HELPING PARENTS OF CHILDREN AT RISK IS BETTER THAN FOSTER CARE

No one ever accused Norma Rodriquez of beating her children. No one ever
said the Memphis woman sexually abused them. No one said she abandoned
them. No one said she was a drug abuser. The only thing she did wrong was
to be evicted because she couldn't pay the rent. When she sought help, the
only help offered by the state of Tennessee was to throw her children into
foster care.

For 11 months, the children endured the emotional trauma of losing not only
a loving mother but also each other as they were farmed out to separate
foster homes. No matter how good those homes might have been, for younger
children who can't understand what's happening to them, it can be an
experience akin to a kidnapping.

And, even now, the foster parents of one of the children are trying to get
him back, making an argument that boils down to: We can take better care of
him because we're richer.

No one ever accused Petra Nolan of Ripley, Tenn., of beating, or starving,
or abandoning her children. Nolan's only crime is to be partially
paralyzed, so she's not always able to keep up with her three children
while her husband is at work. So one day, her 4-year-old, Dewayne, got lost
in the woods overnight near the Mississippi. The Nolans' home also was messy.

Rather than provide help to supervise the children and clean the house, the
Nolan children also suffered the trauma of separation from loving parents
and from each other. Poor Dewayne almost certainly thought he was being
punished for getting lost.

We've heard a lot about a so-called shortage of foster parents in Tennessee
and around the nation. But the truth is, Tennessee doesn't have a shortage
of foster parents. Tennessee has a surplus of foster children because
Tennessee keeps taking away children like the children of Norma Rodriquez
and Petra Nolan. These children take places that should be reserved for
children in real danger -- creating an artificial shortage of foster parents.

That's one of the reasons the foster care population in Tennessee has
soared from 9,114 in 1996 to 11,300 today. And, sadly, Tennessee is not
unusual. The dominant philosophy in child welfare agencies all over the
country can be boiled down to a single sentence: Take the child and run.
And that has had disastrous consequences for children.

Of course, parents like Norma Rodriguez and Petra Nolan aren't what comes
to mind when we hear the words "child abuse." Rather, we think of parents
who rape, torture and sometimes murder their children. But these cases are
a tiny fraction of those dealt with by agencies like the Department of
Children's Services.

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 like the Rodriguez and Nolan cases, in which a family's
poverty has been confused with child neglect.

Often a rent subsidy, some housekeeping help or a place in a day-care
center to avoid a lack of supervision charge may be all that is needed to
keep a family together. In more complicated cases, Intensive Family
Preservation Services programs have kept tens of thousands of families
together all over the country. Such programs are less expensive than foster
care and, more important, safer.

Though most foster parents try to do the best they can for their children,
the rate of abuse in foster care is far higher than in the general
population and far higher than generally realized. The record for
institutions is worse. And foster care gets more dangerous when states take
away too many children, tempting agencies to overcrowd homes and lower
standards.

Other cases fall on a broad continuum between the extremes, the parents
neither all victim nor all villain.

Some of those cases involve drug abuse. And that raises a question: Why
even bother with the parents in those cases? The answer is, we shouldn't
bother for the sake of the parents but for their children.

In a University of Florida study of crack babies, one group was placed in
foster care, another with birth mothers able to care for them. After six
months, the babies were tested using all the usual measures of infant
development: rolling over, sitting up and 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. Therefore, if we really believe all the rhetoric
about the needs of the children coming first, we must put those needs
before anything -- even our anger at their parents.

And that means Tennessee should be diverting resources from foster care to
drug treatment programs, including impatient programs where parents and
children can live together, such as Renewal House in Nashville.

Even the head of one of the state's largest residential treatment programs
agrees. Patrick Lawler of Youth Villages has reoriented his entire program
to make families partners instead of adversaries -- and he had to fight the
state to do it. The result: more children kept safely in their own homes
and far better outcomes for the children.

"I used to think we could do a better job of raising these children,"
Lawler has said. "We know better now. The best way to help a child is to
help his or her family."

A few communities have implemented Lawler's vision on a wide scale.
Alabama, for example, is rebuilding its entire system to emphasize keeping
families together. The number of children in foster care is down
significantly, and an independent, court-appointed monitor has found that
children are safer now than before the changes. (Fortunately, one of the
leaders of the Alabama reform efforts is on the panel overseeing the foster
care consent decree in Tennessee).

Alabama, and a few other places, have figured out what Tennessee has yet to
learn: The only way to fix foster care is to have less of it.