Foster care apologists set an incredibly low bar — and still can’t clear it.
A recent study in Sweden followed children in more than 21,000 cases of child abuse or neglect allegations. Part of the sample went to foster care, the others were allowed to stay in their homes.
It found that though the two groups were no worse off to begin with, by age 20, the foster children were more than four times more likely to have died than the children allowed to stay with their families. We’re not talking about a small difference: the study finds that if a child facing the prospect of being taken into care is indeed removed from their home, the risk of dying by the year they turn 20 increases from 1.8% to 8.6%.
The lead researcher on the study called the results “staggering.” She cautioned the findings might not apply in North America. But this is only the latest in a long, long line of studies, most from North America, finding worse outcomes for children placed in foster care than comparably maltreated children left in their own homes.
Like the one studying Canadian First Nations children, which concluded that foster care “worsened children’s health and legal system outcomes.” The study also found that foster care is “as risky (or more) as leaving a child requiring protection at home.”
Or the one that found foster children were nearly twice as likely to suffer from Reactive Attachment Disorder — not surprising, since one cause of RAD is “repeated changes of primary caregivers.”
Or the one that found that, even among children born with cocaine in their systems, at six months of age, the physical development of the children left with their mothers was better than that of those placed in foster care.
Or the review of 11 studies concerning criminal behavior, in which one had mixed findings, three found no difference and seven found that such behavior was worse for those who’d been in foster care.
That is on top of still another set of studies that find, over and over, abuse in one-quarter to one-third of family foster homes — and an even worse record in group homes and institutions. Some of these studies use conservative methodology; they may ask only about the home a child was in the longest, or they may exclude abuse by peers, so the real rate of abuse probably is higher.
What makes these findings even more staggering is that we’ve let foster care apologists set the bar for foster care success so low to begin with.
Call it the “compared to what?” factor.
None of these studies compares foster care to cases in which the families allowed to keep their children got whatever they needed to keep their children safe. None compared foster care to a program in which all the families were, say, guaranteed child care or adequate housing or, when substance abuse really impaired parenting, high-quality, appropriate drug treatment.
Instead, the comparison group consisted of families who got whatever the child welfare agency now overseeing them decided to dole out. Sometimes that might have been exactly what the family needed. But odds are, more often it would be a bunch of referral slips. Or maybe a cookie-cutter “service plan” forcing families to jump through assorted hoops and endure services that might have nothing to do with their actual needs. In some cases, the “services” could make things worse by adding burdens with no benefits. Or maybe they got nothing at all.
It is a testament to how inherently harmful family separation really is that, nevertheless, in so many studies, the foster children still do worse.
None of this means no children ever should be taken from their families. All of these studies represent averages. The horror stories upon which this entire system was built are extremely rare, but real. There will always be some children for whom foster care will be the least detrimental alternative. But the research demands we take far fewer children and, when it comes to the efficacy of foster care versus alternatives, we shift the burden of proof.
The very need to pile up all these studies means foster care apologists have succeeded in putting the burden of proof in the wrong place.
We’ve had more than half a century of what Bart Klika, chief research officer for Prevent Child Abuse America, called “health terrorism” — scaring people into embracing approaches that led to taking away more children and investigating more families, while “raising awareness,” all by extrapolating from horror stories. (Klika said his organization no longer uses such tactics.) As a result, foster care apologists have been able to scare the public into demanding that the rest of us prove, over and over, that alternatives to tearing apart families are safe and effective, while they must prove nothing.
A classic example is the Family First Prevention Services Act, which requires that backers of alternatives to foster care dot every i and cross every t on rigorous — and expensive — studies before those alternatives are fully eligible for funding. Can you imagine what would happen if, say, residential treatment centers had to meet that standard? At last, we’d be rid of those places! Because the entire model has been shown to be a failure.
The research pile is high enough. Now we need a new standard for using research to determine public child welfare policy: Those who want to keep taking away children at the current rate, or who want to take even more, should have to pile up research showing clearly and definitively that foster care typically is better than leaving children at home, and that only foster care could lead to such improvement — even when families of the children left at home get high-quality services geared to what they really need.
Similarly, if you’re going to defend a child welfare surveillance state in which one-third of all children and more than half of Black children will be investigated by family police agencies, shouldn’t the burden be on you to show that pounding on the door in the middle of the night, poring through the contents of drawers and cupboards, waking up the children, interviewing them and sometimes strip-searching them, really doesn’t do any harm to all those children? Especially considering that more than 80 percent of children were put through it all as a result of allegations the worker later did not “substantiate.”
In setting public policy, the burden of proof always should rest with those who think children don’t belong with their families.
