Growing up was an ordeal for William Hagen. He was only six when his mother and her live-in boyfriend began to abuse him. Although the abuse ended with the intervention of state child-protection officials, the misery did not, as Hagen found himself being bounced around from one home to another in a foster-care system which deprived him of any sense of permanence or belonging. He never counted how many foster homes he passed through between the ages of six (when he was first taken from his mother) and age 19 when he finally left the foster-care system, but he estimates that it was between 15 and 17 homes. With periodic, but unsuccessful, attempts to return him to his mother, Hagen had to move at least 30 times during those years. Nor did his understanding of the reasons for the state’s intervention ever fully enable him to accept it: "I was glad to not have the abuse happen," he now acknowledges, "but I had a strange sense of loyalty to my mother....I always wanted to go back."1

Lamentably, the number of children with similarly problematic experiences in foster care has skyrocketed in recent years, prompting many public officials to speak of a crisis in foster care. The well-being of hundreds of thousands of children, they warn, depends upon the infusion of much more money into the foster-care system for the employment of more foster-care social workers and the recruitment and training of many more foster-care families.

Before lawmakers appropriate more money for enlarging the foster-care system, perhaps they should take a sober look at the reasons for its troubles. For a thorough analysis of these troubles will reveal that the causes of these troubles extend far beyond the foster-care system itself. Under careful scrutiny, the problems that public officials now face in foster care thus turn out to be but the symptoms of a much wider and deeper crisis: a crisis in American family life. Trying to resolve the problems in foster care without addressing the overall retreat from family life makes about as much sense as buying ever larger pumps to pump the sea water out of the Zuider Zee–without ever bothering to find out where the dikes are leaking and why the leaks are growing. As the breaches in America’s social dams grow, policies focused narrowly on foster-care reform must prove both foolish and futile, sure to doom thousands of children to drowning in a wild and turbid flood. It is past time for merely bailing water; it is time to fix some dikes.

Number Crunched

Local and national officials now raising the cry of a "crisis in foster care" do not lack for statistics. In 1985, there were about 275,000 children in foster care in the United States (a figure already very high by historical standards), but by 2000, more than 540,000 children were in such care, despite the relatively depressed fertility throughout the period.2 The number of children entering foster care is still growing "at a dizzying rate," and–what is worse–children now entering the system "tend to be younger and more distressed," with foster-care workers now seeing more "children who set fires, sexually abuse others, torture animals, and attempt suicide."3

Even as the number of deeply traumatized children entering the system is skyrocketing, the number of foster homes available to place them in is plummeting, dropping from 147,000 in 1991 to just 100,000 in 1995. In 2000, officials in Massachusetts reported that the state was short 2,000 foster parents, so creating "an emergency" in foster care.4 In the same year, a single Florida city reported with alarm that it had "400 more foster kids than foster beds."5 One consequence of this shortage of foster-care homes is that children are often "crammed into over-capacity homes," so exposing them to "greater risk of abuse by overstressed foster parents or other kids."6 Moreover, foster children are consigned to "a longer stay in limbo," because overburdened caseworkers are forced to spend more time figuring out how to get new children into foster care and less time arranging for their release from foster care either through permanent reunification with their parents or through adoption. Inevitably, an extended stay in foster care means more bouncing around, especially at a time when so many foster families are now withdrawing from the foster-care system. In Nebraska (which is far from suffering from the worst foster-care problems), social workers report that the number of children who moved more than four times during their stay in foster care rose from 33% in 1992 to 47% in 1998. Similar trends have been reported in other jurisdictions. One New York boy was placed in a depressing 37 different homes within 2 months; another lived with 17 different families in just 25 days.7

These are the numbers, then, that officials cite to buttress their claim that we now face "a foster-care emergency," a "system in crisis," a foster-care system "on the verge of collapse," a "system out of control," and "a foster-care crisis worse than ever before."8 No set of statistics, no rhetoric of bureaucratic urgency can adequately represent what is really at stake here: the emotional and psychological well-being of tens of thousands of children. Public officials realize all too keenly that by forcing children to deal repeatedly with the pain of rejection, "it ‘re-traumatizes’ children every time they are moved."9 Yet the current upsurge in the number of children entering the foster-care system, at a time when foster families are dropping out far faster than they can be recruited, is forcing more and more children to deal with that pain. The current pressures on the system have also made inevitable the frequent separation of siblings–another cause of emotional trauma–and the increasingly common placement of foster children in distant jurisdictions, so rendering it difficult for extended family to visit.

In what probably constitutes the most galling irony of the foster-care quagmire, officials acknowledge that foster-care placement does not even do a very good job of shielding children from the evil which is typically the reason for their entering the system in the first place: child abuse. Although most foster parents demonstrate remarkable patience and love in caring for the troubled children in their care, a distressingly large minority not only fail to manifest such virtues, but actually abuse and victimize the children placed with them. One metropolitan jurisdiction found that "nearly a third of children taken from their families suffered some abuse by their foster parents."10 The horror stories associated with foster care include verified cases of foster parents who beat their charges with belts, force them to bathe with Clorox, and even kill them with wanton cruelty.11 In 1996 alone, 14 children were killed while in foster care.12 In the overcrowded foster homes increasingly relied upon by desperate social workers, it is often other foster children who are the abusers. A critic of the foster-care system points out that even "liberal definitions of abuse and neglect" yield a national incidence rate of between 2.3 percent and 4.9 percent in the general population, which is "far less maltreatment" than has been documented for the Seattle-based Casey Family foster-care program, regarded as "one of the very best in the nation" because of the low caseloads given its social workers and because of the special training given its foster parents. In this model program, 24 percent of female foster children who "aged-out" of foster care said that they had been "victims of actual or attempted sexual abuse" in the foster home in which they had stayed the longest.13

Subjected to the repeated traumas of relocation and abuse, denied the emotional support of siblings or relatives, many foster children slip over the edge into neuroses and depression. A 2000 study found that "children in foster care had Medicaid expenditures for mental health services that were more than 11.5 times greater than those expenditures for AFDC-eligible children," a comparison group which itself is "not notable for stellar health status."14 It should surprise no one that almost half of foster-care children drop out of high school and that a disturbingly high percentage of foster-care children end up homeless, imprisoned, or institutionalized as adults.15 As the Little Hoover Commission observed in 2000, "Despite benevolent intentions and billions of dollars, the government has proved to be a poor surrogate parent....In the end, troubled children often end up as troubled adults. The personal anguish becomes a public calamity."16

Fostering Problems

While some children come out of foster care healed and helped, the long-term track record for children who have spent time in such care is all too prominently marked with academic failure, crime, and homelessness. The true measure of foster-care pathos comes neither from sociologists nor social statisticians, but rather from the children themselves.

"It took me 3 or 4 years before I got adopted," recalls one former foster child. "And it’s the pits going from foster home to foster home.... It’s a killer. I wish kids didn’t have to go through that."17

The autobiographical reflections of another former foster child provide more of the details of their "killer" existence:

That the foster-care system is inflicting too much suffering on too many children, few will dispute. As to the right way to change the system so as to reduce that suffering, however, there is considerable disagreement. Some analysts see no flaws in the current system which cannot be remedied without higher levels of funding, better staffing of the state’s social-service agencies, and more aggressive recruiting of foster families. In this vein, Ames Alexander of Knight-Ridder writes that "much of the problem boils down to money." "Foster parents," he explains, "generally aren’t well-paid or well supported....And many counties aren’t recruiting effectively." "The funding squeeze," Ames adds, "has made it harder to recruit, train, and retain [foster-care] workers."19

To the contrary, many observers see the woes of foster care as too severe, too systemic, to be resolved by merely infusing more tax monies into the current system. "The foster care system, noble in intent, is a bureaucratic nightmare," in the opinion of journalist R. Bruce Dold, who sees "the revival of the orphanage" as the "unhappy, but unavoidable, choice" for policymakers.20 Likewise endorsing the orphanage as an option superior to that available through foster care, social worker Dick Thompson suggests that "perhaps we’ve been too hasty in trying to de-institutionalize everything. What we’re doing now [with foster children] is not working. The idea of returning to residential homes for security and stability has so much merit....We can’t go and confuse all these kids by trying to love them like their mothers and dads, but we can give them honest care, permanence, and stability."21 In endorsing this perspective, Federal Circuit Judge Estella Moriarty argues that "the foster-care system not only fails to prevent maternal deprivation, but also fails to provide the stability of place, friends, school and discipline that can be provided by an appropriate orphanage."22

Still, some experts decline to join in this new enthusiasm for orphanages, seeing in it desperation, not prudence. A professor of social work at the University of Calgary, Bill Cunes accuses advocates of orphanages of listening to too many former orphanage residents who have succumbed to the "Patty Hearst syndrome where the captive prisoner begins to identify with the captor."23 Some critics of the current foster-care system come down in favor not of orphanages, but rather of the children’s own parents. Thus, Richard Wexler of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform dismisses both the campaign to recruit more foster parents and the crusade to bring back the orphanage, insisting that "the only way to fix foster care is to have less of it." In his view, state officials often remove children from homes because "poverty is confused with neglect," or because housing is judged to be inadequate. The truth, he asserts, is that "the typical foster child is taken away from parents who are neither brutally abusive nor hopelessly addicted." Because they remove "too many children too quickly," state child-protection officials find themselves "overloaded with children who don’t need to be in foster care." As a consequence, these officials lack the time to identify properly those children who really do need to be in care. The result, in Wexler’s assessment, is that children’s workers make needless mistakes. "But nothing will change," he adds, "until the state confronts the problem of taking away too many children."24

Wexler’s argument for taking fewer children from their parents deserves serious consideration for several reasons. One very simple but legitimate reason for reducing foster-care placements is that foster care, like welfare, puts economic pressure on married-couple families by forcing married couples, who are supporting their own children directly through their earnings, to support other people’s children through taxes.25 A far more fundamental reason for reducing the number of foster-care placements is that children almost always suffer emotional distress upon being taken from their parents and being placed in the hands of strangers, no matter how conscientious and loving those strangers. In a fairly typical case, when the foster family was asked about their six-year-old foster daughter, they responded: "Oh, she cries often....I think she misses her mom and dad."26 Alexander suggests that as "wrenching" as abuse and neglect at home may be, for some children "being taken from their families can be even more so."27

Given the trauma typically suffered when children are taken from their families, it is particularly troubling that, in more than a few cases, state officials take this action on the basis of what the Washington Monthly criticizes as an "overly broad definition of abuse": using such a definition, state officials in many jurisdictions may take children from their parents and put them in foster care because of such dubious symptoms of sexual abuse as clinginess and thumb-sucking.28 Let no one minimize the trauma caused when state officials unnecessarily take children from their parents based on groundless accusations of child abuse. This trauma was well documented in 1992 by a grand jury in San Diego, which found that an alarming number of children were being separated from their parents and placed in foster care for "extended periods of time," because state officials were "determined to err on the side of assuming guilt" and were, therefore, "accept[ing] reports of molest[ation] as true, notwithstanding that they may [have been] inherently incredible, made for motives of harm or gain, or the product of months or years of ‘therapy.’"29

The arguments of Richard Wexler and the findings of the San Diego Grand Jury grow in gravity when viewed in historical context. For the lineage of the child-protection system (responsible for putting children in foster care) runs directly back to the problematic 19th-century movement of Child Savers, who frequently removed children from impoverished immigrant families judged to be insufficiently American. Though no state official would cite today such a justification for removing a child from a home, the legal doctrine of Parens Patriae ("the parenthood of the state"), first invoked by the Child-Saving zealots, remains the legal basis for today’s foster-care system. This doctrine, as historian Allan Carlson points out, is not rooted in the American Constitutional tradition, but in English chancery laws. Yet, under its influence, the autonomy of the American family has been seriously compromised as "parents [have seen] their rights of custody stripped away, without the niceties of due process, through an inquisitorial hearing into their character."30

Some activists may claim that respecting the rights of parents accused of abusing their children will mean exposing more children to harm. However, given the sorry record of foster-care workers in trying to protect children, it is difficult to fault the logic of the Florida judge who declared: "I’m not going to take a child from his home to be put in a foster home where he will be abused. If he is going to be abused, let him be abused by people who love him instead of being abused by strangers."31 Nor is it easy to dismiss the fears of those who worry that aggressive campaigns to recruit more foster-care families will increase the risk of foster-care abuse by attracting foster parents with mercenary–or even predatory–motives.32

Nonetheless, only the purblind can suppose that leaving children with their natural parents is a universal formula for minimizing children’s suffering or that Child-Saver style overreaching by state officials constitutes the primary reason for the upsurge in recent years in the placement of children in foster care. By any reckoning, far more children are in distressing circumstances than was the case 25 or 30 years ago. As a consequence of what historian William Manchester has termed the "general revolt against constraints which characterized the 1960s," a revolt which continues today, Americans have seen "the discipline that knits a society together...weaken[ed] and at some points giv[e] way altogether."33 Tens of thousands of children have been put at risk because of this disintegration of social discipline, with their neglectful or abusive parents–still living by the mindless mantras of the Sixties–doing drugs and violating every traditional precept of parental responsibility. As the news accounts of children beaten and even killed by live-in lovers makes horrifyingly clear, the post-Sixties repudiation of marriage as the basis for parenthood has been particularly perilous for children.

Illegitimacy

It is, therefore, the rising tide of illegitimacy which Heather McDonald deplores as she questions the costly efforts of state officials to keep at-risk children in their single-parent homes rather than removing them for adoption or foster care. Though this endeavor bears the name of "family preservation," McDonald sees in it merely an attempt to "legitimate illegitimacy" and subsidize "family fragments," all the while exposing children to terrible risk in "the mother-child groupings that are forever moving in and out of combination with boyfriends, aunts, cousins, and grandmothers."34 Brenda Nordlinger of the National Association of Homes and Services for Children underscores McDonald’s point when she notes that too often social workers confront situations in which "the mother is on crack, and so is the grandmother [and the father is nowhere to be seen]–that’s not a viable family."35 "There is no evidence that social services can compensate for the lack of personal responsibility that is fueling America’s epidemic of illegitimacy," McDonald remarks, as she assails the intellectual dishonesty of the typical "family preservation" initiative, which "studiously avoids any suggestion that there might be a connection between illegitimacy and family pathologies."36 Insofar as the welfare of children is concerned, the politically correct amoralism of today’s social workers offers no improvement over the zealotry of the high-minded Child Savers of the 19th century.

In highlighting illegitimacy as the primary reason so many children are now at risk, McDonald helps us get past much of the misleading rhetoric surrounding the crisis in foster care. So, too, does policy analyst Penelope Lemov, who acknowledges that "the reasons [that the number of families available to provide foster care is dwindling] have almost as much to do with society at large as with the system itself."37 For whether we are looking for the reason more children are suffering harm than in the past or for the reason that fewer families are available to provide foster care to palliate that harm, the answer is the same: society–more specifically, family life–has changed in troubling ways. Since children are least likely to suffer abuse in an intact family, the decline in recent decades in the marriage rate and the sharp rise in divorce and illegitimacy rates has translated into a sad toll of abused children needing foster care.38 Of course, these same changes concomitably have reduced the pool of families available to provide such care. The foster-care crisis is, therefore, merely the symptom of a much broader crisis in social life. It is the worst sort of foolishness to suppose that the crisis in foster care should be viewed as a discrete problem, amenable to managerial finesse, and not as the inescapable result of a widespread cultural malaise engendered by a broad retreat from family life. For the problems which bedevil the foster-care system are merely a bureaucratic concentration of problems increasingly prevalent as a consequence of family decay. Hence, the crisis in foster care may be taken as a portent, a sign of things to come, for all of society, if we do not reverse the retreat from family life.

For example, if we do not check the rising tide of illegitimacy, then many of the afflictions associated with foster-care abuse–academic failure, mental illness, adult homelessness, and imprisonment–will be visited on more and more children, regardless of what is done with the foster-care system. For illegitimate children are highly vulnerable to all these afflictions, regardless of whether they are ever placed in foster care.39 Consequently, policymakers will have done nothing for the overall welfare of children if they devote all their labor to improving the foster-care network, but do nothing to curb the epidemic of illegitimacy.

Divorce & Remarriage

Likewise, no one who worries about how foster care bounces children from home to home, caregiver to caregiver, can ignore the way in which divorce and remarriage often does something very similar, even if to a less pronounced degree. While some stepfamilies do succeed in establishing an atmosphere of love and harmony, they are unfortunately all too exceptional. Recent research has provided troubling validation of the traditional folklore in which the stepfamily appears as the setting for tension, discouragement, depression, and even abuse for children. Sociologists from Wright State University and the University of Dayton, for example, report that "children who experience the divorce and/or remarriage of their parents are at greater risk for psychological, academic, and health problems than are children who live continuously with both parents."40 This profile of pathologies thus disturbingly parallels that limned among foster-care children.

Moreover, the emotional scarring experienced by foster children forced to move again and again has also been experienced by tens of thousands of stepchildren: two out of three remarriages have failed in recent years, with these second (or third) divorces occasioning "new waves of grief and loss to every member of the family."41 That grief and loss often translates into behavior and psychological problems, academic failure, and crime. Whether we have in view foster children or stepchildren, we see the same "teeter-totter relationship" (sociologist David G. Myers’s term): "As the percentage of children living with both their natural parents has gone down, their rates of...neglect, abuse, criminality, emotional disorder, and academic failure have gone up."42 So long as the divorce rate remains high, reform of the foster-care system will not fix that teeter totter.

Indeed, reform of the foster-care system alone will do nothing to free American families from the legal entanglements which surround both foster care and divorce. For just as foster families find themselves enmeshed in the red tape and protocols of government bureaucracy, so too, divorced-parent families (including stepfamilies) find themselves subject to the constant intrusion of child-support officers, custody lawyers, and divorce-court judges. In both the divorced-parent family and the foster family, we view what attorney George S. Swan regards as the erosion of the family as "a freestanding institution mediating between the individual citizen and the central government.... Today’s family, continually threatened by dissolution, is less and less able to serve as the context in which millions of Americans...organize their lives independent of central political authority."43

Likewise reminiscent of the sad plight of foster-care children is the tragically elevated vulnerability to abuse which is found among stepchildren (as it is among foster children). One study found that "preschoolers living with one natural and one stepparent were 40 times more likely to become child abuse cases than were like-aged children living with two natural parents."44

Day Carelessness

Concerns about dangers faced by children not in the care of their natural parents might reasonably extend not only to children in foster care, but also to children in day care. For, like foster care, day care undermines children’s sense of stable relationships of trust. The repeated changes in caregivers which emotionally impair a foster child can have a similar effect on a child in day care. It is, therefore, entirely predictable that what one prominent critic has said about foster care (that it moves children around "so much that they don’t trust anyone after a while") nearly matches what a prominent child psychologist has said about day care: that it may be the way "history is preparing us for its future," a future which leaves "everyone out for himself" more than ever before.45The problem is not simply that placement in day care weakens the mother-child bond–though there is evidence indicating that this is so (especially for infants)46–the problem is also that once in day care, the young child is passed from caregiver to caregiver in a high-turnover institution. Because the best-informed analysts believe that "child-care wages are likely to stay at their extremely low levels," they predict that "the turnover rates in this occupation will continue to be high," meaning that children who form attachments to day-care workers–like foster children who form attachments to foster parents–will frequently feel the pain of having those attachments broken.47 Improving foster care will do nothing to spare children in day care this emotional distress.

Further, the rise in maternal employment, which has made day care so popular, is making foster care more difficult to arrange for those who need it, while also hurting children who don’t. In explaining the drop in the number of foster-care families, Lemov remarks, "More women are working, which means fewer mothers are at home to care for foster children."48 In Lemov’s observation, however, the word foster is superfluous; maternal employment outside the home means fewer mothers are home to care for their own children. This reality was quantified by a University of Virginia study concluding that "among families with preschoolers, mothers without a job spend 525 minutes in some contact with their children, more than twice the time of those with a job. Full-time mothers without a preschooler spend 355 minutes with their children [per week day], about two hours more [per week day] than their employed counterparts." This gap in maternal involvement showed up across "a wide range of activities" with "at-home mothers spending more time with their children than employed mothers in play, education, child care, homemaking and ‘fun.’"49

Despite feminist efforts to put a favorable interpretation on this maternal deficit, research is accumulating which links it to depressed academic performance (especially, but not exclusively, among sons), to compromised "early affectional relationships between parents and children," to "very high levels of noncompliance" among preschoolers, to adolescent anomie, to "parental withdrawal," and to "lower well-being for daughters."50 Whatever else it is doing, maternal employment appears to be giving their children problems recognizably similar to those found among foster children. No likely reform of foster care will do anything to improve the lot of the children of employed mothers.

The Family as Solution

Officials currently grappling with the crisis in foster care can take a number of positive steps to alleviate that crisis. First, they can reduce foster-care placements by defining child abuse more narrowly and clearly and by restoring the presumption of innocence to parents accused of abusing their children. Second, when foster-care placement is necessary, they can rely more heavily on kinship-based care, a policy proven to reduce sharply the risk of foster-care abuse.51 Third, they can support and accelerate adoptions, thereby delivering children from foster care into a permanent home. (However, it must be acknowledged that the number of families willing to adopt older children is not high.)

Yet, even if all three of these prudent steps are taken, the number of children being abused, neglected, or abandoned will remain troublingly high; nor will any of these steps increase the number of strong and loving families willing to take on foster-care responsibilities. Real progress in reducing children’s suffering, like significant progress in increasing the number of good foster-care families available, will require far more. It will require far more than any reform focused primarily on the foster-care system. The current passion for reforming bureaucratic systems–the child-care system, the child-support-collection system, the child-custody system–instead of renewing the family life for which such systems can never be more than poor surrogates, is itself symptomatic of our cultural malaise. An appropriate gloss on modern America’s overweening faith in government systems comes from the poet T.S. Eliot, who despaired of those carried away in "dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will have to be good" (Choruses from "The Rock," VI). Genuine progress in resolving not only the foster-care crisis, but also the more fundamental family crisis of which the foster-care crisis is a mere symptom, will require nothing less than that goodness which inspires enduring marital ties and strong parental commitments.

Although such goodness ultimately depends upon moral and religious impulses, not the command of government policymakers, these policymakers can at least reverse policies subversive of the family–such as the gender-role engineering which has undercut a man’s ability to earn a family wage sufficient to support his wife and their children, so fostering maternal employment. Such policies have intensified what one commentator has called "the continuous self-destructive war against the family."52 Reducing the social havoc of this war will be difficult because of the political clout of feminists, homosexuals, and others indifferent or hostile to the family. The only alternative, however, to effecting a renewal in family life is that of watching as more and more of American life metastasizes into one huge and failing foster-care system.

Endnotes