare agencies turn their efforts toward placing children in permanent, homes—basing those efforts on work with the natural parents—children like Patricia will continue to drift toward adulthood with no real sense of family...

...Instead of providing the vague generalities widely used now about the "best interests of the child...

...But public agencies continue to pour money into these mistakes, spurred on by Federal policies that in effect reward the abuse...

...In other words, the parents are the cause of the removal...

...Frequently the therapy recommended by the worker had nothing to do with the parent's capacity as a parent and, therefore, was not a factor in getting the children back home...

...I left from the school...

...That wasn't what I wanted to do...

...A day can be a year to a child whose emotions are severely twisted by separation...

...A recent study of foster child care found children who had been moved from home to home as many as eighteen times...

...In both of these programs, only half the money goes for support of the child...

...Ten years ago, Laurie Flynn of Pennsylvania was asked to be a foster parent for a nine-year-old girl, Patricia, who had spent six years in an orphanage...

...Box 751, Portland, Oregon 97207...

...Susan was freed for adoption at about that time, but no one from the adoption unit has followed up the case or ever visited the foster parents...

...But for nearly thirty years, study after study has shown that foster care seldom lives up to this promise...

...If speedy return of the child is the goal, then the parents' problem must be solved...

...The welfare agency told her it had no way of giving her the $250 necessary for furnace repairs and instead charged her with neglect (one of the children had developed a severe respiratory infection...

...Removing the child would be seen as a drastic step rather than the casual step it is now...

...But it has been funded at only $50 million, and states have spent more than 70 per cent of even these limited funds on still more out-of-home care—not the family services they were earmarked for...

...A Maryland mother, Virginia Ra-der, who asked her county social welfare agency for financial help and, instead, lost four of her children first to foster care and then to adoption, expressed concern about the new emphasis on adoption to a social worker from a public agency at a recent conference in North Carolina...

...One worker, for instance, said children should be returned to their natural mothers only if the mothers "achieved and maintained a steady male relationship...

...Wald's proposed standards would have courts demand that families be respected, taken seriously, and helped...

...is a national disgrace—a pattern of institutional abuse and neglect of our most vulnerable children that cannot wait one more day for correction...

...Nationally, fewer than 25 per cent of child welfare social workers have either a bachelor's or master's degree in social work...

...The Children Are Waiting, available from New York City Comptroller's Office, One Centre Street, Municipal Building, New York, New York 10007...

...On the surface, work with the natural families may seem even costlier than present casework...

...The conclusions were that workers were unclear with themselves and with clients about what needed to be changed in order to restore the child to the home...

...Child welfare officials in 140 counties that responded to questions from the Children's Defense Fund said they did not know the race of 54 per cent of the children in foster care, did not know the age of 49 per cent of the children, and did not know the legal status of 73 per cent of the children...

...There were no guidelines on that...

...Now twenty, he wonders if he will ever be capable of loving...

...Flynn, Laurie, or Mommy...

...She was forced to return to her own parents in another state—a move that made visits to her children virtually impossible...

...20024...

...David Byers, Coordinator, Arizona Supreme Court Foster Care Review Board System, 1812 W. Monroe, Suite 201, Phoenix, Arizona 85007...

...Official removal of children from their natural parents is one of the fastest growing industries in the country...

...An eighteen-year-old former foster child testified at the same hearing about one of his several moves: "I was called to the school office and they told me that I would be picked up there after school...

...Our income will be the same...

...The success of a few Betty Medsger, formerly a reporter for The Washington Post, is a free-lance writer in Berkeley, California...

...Mary Funnye Goldson, Director, Foster Care/Adoption Training Project, Columbia University School of Social Work, New York, New York 10027...

...Surely the cost of institutional care far exceeds any reasonable type of subsidized adoption program the Government could offer...

...Local agencies instead increase foster care in order to get the largest possible funds...

...director of the Los Angeles Department of Public Social Services...

...One of the most irrational foster care policies concerns payment for medical costs for severely ill or disabled children...

...The Government makes these foster children hard to place by cancelling Medicaid when they are adopted...

...A family's regular health insurance usually will not cover a newly adopted child's pre-existing medical problems...

...But now taxpayers are spending thousands of dollars to maintain three children in foster care, indefinitely...

...Social workers, pressed to explain what would cause restoration, seemed to rely on two things: some magical change in the family or psychiatric therapy...

...I saw a lot of children being sent to foster homes simply because the original home was considered dirty by the social worker...

...What we have found...

...In view of this, many fear, justifiably, that when reform comes, the natural parents will be forgotten completely...

...Clearly, the economic policies that encourage extended foster care are in need of reform...

...Eighty per cent of these children will never live with their families again...

...I asked her what she'd like to call me—Mrs...

...Caseworkers were instructed to involve the natural parents in plans for their children, with the conviction that children belonged with their natural families or in another permanent home if that wasn't possible...

...What we are looking for is another alternative other than returning Michael or accepting possible financial ruin that may cripple our whole family...

...Stanford Law Review (April 1976), "State Intervention on Behalf of'Neglected' Children...

...Ner Littner of the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, "may develop pseudo-mental retardation or learning problems, or personality problems, including delinquency, criminality, and sexual perversions and varying degrees of self-defeating behavior...

...Lost Children Foster care is a 'last resort' that lasts and lasts BETTY MEDSGER Martha, the mother of three pre-schoolers, received Federal welfare assistance for herself and her children until three years ago...

...Despite the added cost of the new board, in the first year the state's foster care system saved $500,000 because the board got children out of the system—either back to their parents or to adoptive parents...

...The worst perversion of foster care reform is already occurring in agencies that see adoption as the main way to decrease the number of children in foster care...

...Time is crucial in Wald's plan...

...For state governments, it pays to keep children in foster care, to avoid releasing them either to their parents or to adoptive parents...

...Key to the fate of children in foster care are the child welfare social workers...

...20036...

...the damaged child often becomes a damaged adult...

...Why cannot he qualify after legal adoption...

...The results were remarkable: 26 per cent were returned to their families and 52 per cent were placed in adoption...

...The "child who is moved from one home to another, said Dr...

...In the vast majority of the cases, children are placed in foster care not because of anything they did but because of something their parents did or didn't do...

...Boyne and the waiting adoptive parents said no...

...According to Kermit Wiltse, professor at the School of Social Welfare of the University of California at Berkeley, many textbooks, when dealing with foster care, ignore most research on the subject and simply advise the worker to "take those little kids and give them homes...

...The national average monthly payment is $260 for a child in a foster home (half for the family and half for the administrative agency), and $601 for a child in an institution...

...The case was not unusual, only the candor, he said...

...The usual result of such overloads is that each successive report to the court, in states where such reports are required, will be "Recommend placement continue...

...In 1961, HEW reported 177,000 children were removed from their parents and placed in foster care...

...The foster care worker agreed they would make excellent adoptive parents and referred the case to the state's adoption unit four years ago...

...Box 23641, L'Enfant Plaza Station, Washington, D.C...

...Victor Pike, Executive Director, Permanency Planning Project, Portland State University, P.O...

...The original decision to remove the child—too often made by a poorly trained and overworked social worker and ordered in a few seconds by a judge—is difficult to reverse...

...M. ing of "many millions," according to Keith Comrie...

...Under these loads, face-to-face contact with the child and family may amount to less than two work days per year—hardly enough to solve problems and quickly return children to their families...

...The daily plight of these children, often left family-less, makes a mockery of our professed belief in family, our concern for our young, and for the cost-effective use of taxpayers' money," wrote Marian Wright Edelman, director of the Children's Defense Fund in her organization's recent study of foster care...

...We know that the average professional 'life-span' for a child welfare caseworker is about nine months," said Stewart Blechner of the New York State Citizens Coalition for Children...

...A Virginia agency worker reports, "We have worked with a child who had three caseworkers, all of whom had been calling her by the wrong name for several years...

...Of all the problems, the most critical is the failure to work with the natural parents of the foster child...

...20036...

...Therefore...

...But that is not the case...

...Without her children, Martha was no longer eligible for Federal welfare benefits and was transferred to a state relief program that was inadequate to pay her rent...

...But I had scored well on their exam, and they said I had to go into child welfare...

...New laws he has proposed would force both the courts and child care agencies to change drastically how they handle foster care cases...

...in 1977, there were 503,000—an increase of 184 per cent during a period of negligible increase in the number of children...

...Oregon has developed the most successful program for foster children...

...Dramatic or not, all the cases are dumped in the lap of the social worker by police, teachers, neighbors, ministers...

...And the removal would be seen more as a failure of the agency to keep the child in the home than as a failure of the parents...

...The largest such subsidy comes from HHS's Aid to Families with Dependent Children Foster Care Program (AFDC-FC...

...Logic would seem to indicate that is where the social agency's attention should be focused, but instead, of all parties involved, the natural parents are the ones with whom the social workers have the least contact...

...Studies completed only recently come to virtually the same conclusions...

...Removal frequently is not only not needed, but in the long run is a far greater tragedy...

...Records often aren't kept...

...This staggering increase was caused in part by improved reporting of child abuse...

...In the absence of official policy, Wiltse and a colleague, Eileen D. Gambrill, found individual workers coming up with their own strange criteria...

...It also perpetuates the long-held worst attitudes of some social service agencies: that natural parents are unimportant, hopeless, or can't be worked with...

...by Michael S. Wald, professor, Stanford University Law School...

...Dennis Smith, a young man who spent the first sixteen years of his life in sixteen foster homes, describes the experience more directly, calling it "a scar on my brain...

...the agencies would have to specify to the judge the harm likely to occur if the child stayed at home...

...The first massive survey of foster care, the Maas-Engler study, was published in 1959, but the problems it pointed to remain unchanged...

...When asked to write about their work with parents, they used vague terms such as "supportive casework...

...I learned as I went...

...They must make Solomonic decisions that sever families, sometimes forever...