To the Editor:
Re “To Protect Kids, We Need More Foster Care, Not Less,” by Naomi Schaefer Riley (Opinion guest essay, May 13):
Pieces like this express concern about the well-being of children while ignoring the daily harms caused by family separation. The trauma of being ripped away from their parents and placed in the foster system with strangers often results in children developing a host of challenges, including poor mental and physical health, low educational achievement, high rates of homelessness and early pregnancy, and involvement in criminal activities.
The overreliance on family separation for children who aren’t in any immediate danger destroys families who could have remained together with the right support. The parents we work with every day love their children, but they often lack access to vital resources like secure housing, child care, nutritious food, mental health care and transportation.
In New York, allegations of neglect — many times because of a lack of resources — account for the vast majority of complaints against parents. We know that Black and brown families are especially vulnerable to being separated during invasive and coercive investigations.
Rather than overfunding punitive systems that do more harm than good, we must invest in the health and stability of vulnerable families.
Tehra Coles
New York
The writer is executive director of the Center for Family Representation.
To the Editor:
This essay cogently highlights the well-intentioned but often dangerous trend of keeping children in risky settings. Unfortunately, it’s not only keeping children out of foster care; it’s also how many child welfare officials now approach adoption — seeking to have children be with their birth family, even when it is unsafe or when reunification efforts have failed for years.
In 1997 Congress sought to solve the problem of children lingering in foster care by passing the Adoption and Safe Families Act to limit how long children spent in the child welfare system before initiating the adoption process. Shortly after the bipartisan law was passed, timelines for children in foster care significantly decreased. Now, this law is largely ignored.
The most recent child welfare data show that 20 percent of the nearly 370,000 children in foster care have been in the system for three or more years, which means children spending more time without the love of an adoptive family.
Ryan Hanlon
Alexandria, Va.
The writer is president of the National Council for Adoption.
To the Editor:
I have worked in the child welfare system as an attorney representing foster youth in the Bay Area for 18 years. The greatest flaw of the system, in my view, is the child welfare agency’s failure to identify family or family friends immediately upon removal of a child from their parent(s), so the child can safely remain in the care of someone they know, whether temporarily or longer term.
The act of removing a child from their parent(s) and placing them in a foster home with “strangers” has documented and obvious damaging consequences to a child’s emotional, physical and psychological health. The time that child welfare agencies often take to identify, contact and clear a relative or family friend for placement is problematic. More emphasis and resources must be devoted to this stage of the case.
A society that unequivocally cares about children would eliminate barriers that child welfare agencies create to circumvent and delay placing a child who they determine must be removed from parental care with a familiar face. Those of us working in this field witness the traumatic impact of this flawed system on children and families daily.
Vicki Trapalis
San Francisco
To the Editor:
Naomi Schaefer Riley attributes children’s deaths to efforts by child welfare agencies to keep at-risk families together. However, she fails to account for the many cities and states where significant reductions in children entering foster care have not led to any uptick in child maltreatment fatalities, such as New York City, Texas and New Jersey.
Data shows that the two trends described — efforts to reduce family separation and increased fatalities — are not happening in the same places. Texas, for instance, has recently reduced both foster care placement and fatalities, while both have increased in Georgia.
Research published in the Children and Youth Services Review shows that horrific child fatalities like Phoenix Castro’s, cited by Ms. Riley, represent “extreme outliers,” and that sensationalized media coverage leads to “foster care panics,” when child welfare agencies make politically conservative decisions that separate families unnecessarily, traumatizing children.
It’s important that we understand the facts about these tragic but rare deaths and the policies that actually protect children.
Nora McCarthy
New York
The writer is the director of the NYC Family Policy Project, a think tank.
To the Editor:
The author uses the age-old tactic of highlighting an outlier case where a child tragically dies in the care of their parent as justification for erring on the side of caution and removing children from their families.
The reality is that unlike the horror stories that are portrayed in the media, physical and sexual abuse accounted for only 17 percent of the children that were removed from their parents last year. Most removals are due to “neglect,” a nebulous and vague term because poverty is often conflated with neglect.
And for those children who are placed in foster care, safety is far from guaranteed. One study found that children in foster care were 42 percent more likely to die than those in the general population. Multiple studies show that foster children experience physical and sexual abuse at higher rates than the general population. Many children have died in foster care.
Our society continues to perpetuate the well-debunked myth that foster care ensures that children will live better lives. As Naomi Schaefer Riley admits, “Foster care is not a panacea.” That’s the one thing we can agree upon.
Shanta Trivedi
Baltimore
The writer is faculty director of the Sayra and Neil Meyerhoff Center for Families, Children and the Courts and an assistant professor of law at the University of Baltimore School of Law.