Back when cases involving
missing children – many of them runaways from foster care – were making
headlines in Washington, D.C., Marie Cohen rushed to try to shift
responsibility from a failing foster care system. She told us to be sure to remember that a majority of missing children
in the District of Columbia “are fleeing their own homes, not foster care.”
That’s a testament not to
the success of foster care but rather to the immutable laws of mathematics.
Despite the best efforts of those pushing endlessly for a
take-the-child-and-run approach to child welfare, a majority of children
still live in their own homes, so those will be the
homes from which a majority of runaways run.
To get a sense of the
extent to which foster care is a horror show for District children, one needs
to look at the proportion of runaways from
their own homes and from foster care. Foster children represent less than one
percent of all D.C. residents under age 18. Yet they
represent ten percent of the missing children.
This is
not exactly a testament to the success of foster care.
In fact, in another column Cohen herself recites a litany of what
she deems horror stories about D.C. foster parents she encountered. Well,
not quite a litany – she cites three examples. From there she tells us “many”
foster parents “siphon off” money meant for their foster children and that she
had to “parent most of the youth in my
caseload because their foster parents did not do so …” [emphasis added].
But sweeping
generalizations based on horror stories are no more valid when aimed at foster
parents than at birth parents. And even if, in fact, systematic research
reveals a widespread problem of D.C. foster parents in it for the money, the
likely cause would be an anomaly. Unlike most the country, D.C. has a history
of paying foster parents way too much.
The Real Horrors are Revealed by Data
The real reasons to worry
about needless foster care are the studies showing abuse in one-quarter to
one-third of foster homes – a problem illustrated in tragic detail this week by
the Arizona Republic – and the studies showing that the
inherent trauma of foster care placement is so great that, in typical cases,
children do better when left in their own homes. (If anyone conducted a betting
pool to predict the paragraph in which I would cite those studies this week,
congratulations to those who chose #7.)
Oddly,
having spent most of this particular column trashing many foster parents, Cohen
suggests that, somehow, if you put foster parents together in one place and
call it a “foster care community” everything will be fine. She does not explain
how these communities will have only the good foster parents she wants, and not
the bad ones she condemns.
Or we could just do what
Cohen always recommends: Institutionalize the children! Because if an
institution’s own website says it’s wonderful, who cares about the research proving this is the worst possible
option – or about all those scandals over the tendency of institutions to turn
into hellholes – the most recent examples exposed in Philadelphia in April and in California in May.
Of
course, institutions do have one big advantage: All the children are in one
place. That is not an advantage for the children; on the contrary, the problems
with putting a whole lot of young people who may have serious emotional
problems in the same place right at the age when they are most vulnerable to
peer pressure should be obvious.
But
it’s a great advantage for caseworkers who might be upset about what an
imposition it is upon them to have to spend time in a motor vehicle with the
children one is supposedly helping, or even, declares Cohen, saving.
As she has before, Cohen complains about driving foster children. In the
course of listing some of the things that prompted her to quit her job as a
caseworker she writes:
Things that I did that the
foster parents were supposed to do included: take my clients to the doctor, the
dentist, and the therapist. Talk to their teachers. Pick them up from school
when they were sick. Wait with them for hours at the emergency room.
I’m
sure that, as she sat beside frightened, vulnerable foster children she’d taken
to the E.R., Cohen tried to hide how much she resented having to be there. I
hope she succeeded.
Extra time
spent with foster children, wherever it may take place, could be viewed as a
gift, not a burden. It’s a chance to talk to a foster child without
interruptions, truly get to know her or him and, maybe, discover new ways to
help. The same is true of chances to talk to foster children’s teachers.
There
are times when parents really are horrible and children really need to be saved
from those parents. There are times when foster care really is the least
detrimental alternative. But everything from the mass of research to the foster
children who vote with their feet tells us that, sometimes, what children
really need is to be saved from their saviors.
