UPDATED, NOVEMBER 2024
There are a couple of studies that I cite so often on this
blog and elsewhere that I once suggested readers could run a betting pool to
guess which paragraph would contain the reference.
They are the three massive
studies of more than 15,000 typical cases conducted by MIT researcher Prof.
Joseph Doyle. The longitudinal studies
compared children in typical child welfare cases who were placed in foster care
to children experiencing the same sort of alleged abuse or neglect who were
left in their own homes.
The studies didn’t guess what happened to these children
based on subjective assessments. And the studies didn’t track the children for
just a few months or maybe a year or two.
These studies tracked the children all the way into late adolescence and
young adulthood and looked at what actually happened to them. Typically, on measure after measure, the
children left in their own homes did better.
A second, even larger study, confirmed the findings.
That was a decade ago.
In all the time since, the study has remained definitive. Nothing has
matched it for size, scope or rigor. The closest that foster-care apologists
could come to finding a flaw is their claim that the studies didn’t follow
young children. (In fact, they followed
children as young as age 5.)
So the only straw at which the foster-care apologists could
grasp was the hope – with no evidence – that the results would be different for
even younger children.
But that ignored still another study, (also discussed here) from University of
Minnesota researchers. Using different
methodology and outcomes, but again tracking actual outcomes all the way into
adolescence, this study looked at children who first entered foster care
anywhere from birth to age 9. This study
also was an apples-to-apples comparison. The researchers looked at children under comparable
circumstances and it, too, found that the children left in their own homes did
better.
OK, the foster care apologists might say, but what about
just infants. If we limit the study to just infants will we get the results we
want? No. Not even when the infants are
born with cocaine in their systems.
University of
Florida researchers studied two groups of such children; one group was placed in foster care,
another left 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,
reaching out. Typically, the children
left with their birth mothers did better.
For the foster children, the separation from their mothers was more
toxic than the cocaine.
None of these studies is perfect, of course. But compare the
rigor of these studies to the best the foster-care apologists can come
up with.
The 2018 study
And
now comes study #6. Unlike the others,
this one concerns children in Finland.
Once again it directly examined comparable cases. Once again it tracked
the children all the way to young adulthood.
And, like the Minnesota study, this one was limited to young children –
ages 2 to 6. Once again, the children
left in their own homes did better.
The researchers note one point about their child welfare
system that they seem to think might make it different from the one in the
United States. They write:
…in the Finnish
context, the main reason for placement is not abuse but some level of neglect
or inability to care for the child as a result of parental poor mental health,
financial difficulties or the accumulation of problems.
But in fact, those are the main
reasons for placement in the United States as well. And, as this investigative report from
Finland’s public broadcaster YLE makes clear, the Finnish system’s denial of
due process and penchant for needless removal are depressingly similar to the
American system.
The fact that researchers got these results in Finland is
important for a very different reason: In America foster-care apologists
constantly blame the rotten outcomes of foster care on the fact that the system
is underfunded. If only we had more
money, they claim, we could fix it.
But Finland is a world leader in social welfare spending; by
some measures it’s
#1 in the European Union. If money
is the problem, then the results from Finland should be vastly different. That they are not is still more evidence that
foster care is inherently so traumatic for a child that it is fundamentally
unfixable.
The 2019 Studies
This study took a different approach. It compared families who received high-quality interdisciplinary family defense to families that did not. Children of the families who received this defense spent significantly less time in foster care, with no compromise of safety.
Another study in 2019 compared mental health outcomes for maltreated children placed in foster care compared to those left in their own homes. The foster children were nearly twice as likely to suffer from Reactive Attachment Disorder - not surprising, since one cause of RAD is "repeated changes of primary caregivers. ..."
A study of the studies
And then there's this, from a review of studies concerning the impact of foster care on criminal behavior:
Many studies (82% of the eleven studies that addressed the
first research question) showed higher rates of offending behavior for
maltreated youth placed in foster care compared to those who remained at home,
while some studies (27%) found no difference between the two groups of
maltreated youth. One study showed higher risk of offending for maltreated
youth who remained at home compared to maltreated youth placed in foster care
only. Another study showed mixed findings ...
None of this means that no child ever should be placed in foster care. But it all shows that foster care is an extremely toxic intervention that should be used sparingly and in small doses. And, at long last, the burden of proof should shift from those who want children to remain safely in their own homes to those who want those children taken away.
Special thanks to Alia Innovations, whose own review of the literature led me to the studies cited in this update.
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