by INFORUM
North Dakota takes updated approach to foster care
August 29, 2010 at 7:00 pm in INFORUM
State’s goal is to help families stay together
North Dakota is at the forefront of a new trend in the way foster care is administered: Don’t put children in foster care. Continue Reading
This article, and this approach, upsets me. It’s wonderful when the children can be kept together, but the availability of foster families makes this a rare thing. There is already way too much emphasis on keeping them together at all costs. I know because I have a friend who does foster care. This approach of keeping them together no matter what has cost many children permanent homes. Keeping them in a cruddy home is no solution, and is not fair to the kids.
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I think you misunderstand the purpose of this new policy. Let’s very crudely break foster cases down into two groups: 1) the parents are the problem; 2) the kid is the problem.
In the first group, things will proceed as before. Pull the kid(s) out, keep siblings together if possible, move them into a foster family. It’s the second group where things will change. Sometimes a kid has problems and the parents aren’t able to deal with it. Things finally get to the point where the child is removed from the family and given to a foster family for a time to help the child with whatever problems s/he is having. It may be drugs, alcohol, emotional or behavioral issues, learning disabilities, etc. Whatever the case, the birth family is unable to solve it on their own.
From the article, it seems like this new method is an attempt to help the family without pulling the child out. Instead of taking the child out and giving him/her to an “expert” foster family, you go into the birth family and make them the “experts”. A side effect if this works is that existing foster families will get freed up to help with more of the cases from the first group, where the parent is the problem.
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I’m glad the forum started this topic, had hoped to see more. A couple of things: our child welfare system is secretive (some states have changed this) so a lot of people base their opinion on “I know because I have a friend who. . . ” This gives you an extremely limited perspective on what goes on. The second email took a simplistic view–”parent is the problem or the kid is the problem”. Researchers know that to a profound degree poverty is the problem (you can live in a “crappy family” in Rose Creek, but you are not likely to be taken away from that crappy home).
Research also tells us that in the majority of cases, kids can stay in their homes and will be better off for it. There have been two very large scale studies (data from thousands of cases) in recent years that looked very closely at this.
Investigation (“assessment”) of families tends to be done very poorly. Then the system decides on “services” based on low quality assessments, relying on a limited menu of options. Having worked with a number of families involved with child welfare–kids out of the home, kids in the home–I have yet to see one case where at some point I don’t say “What the h—?” Example: mom is terminally ill, she’s found with messy house unable to get off the couch any more. Kids go into foster care. Mom goes to a nursing home. Social services presents a case plan saying that a)mom is terminally ill and b) mom has to demonstrate she can keep a clean house so she can get the kids back. What social services really needs to do is help the family work through the process of dying, take action to locate relatives the kids can stay connected with and perhaps eventually live with, counseling to help mom come to terms with her death and state her wishes for the kids’ future. With one kid approaching 18, they need to work hard to prepare him for life on his own (here again, supportive relatives could be a godsend). Instead the oldest kid waits for months for “independent living” counseling because the case plan says he’s going home to mom–who no longer HAS a home and whose doctor says is not able to live on her own anymore.
I think simplistic ideas come from the secrecy, most people have no idea what goes on in the system. There are families who have started to take action–this may be an upcoming story in the Forum because of other legislation already being considered in the interim session–with the idea of making the system more open.
I’m glad both of you weighed in. We need more people to at least HAVE an opinion about child welfare!
(The mom did pass away, just two weeks before her oldest son’s 18th birthday. The kids were ultimately separated–there were two little kids and the older one. They were all placed 60 miles from home but the older one wanted to be closer to his mom during her last weeks.)
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