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 Children
Enter the Foster Care System in Record Numbers
Institutions
Harm Children
Foster
Care is Less Expensive and More Effective Care
Family-based
Alternatives Speed Permanency Planning
Foster
Parents Successfully Adopt Special Needs Children
Adoption
Saves Money
Summary
CHILDREN ENTER THE FOSTER CARE SYSTEM IN RECORD NUMBERS
- From 1986 to 1993 the foster care population grew from 276,000 to 452,000.
- Infants and young children comprise the fastest growing segment of the foster care
population. They also stay in care longer than children who enter care at older ages.
- It is estimated that about 25% of children in substitute care are so damaged as to
require a major investment in treatment. Many of these children are teens who have spent
years in the child welfare system rotating from one placement to another, sometimes ending
up on the streets.
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INSTITUTIONS HARM CHILDREN
- Institutionalized children are denied the opportunity to form a consistent relationship
with a caregiver in their early years and are at serious risk for developmental problems
and long-term personality disorders.
- Many insecurely attached, institutionalized children lack empathy, seek behavior in
negative ways, exhibit poor self-confidence, show indiscriminate affection toward adults,
are prone to noncompliance, and are more aggressive than their non-institutionalized
counterpart.
- Insecurely attached children rebound from adversity far less effectively than securely
attached children.
- With few exceptions, children reared in poor quality institutions fail to sit, stand,
walk, and talk by age four.
- Close examination reveals that even good institutions harm young children, leave teens
ill-prepared for the outside world, and cost over three times more than a permanent,
loving family.
- The Child Welfare League of America, Inc estimates that the average cost of
institutional child care is $36,500 per child per year. One child in basic family foster
care costs the system only $4,500 per year. Specialized, treatment foster care costs
$12,000 per child per year. Adoption assistance costs between $2,880 and $12,000 per child
per year.
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FOSTER CARE IS LESS EXPENSIVE AND MORE EFFECTIVE CARE
- Infants, young children, and teens with special needs benefit from treatment foster
care. Treatment foster care is a less expensive, more effective alternative to
institutional care.
- Treatment foster care programs provide more integrated, comprehensive services in a
community setting compared to institutional care. At follow-up, children discharged from
treatment foster care show better adjustment and greater stability than children who were
institutionalized.
- Children in treatment foster care programs spend more time with adults who supervise and
teach; children in residential or institutional care spend more time with deviant peers.
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FAMILY-BASED ALTERNATIVES SPEED PERMANENCY PLANNING
- Agencies achieve permanency for children sooner when foster parents, foster children,
and biological parents are served in a coordinated fashion. Through concurrent Planning,
workers can legally consider reunification and termination of parental rights
simultaneously— a practice that often paves the way for biological parents to
voluntarily relinquish their parental rights. Specially prepared foster parents adopt
foster children, often in "open adoption" arrangements.
- Whole Family Foster Care in St. Paul, Minnesota places whole families—children plus
parents—with "mentor" foster families who model consistency, clarity, and
stability. Biological families have had good outcomes, leaving child protection rolls and
graduating successfully to independent living.
- Project L.I.F.E. in Royal Oak, Michigan recruits, trains, and takes eligible families
off AFDC to care for special needs foster children. Project L.I.F.E. estimates that the
government saves $25,000 in AFDC and institutional costs per family per year by using this
family-based alternative.
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FOSTER PARENTS SUCCESSFULLY ADOPT SPECIAL NEEDS CHILDREN
- Programs that train foster and adoptive parents together and emphasize permanency for
children yield significant increases in foster parent adoptions.
- In a study of almost 800 families that adopted special needs children, researchers found
that overall, adoption had a positive impact on families. Outcomes were excellent or good
for single-parent families and families with lower education, lower income, and minority
status.
- Adoption subsidies have been vital to opening up adoption opportunities to minority and
low-income foster families. Researchers found that for high-risk adoptions, subsidies
lessen the chance of disruption.
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ADOPTION SAVES MONEY
- From 1983 to 1987, the federal government saved $815 million in foster care
administrative costs by placing 40,700 children in adoptive homes with adoption subsidies.
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SUMMARY
Many child advocates believe the child welfare system is functionally
bankrupt—that is incapable of providing a real commitment to the children and
families it is designed to serve. In its moment of total despair, the child welfare system
turns to archaic, institutional solutions. Meanwhile, the real solution stares the system
in the face: families—including reunited birth families, foster families, and
adoptive families.
Children Belong in Families— Not in Institutions
Infants and young children with special needs are flooding the child welfare system as
never before, and disturbed teens cycle in and out of placements, sometimes ending up on
the streets. This crisis calls out for the creative, family solutions reported here.
Government leaders and child welfare professionals must marshal resources, commit to
family care for children, and resolve not to warehouse young "inmates" in
institutions. Expedited permanency planning efforts should result in either biological
family reunification or termination of parental rights and adoption.
All children are adoptable: handicapped children, older children, sibling groups,
children with Down's syndrome, and children born exposed to drugs.
If children were made available at younger ages, more would be adopted. Models which
either reunite families or free children for adoption within a short time are an
imperative part of any viable plan to fix the child welfare system. Too often, the
underfunded child welfare and court systems slow a child's journey to permanency. We can
do better than orphanages, and we have, as witnessed in the examples reported above.
Algie Braly, now age 85, was four years old when he and his three older sisters and
younger brother were placed in the Brooklyn Orphanage Asylum by their mother who could no
longer care for them. A year or so later in 1910, all siblings rode the "Orphan
Train" to Arkansas. Each one was placed in a different home. Algie remembers caring
for his little brother Johnny before they were separated:
Johnny stayed by my side everywhere we went. We sat together when we ate at a big table
in the large orphanage dining area....They chose 125 of us and put us on a train bound for
Arkansas. They say we were on the orphan train for four or five days. When the train
reached its destination....my little brother Johnny clung to me desperately. Naturally
fear gripped my heart. Unfortunately all my sisters and my little brother and I were
separated, taken by different people. They pulled my little crying brother away from me.
You asked me if I cried. No, because I'd cried until I guess there were no more tears.
Algie Braly recalls that he could see the statue of liberty from a window in the
orphans' home and from chinks in the play yard wall. To this day, seeing the statue of
liberty brings a knot to his stomach. He says that the statue of liberty gives him
"...an unusually sad feeling and reminds me of a time when I was insecure"
(Braly, 1994).
"Orphan trains" were a novel idea in 1910, but they tore families and
siblings apart. The orphanage idea is not new, unique, or adequate for today's problems.
It is the easy way out. All children deserve the opportunity to pursue life, liberty, and
happiness. Families supply the best road map.
Countering the Call for Return to Orphanages Monday, May 22, 1995
9:45 AM to 11:15 AM Presenter: Joe Kroll, The Fourteenth Annual Conference of the National CASA Association,
May 20-23, 1995 Scottsdale, Arizona
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