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.... in child welfare, 10/23/23

I hope your Monday’s going well!

Last week I responded to an article that, I suggested, unfairly painted foster parents with a broad brush as “meddling” in efforts to reunite children and parents. A person whose opinion I highly respect responded to me by pointing out that, too often, foster parents take an antagonistic and skeptical view of biological parents and don’t sufficiently partner to ensure children can be safely reunited. I think she has a point. We do need foster parents to partner with families to ensure that the 47% of children reunited with parents are returned safely to a stable home. We also have to recognize that over 1/3 of children in foster care awaiting adoption have been in limbo for over three years. My belief is that it’s possible to both support family preservation and family reunification and, at the same time, ensure foster parents are treated with dignity and respect. Failing to do so does great damage to efforts to recruit foster parents and has contributed to the dearth of appropriate foster homes. We also need foster parents to advocate for permanency, so we don’t have situations where children have been in foster care for eight years without permanency. Children need secure attachments. As 1 Corinthians 12 might suggest, to keep children safe and ensure family connection we need everybody.

• Another reminder that many children in care have suffered such trauma and instability that they end up in emergency rooms and offices because there are no services adequate to meet their trauma-related behavioral symptoms.

• I hate to see systems simply react to a tragedy such as the death of little Zoey Felix, about whom Kansas DCF received nine reports of concern in the year prior to her demise. But the release of at least limited information about the child’s situation has spurred action. Republicans want to create an independent Office of the Child Advocate. Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly says she wants to increase the agency’s transparency so the public and policymakers can better analyze how children are being protected and create solutions when things go wrong.

  As in Maine and Massachusetts, Kansas is going through the cycle that we see whenever a child death occurs and there is concern that the child protection agency didn’t do its job. The agencies often don’t want transparency — too many of our child protection leaders worldwide defend confidentiality for reasons that don’t necessarily have to do with the child’s privacy. In my opinion, if we are ever going to create a system that appropriately balances the dual priorities of child safety and family integrity, we are going to have to have more transparency so that people can better understand the system’s strengths and needs.

• Children of married parents do better, research says, but the US is going in the opposite direction.

• Useful article here on how trauma affects children and youth in the foster system.

• Upcoming events!

  • The Senate is having a hearing on Georgia’s foster care system this week — 10/25 at 2:30 pm. You can watch here.

  • Georgia’s Senate Adoption and Foster Care Study Committee is meeting on 10/26 at 9 am. You can watch here

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