FOSTER CARE NO PANACEA FOR ENDANGERED KIDS

University of Florida Medical Center researchers tracked the development of
two groups of infants born with cocaine in their systems. One group was
placed by child protective services in foster care, the other with birth
mothers able to care for them. After six months, the infants were tested
using all the usual measures of infant development: rolling over, sitting
up, reaching out. Consistently, the children placed with their birth
mothers did better.

For the foster children, the separation from their mothers was more toxic
than the cocaine.

It is extremely difficult to take a swing at "bad mothers" without the blow
landing on their children. But that's exactly what many in Arizona seem
intent on doing ever since the death of Anndreah Robertson made headlines.
Of course Anndreah never should have been allowed to live with her mother
and grandmother if they were smoking crack every day. And Department of
Economic Security Administrator John Clayton now tacitly acknowledges that
existing law did not, in fact, require it.

But some in Arizona want to declare any newborn with drugs in his or her
system automatically neglected and subject to being torn from his or her
mother. In the current climate of hysteria, this amounts to a policy of
confiscation at birth.

That will hurt enormous numbers of children in the name of "saving" them.
First, it will drive mothers away from prenatal care. There still will be
crack babies. They'll still be with their mothers. We just won't know who
they are.

Second, as the Florida study suggests, confiscation at birth causes
emotional trauma so severe it sets back infants' physical development. And
even that isn't the worst of it.

Though most foster parents try to do the best they can for the children in
their care, the abusive minority is significant and probably growing.

Academic studies consistently show far more abuse in foster care than in
the general population, and far more than revealed by official statistics -
data compiled by agencies investigating themselves.

Add thousands more children to the system and it would only lead to
overcrowded foster homes and lower standards for foster parents.

Potential For Disaster

That would mean even more abuse in foster care itself - and almost
certainly more cases like China Marie Davis and Tajuana Davidson, whose
deaths in Arizona foster homes shocked the state in the 1990s.

There is a far better option than confiscation at birth: drug treatment on
demand, including inpatient programs where parents and children can live
together.

Worse than the specific proposals involving drug-exposed infants is the
general, false assumption that the death of Anndreah Robertson proves that
authorities are bending over backward to put "parents' rights" ahead of
"child protection."

In fact, between 1990 and 2000, the number of foster children in Arizona
increased by at least 80 percent - hardly the record of an agency desperate
to keep families together.

Contrary to the common stereotype, most parents who lose their children to
foster care are neither brutally abusive nor hopelessly addicted. Far more
common are cases in which a family's poverty has been confused with child
"neglect."

Other cases fall on a broad continuum between the extremes, the parents
neither all victim nor all villain. In these cases, there are a wide
variety of proven programs that can keep these children in their own homes,
and do it with a far better track record for safety than foster care. But
such programs are smeared when the label "family preservation" is slapped
onto any decision to leave any child in any home under any circumstances,
when something goes wrong.

And that's exactly what's happening in Arizona right now.

Fault Is In The System

The real reason children like Anndreah sometimes die almost always is that
undertrained, underprepared caseworkers have overwhelming caseloads. As a
result, child welfare systems are arbitrary, capricious and cruel. They
leave some children in dangerous homes, even as they tear many other
children from homes that are safe or could be made safe with the right kind
of services.

The current frenzy over the Robertson case will only make this worse.

Terrified of having the next Anndreah Robertson on their caseload, workers
will rush to tear even more children needlessly from their parents. That
will further overwhelm the system. Workers will have less time for each
case, they will make more bad decisions in both directions, and more
children will wind up dead.

That's exactly what happened after similar "foster care panics" in Illinois
in 1993, New York City in 1996 and Florida in 1999. New York and Illinois
learned from their mistakes - they are reducing foster care and making
children safer by embracing safe, proven programs to keep families
together. Florida has not learned, and the whole nation has watched as that
state's system imploded.

Florida didn't learn from its foster care panic, and it didn't learn from
those "crack babies" who did better with their birth mothers than in foster
care.

Maybe Arizona will.