Foster Care in the United

Foster Care in the United States

The difficulty in studying foster-care in the United States as a topic is that foster-care falls under the auspices of different agencies in different states, and some are not even operated by the states. For instance, Kristen R. Humphrey, Ann P. Turnbull, and H. Rutherford Turnbull III (2006) report that in the state of Kansas, foster-care is being conducted by privatized interests, which was very controversial in that state because it means that the state transferred its interests in foster-care to privatized organizations to operate and manage foster-care (p. 2). In the first three months of privatized foster-care in Kansas, some 3500 children were transferred to the private system, except for the Child Protective Services (CPS) component of the program, which remains within the state. Private research conducted by Sarah Geenen and Laurie E. Powers citing numbers from the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis Reporting System (2005) put the number of children placed in foster care over the past 20 years has doubled from 276,000 in 1985, to an estimated 523,000 in 2005 (p. 233). The PEW Charitable Trusts reports that in 2004 new federal guidelines concerning foster-care at the state level was forcing states to rethink their foster-care programs and to find ways to meet the federal government's new and strict guidelines or risk losing billions of dollars in foster-care program funding (Winniker, T., 2004, found online at: (http://www.pewtrusts.org/news_room_ektid17834.aspx).As we look at the individual states and attempt to get an overall picture of foster care in the United States today, it is a very sad picture, a haphazard picture, and there is a need for everyone to be very concerned about the fate of children in America's foster-care system today.

The History of Foster Care

There was a time in American history when young children roamed the streets, homeless, hungry, and having to fend for themselves. Charmaine Brittain and Deborah Esquibel Hunt (2004) talk about the early years of what was the first children protective service in the United States (p. 36).

From late in the nineteenth century through most of the first half of the twentieth century, private nonprofit societies for the prevention of cruelty to children initiated and took responsibility for child protection efforts. In 1877, humane societies from across the country -- including the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NYSPCC) and the ASPCA -- convened in Cleveland, Ohio, and founded the national American Humane Association (AHA). In 1886, American Humane (AH) amended its constitution to include the protection of both children and animals, a mission that it supports to this day (Douglas, 1998) (Brittain and Hunt, 2004, p. 36)."

From there, advocacy by private groups and through individual philanthropy helped raise the collective social conscience in a way that caused Americans to become concerned about the fate of the country's young children who were suffering a full range of social ills. In 1909 President Theodore Roosevelt responded to the American people's concern for the young children in the country by convening the first "White House Conference on the Care of Dependent Children, but the federal government did not enter the child welfare arena officially until 1912, when it established the Children's Bureau (p. 36)."

In the mid 1900s, 1946-1959, physicians and healthcare providers joined the advocacy of child protective services (p. 36). And in the 1960s a distinct and directed progress in addressing the needs of abused, abandoned, neglected and suffering children was being made and was receiving extensive media interest and coverage (p. 36).

By 1966, due to the efforts of child welfare professionals and the medical community's recognition and publicizing of the "battered child syndrome," 49 states passed mandatory reporting laws obligating certain professionals working with children to report child abuse or neglect to public departments of social services (Pecora et al., 2000) (Brittain and Hunt, 2004, p. 36)."

The interest at the outset was to help families stay together, to provide families the support and assistance they needed in order that they not become separated (p. 37). However, the systems that were implemented were not color blind, and minority children and families were not given the same attention as were the families and children of non-minority families (p. 37). Brittain and Hunt report the following racial bias in the CPS systems:

Child protective services agencies receive and substantiate more maltreatment reports on children of color and provide fewer services to them. Statistics show that these children spend a longer time in care, have a higher rate of reentry into care, have less stability in their out-of-home placements, and wait much longer to be adopted (Courtney, Barth, Berrick, Brooks, Needell, & Park, 1996).

1980 Youth Referral Survey conducted by the U.S. Office of Civil Rights showed that prevalence rates for out-of-home placement per 1,000 children were highest for black and American Indian children.

According to a 1986 nationwide survey, American Indian children entered the foster care system at a rate 3.6 times higher than any other group of children.

Data from California, Illinois, Michigan, New York, and Texas indicated that in 1990 black children were more likely to be placed in out-of-home care (Courtney et al., 1996).

1999 analysis of data in the Multi-State Data Archive found that black children stay in the foster care system longer than white children in 11 states (Alabama, California, Illinois, Iowa, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, and Wisconsin) (Derezotes & Poertner, 2002).

In 2000, the Administration for Children and Families of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services reported that while blacks represented only 17% of the country's youth, 42% of the children in foster care were black (Roberts, 2002, p. 8) (Brittain and Hunt, 2004, p. 38)."

Brittain and Hunt concur that there are circumstances that sometimes convey a sense of differential treatment, but those circumstances and instances by number do not explain the overall statistical data that demonstrates there is racial bias in the system at the institutional level, and in the outreach initiatives (p. 38).

Today, with the individual states' child welfare systems in seeming jeopardy or being placed into the management of private enterprise, there must remain concern as to the racial bias that reveals itself in the system.

Likewise, just as we see adoption becoming more and more popular, we need to see greater philanthropy on the part of minorities who hold positions of power and wealth in order to bring the focus on the needs of the minority children of the nation.

Foster CareToday

James G. Barber and Paul H. Delfabbro (2003) explain the concept of foster-care as "the mark of civilized society" that recognizes there are instances, hopefully temporary in nature, when children are better served by being removed from their homes and families and placed in foster-care (p. 3). The first choice, they say, should be a family-based foster-care option (p. 4). This means that a child identified as in need of temporary removal from his or her immediate family, can be placed with an extended family member until such time as the child can be safely returned to the immediate family. Barber and Delfabbro cite McDonald, et al., (1996) and Minty (1999) in suggesting that the extended family-foster-care is the preferred placement option for a child temporarily removed from custody of a birth parent(s).

One reason why family-based foster care deserves to be the preferred mode of temporary out-of-home care is because it is as close as you can get to the way most of us actually live. Besides, there is now considerable research evidence to suggest that conventional family-based care is the best option for most children (see, for example, McDonald et al. 1996; Minty 1999). Generally speaking, the research indicates that children from foster family care are more likely than children in group or institutional care to grow into well-functioning adults, as demonstrated by a wide range of social indicators such as high school completions, crime rates, drug and alcohol usage, divorce rates and satisfaction with life generally (Ferguson 1966; Festinger 1983; 1984) (Barber and Delfabbro, 2003, p. 4)."

Of course placement within the family really is not what foster-care is about, and those occasions when placement within the extended family can happen, are not frequent as society might like or hope them to be. The majority of children in foster-care today are placed in the homes of families and individuals who, for the most part, volunteer to be adjuncts of the child's family until such time as the child can be returned to his or her family, or placed in a permanent adoptive home. Today, as mentioned in the introduction, states are looking to relieve themselves of the burden of the foster-care program, and the well being of these children is being put into the hands of managed care private organizations, presumably for profit. In Kansas, the system was privatized without the consultation of the many social workers, therapists, or even the family court judges who must approve the removal of a child from a birth parent's legal custody (Humphrey, Turnbull, and Turnbull III, 2006, p. 2).

Barber and Delfabbro report that research has determined that children with physical and mental disabilities fare better in institutional settings, where the continuity in care-to-need structure is in place and the consistency in structured routine seems to better serve the individual (p. 7).

Thus, best practice in foster care should begin with a careful assessment of each child's suitability for placement. Where the child suffers from serious emotional or behavioural problems, regular foster care services are unlikely to be sufficient. Such children are likely to need either supervised group care or one of the forms of intensive, therapeutic foster care described in the literature (see Hudson, Natter and Galaway 1994, for a review) (Barber and Delfabbro, 2003, pp. 7-8)."

Adam Pertman (2000) says that America has become an "adoption nation," and that this has been a good thing for children who would otherwise be long-term placements in less desirable foster-care settings (p. 5).

It's not just that adoption suddenly seems to be appearing everywhere at once, as if revealed by a cosmic sleight-of-hand. Its public image is also exponentially better than it has ever been. The new climate allows birth parents like the comedian Roseanne, the singers Joni Mitchell and David Crosby, along with thousands of men and women unprotected by famous names, to finally ease their torment by disclosing their secrets and meeting their children. It leads celebrities like Steven Spielberg, Tom Cruise, and Rosie O'Donnell to proudly announce the arrival of their adopted children, further raising the profile of the process and accelerating public understanding that it's another normal way of forming a family. And it allows adoptees to learn that they aren't "different" in any negative sense, though they've been treated that way in the past; rather, they're part of a big, successful community whose members range from baseball legend Jim Palmer to former President Gerald Ford to Apple Computer founder Steve Jobs (p. 5)."

This, however, is where the bright side of the foster-care picture begins to darken. The numbers of children who become eligible to be adopted by caring and loving families are the exception, and not the rule of the foster care system. The goal of foster care is provide a temporary setting for children whose lives have been disrupted by family circumstances beyond their control, and the hope is that by way of the family's own, or court supervised guidance, the child's family will be able to take the child back into the birth parents' home again.

Geenen and Powers report that children in foster care do not do as well in school as do children living in their birth parents' homes.

The educational performance of foster care youths in general has been substantially investigated, and research indicates that this group of students is struggling in school. For example, Joiner (2001) found that foster youths have a high rate of absenteeism; Burley and Halpern (2001) demonstrated that foster youths score 15% to 20% below their peers on statewide achievement tests. Blome (1997) found that foster youths dropped out of school at twice the rate of youths not in care, and in a Maine survey, 40% of foster youths had repeated at least one grade (Edmund S. Muskie School of Public Service, 1999) (Geenen and Powers, 2006, p. 233)."

Moreover, Geenen and Powers report that children suffering mental and physical disabilities remain in home settings with volunteer foster parents instead of the recommended institutional settings that help their disability with continuity and structure in care (p. 233). This is because the number of institutional settings available to children in the foster-care programs who suffer from disabilities is limited, and, especially when states are looking at privatization along the lines of the managed care model, we can expect that these institutions, like hospitals, will suffer the corporate driven goals and balance sheets of the managed care organizations into whose trust the well being of these children is being placed to become even less available to them.

Each year, between 1,000 and 1,200 children will die from abuse or neglect in the United States. These numbers are estimated to be unchanged in national reporting data over the last decade. Inconsistent state reporting, uninvestigated suspicious child deaths, and deaths misidentified as accidental or SIDS are factors in this number being an estimate only (Brittain and Hunt, 2004, p. 343)."

While it is in the interest of the children and families to work towards temporary placement in foster-care, there are occasions when tough decisions must be made to permanently remove a child from a home. This decision, difficult as it may be, should be based on the evidence available to child protective services, and should prevent the child from further physical and mental harm that could result in the loss of life. However, the very circumstances that cause a child to become a ward of the state often is the very circumstances of abuse and neglect into which the states place children.

Children under 6 years old account for 85% of all child abuse deaths, and children aged 1 year and under account for 44% of all child abuse deaths, according to the 2000 U.S. Department of Health and Human Services report (2002). Most are killed by a parent or caregiver; often both parents or caregivers are responsible; and both genders of victims are equally victimized. Despite the high-profile cases in recent years, the national data reports that only 12.5% of these families had received services in the 5 years prior to the deaths, and 2.1% of these deaths occurred in foster care (Brittain and Hunt, 2004, p. 343)."

It is not acceptable that children be removed from family settings where they are at risk, and put into foster settings that result in the loss of life. States must work harder to ensure the safety of children in foster care programs, and this means physical and mental abuses that do not result in death too. Child protective agencies in the individual states must be staffed to be able to deal with the volume of inspections, background investigations and regular in-person, on-site visits to the foster care settings. States receive billions of dollars in federal aid, and while the cost of programs is in fact expensive, a well managed system should be able to survive on the state and federal dollars devoted to those programs.

Conclusion

The child foster care system that arose out of the 19th century philanthropy and private organizations' concern for the safety and well being of the country's children began with good intentions. Unfortunately, the very programs that grew out of those good intentions became mired down in administrative weights that prevented them from developing in ways that would best serve all children, regardless of race or religion. The progress that was made well into the mid 20th century, is now in danger of sliding backwards, and once it begins that backward slide, it becomes difficult to say how far back it will slide.