symposium

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Dec 4, 2000 | by Heidi Goldsmith, | Richard Wexler

* A single mother in Orange County, Calif., leaves her three children, the oldest age 8, alone because the only job she can get is tending a ride at a theme park at night. When she returns, the children have been taken away. For such children, wouldn't a baby-sitter make more sense than an orphanage?

Foster homes are filled with such children. What Newt Gingrich originally proposed -- confiscating children and throwing them into substitute care solely because their parents are poor -- is, in fact, common practice. Indeed, the single biggest problem plaguing the child-welfare system today is the confusion of poverty with child "neglect." At least Gingrich was honest both about who he was targeting and where he wanted to put them.

In other cases the parent is neither all victim nor all villain, but the family could remain safely together with the right kind of services. In some cases, these are parents who have succumbed to drug addiction -- which raises the question: Why bother with such parents? The answer comes from research such as a landmark study conducted by the University of Florida. In a study of "crack babies" one group was placed in foster care, another 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. Consistently, the children placed with their birth mothers did better. For the children who were taken away, removal from the mothers was more toxic than the crack cocaine. We should "bother" with drug treatment because it is extremely difficult to take a swing at "bad mothers" without the blow landing on their children. And if we really believe all the rhetoric about putting children first, that means we must put their needs before everything -- even our anger at their parents.

We know a lot about how to do this. To cite just two examples: For what it would cost to house one child in even a mediocre orphanage for a year, let alone a luxury orphan resort, 12 families could receive $300-a-month rent subsidies to avoid having to surrender their children because of homelessness. Or six families could be put through Intensive Family Preservation programs which, contrary to the stereotype, not only are more humane but also safer than foster care or orphanages.

Get the children whose parents' poverty has been confused with neglect back home; get help to parents with problems so they can reclaim their children in all those in-between cases, and then there will be enough room in foster homes for foster care to operate as it was intended to -- as a humane, short-term placement until a child can be returned home or adopted. And no one even will think of building more orphanages.

BY RICHARD WEXLER

Wexler is executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform in Alexandria, Va., and is the author of Wounded Innocents.