Saying we don’t know if foster care causes rotten outcomes for foster children is like saying we don’t know if cigarettes cause cancer Photo from Libreshot |
“Good News,
Congressfolk!” says Mr. Butts. “The evidence linking smoking with cancer and
heart disease is still inconclusive!
That’s right, the jury is still out! Is that great or what?”
I thought of Mr.
Butts as I read a column by Naomi Schaefer Riley in which she tries to persuade us that, when
it comes to whether it is harmful to tear a child away from everyone he knows
and loves and consign him to foster care – well, the jury is still out.
Riley, you may recall, is a now former blogger for the Chronicle
of Higher Education. She was kicked off that blog after writing a vile
column smearing the entire field of Black Studies – based solely on her disdain
for the titles and summaries of three dissertations in the field. Years later, in a column for Rupert Murdoch’s
New York Post, she would go on to
explain that racism is so over because
African-Americans have full legal rights. Hate crimes are anomalies. Black people are running corporations, universities and until recently the White House.
So who could
possibly be a better judge of whether children in foster care – children who
are overwhelmingly poor and disproportionately nonwhite – are harmed by being
there?
Pipeline, what pipeline?
Riley is upset by
the notion of a “foster care to prison pipeline” – that is, the idea that if a
child is placed in foster care the harm of that experience makes it more likely
that the child will wind up in jail. She
seems even more upset by the notion that racial bias might contribute to the
needless removal of children - after all, racism is over, remember?
Riley doesn’t deny
that former foster children are overrepresented in our prisons. She does not
deny – but also doesn’t mention – a whole slew of other rotten outcomes for a
shocking number of children who endure foster care, such as their high rates of
unemployment, food insecurity and homelessness, and their extremely low rate of
college graduation.
Rather she falls
back on the classic excuse of America’s foster care-industrial complex: Hey,
it’s not our fault; those kids were
all messed up by their no-good parents before we ever got 'em. What do you
expect us to do, actually make things
better?
So Riley claims that
“We can’t separate the effect of kids being in abusive and/or neglectful homes
and the effect of the foster care system.”
There are two
problems with this claim. First, not all children placed in foster care came from
“abusive and/or neglectful homes.” Many came from homes that were simply poor.
And second, the
claim that we can’t separate the effect of the children’s circumstances before
foster care to the effect of foster care itself is simply not true.
We can. And we have.
Findings from the definitive studies
MIT Prof. Joseph
Doyle did a direct head-to-head comparison of outcomes in typical child welfare cases.
He looked at records of more than 15,000 children, followed them all the way
into their late teen years and, in some cases, young adulthood. He compared children placed in foster care to
comparably-maltreated children left in their own homes. He focused on the
typical cases, not the extremes. Most important, he didn’t simply make a
subjective assessment of the youths, or rely on the subjective assessments of
others. Rather, he looked at what
actually happened to them.
Compared to the
comparably maltreated children left in their own homes, the foster children
were:
● Less likely to
hold a job for at least three years.
● More likely to
become pregnant as teenagers.
● More likely to be
involved in the juvenile justice system.
● More likely to be
arrested as young adults.
And, by the way,
these studies are not alone. A third study, from researchers at the University of
Minnesota, using different methodology and outcome measures also found that
children placed in foster care fared worse than comparably-maltreated children
left in their own homes.
So yes, Naomi, there
is a foster care to prison pipeline – and a whole lot of other harm, too.
To make her Mr.
Butts-style the-jury-is-still-out case, Riley cites one article, by Youngmin Yi and Christopher Wildeman of Cornell University in
which the authors claim that
prior research provides little insight into the direct effects of foster care placement on children: the few studies designed to isolate the effect of foster care placement haven’t reached a consensus regarding its impact on children.
A foundation of sand
But Yi and Wildeman
build their case on a foundation of sand. They rely on a single, smaller study by Lawrence Berger and colleagues at the University of Wisconsin,
using far more subjective criteria than the MIT studies, and suggest this
somehow is equal to the MIT studies. (They don’t mention the University of
Minnesota study at all.)
The MIT studies
followed children well into adolescence and beyond, and looked at what actually
happened to the children. The University of Wisconsin study followed children
for an average of only two-and-a-half years, measured only two outcomes and,
for one of those outcomes – the extent of the children’s behavioral problems - relied
on questionnaires filled out by the children’s current caretakers. Obviously
that’s a far more subjective method than the method used for the MIT studies – seeing
what actually happened to the youth.
Compounding the
problem: Berger and his co-authors admit that when these sorts of
questionnaires are filled out by different people at different times, it “may
be problematic.” No kidding. In fact, alleged “differences” in behavior
may simply mean differing perceptions by the people filling out the questionnaires.
They fail to
acknowledge still another problem: Foster parents were asked to fill out a
questionnaire assessing the children’s behavior while in their foster homes. In effect, they’re being asked how well they
are doing as foster parents. No chance of bias there!
Berger & Co.
then use several different “analytic models” to compare the two outcomes,
including the subjective evaluations of behavior for the foster children and the
subjective evaluations of behavior for the children left in their own homes.
They argue that the model that produced the results most favorable to foster
care is the least biased.
After all that: no improvement
But even this method
for calculating results from this one study did not find that foster care made
things any better for the children. The
best Berger and Co. could say is that, using some of the models they applied to
a partially subjective evaluation of only two outcomes, the foster children didn’t do any worse than the children
left in their own homes.
Consider the
implications: Suppose you went to a
doctor complaining of an illness. The
doctor said: “I’d like to prescribe this medicine. Massive studies indicate
that the medicine has terrible side effects and may well make you sicker. But there is one study that says it won’t do
you any good, but it won’t actually hurt you.”
Would you take the
medicine?
Of course, it’s
worse for foster children. They have no choice. Similarly, the Mr. Butts
approach to research is worse when the topic is foster care than when the topic
is tobacco. At least no one is forced to smoke cigarettes.
Trashing kinship care
But Riley doesn’t
stop with sliming birth parents. She also slimes the least harmful form of
foster care, kinship care - placing children with relatives instead of total
strangers. She quotes a conference
speaker from Harvard who claimed that “If you have a parent who has been
arrested, you are twice as likely to have an aunt or an uncle who has been
arrested.”
To which the proper
scientific response is: So what?
For starters, many
parents who lose children to foster care have not been arrested. Others have
been arrested for the same basic reason their kids were taken: they are poor
and nonwhite. And being arrested does not preclude being a good parent –
something that is apparently beyond the ability of some academicians to
understand.
And here, again, the
evidence is in. Multiple studies have found that kinship care typically is better for children’s
well-being, more stable, and, most important, safer than what should properly be called stranger care.
In fact, even
Youngman Yi and Christopher Wildeman admit this. In the same article Riley cites when it
supports her point of view, Yi and Wildeman also write that:
A wealth of evidence illustrates the benefits of kin-based care relative to other placement types and shows that existing social networks play a critical role in supporting children’s wellbeing.
For some reason,
Riley doesn’t mention that part of the article.
Foster care is fundamentally unfixable
And what does Riley
propose as an alternative to curbing the needless removal of children? The
usual foster care-industrial complex bromide: Make foster care “better.”
Well yes, we could
make foster care better. But not by
much. Here again that pesky research
gets in the way.
One of the many, many studies documenting the horrible outcomes for foster
children found that only 20 percent of the children studied were doing well as
young adults. But this same study also
attempted something else: It came up with a formula to estimate how much better
the outcomes would be if somehow everything wrong with foster care were fixed
and the system were perfect. The answer: The outcomes would improve by 22.2
percent.
So if foster care
were made perfect, it would churn out walking wounded only three times out of
five instead of four.
That’s well worth
trying. But the real lesson from that study, and all the others, is that foster
care is fundamentally unfixable.
But Riley really
reveals her true colors when she explains how
to “fix” foster care. Her first recommendation “We could do a better job
recruiting more stable middle-class
families of all races.” [Emphasis added.]
Right. Because
nothing is more important for a child’s well-being than how much money his
caretakers have.
None of this means
that no child ever should be placed in foster care.
There are times when
parents really are horrible and children really need to be saved from those
parents. There are times when foster care clearly is the least bad option. Not
a good option, but the least detrimental
alternative.
Burden of proof
As so often happens
when foster-care apologists try to defend the system, they put the burden of
proof in the wrong place. Long ago,
when I was just starting out as a reporter, it was actually the head of an
adoption agency who said something I've never forgotten: "The burden of
proof should always rest with those who believe children don't belong in their
families."
Yet Riley suggests
the fact that there exists a study showing that foster care does not make
things worse is reason enough to keep right on throwing children into the
system – and failing to hold the system accountable for what happens to those
children. When will we finally demand
that the foster-care apologists prove that their intervention is actually
better for children in typical child welfare cases?
Of course they can’t
do that. Because, contrary to Riley’s
claim, when it comes to the way the foster care system harms children in
typical cases, the jury is in. And the
verdict is best summed up by another famous line from Doonesbury:
“Guilty, guilty, guilty!”