Rethinking Foster Care

Throughout the evening, the three brothers described to me the years of abuse they experienced in foster care. They were made to stand in the corner of rooms for hours. They were forced to clean every dish in the house, if one was dirty. One brother didn’t go to college after his foster mother ripped up a college scholarship letter he had received to play football. Another was assaulted in his group home. As our dinner went on, these kids kept sharing stories of hurt. After leaving foster care, all three children had been incarcerated, one spending several years in prison. They had a lot to be angry about.  Yet, even when recounting years of pain, they didn’t seem mad. Instead, they were smiling and joking around. They took pictures of their tacos. They invited me to a party at their house. When I asked whether they were angry at their foster parent or their mother – whose drug use led to their entry into foster care – they looked surprised. They resisted my bait, arguing that...

Last week, a major study demonstrated that high-quality, legal representation of parents by institutional providers in New York City got children with their families four months more quickly than those parents represented by solo practitioners.   Think about all that can transpire in four months in a child’s life – birthdays, holidays, family gatherings.   In fact, ask any kid about what four months feels like (i.e. you can’t do something for four months).   They will say it is an eternity. While we should certainly celebrate the impact of this study, for those of us who have represented parents, nothing in it surprises us.   I suspect that most of us recognized the dramatic power that strong parent representation can have to transform child welfare the first time we stood by a parent, which for me was back in 2004.   I still remember the day vividly.   It began with a phone call. I was a young attorney in Washington, DC - where I...

“If they were going to treat me like this, why didn’t they just leave me at home?” That question was posed to me by my twelve-year-old client after being taken from his parents and moved through several foster homes, only to find himself without any home at all.   Instead, he was spending his days sitting in a chair next to the desk of his caseworker – missing school to do so – and then spending each night and each weekend in a different emergency foster home.   My client needed to be in foster care.   Unlike the vast majority of cases that involve neglect, his was the unusual case where there had been serious abuse.   I knew he did not want to go home to his parents – he knew it was not safe for him – which made his question to me all the more chilling.    As a young lawyer, I was horrified by my client’s treatment, but even more so by the response of the child welfare agency to the motion I filed to bring them into court to address his situation...

Sitting across the coffee table from me, a young woman – adopted as a child out of foster care – shared her experiences. She had achieved incredible success in life, a college degree, with a master’s degree forthcoming. Yet the overriding emotions she described were feelings of loss and confusion after being adopted. Unanswered questions had lingered in her mind for years, causing pain. Why did the court terminate the rights of her birth mother and prevent her from ever seeing her mother again?   Why wasn’t she allowed to give input into the decision to terminate her mother’s rights?   Why was she placed with a white family – even though she was black?   Could more have been done to prevent her from being separated from her family?   The uncertainties poured out of her mind. As we talked, she made clear that she was not alone – so many kids adopted out of foster care shared her doubts. Many addressed their pain by connecting with their birt...

The teenage boy stared at the judge, with a face struggling to hide its emotion but clearly displaying its sadness. For weeks, he had been staying at a residential facility and had been getting in trouble. In court today, the judge asked a simple yet powerful question – “Tell me what we can do to make your life better.”             Without hesitation, he answered, “I just want to see my little sister. I haven’t seen her in months, and I need to make sure she’s okay.”               So the judge turned to the professionals in the courtroom – there to serve the child’s interests – to hear why this hadn’t happened. Staff at the residential facility explained that they didn’t know the youth wanted to see his sister. The agency caseworker spoke of policies at the facility and logistical challenges that made such a visit difficult. But the chil...

At a recent meeting I attended, a foster parent described her role as being a “co-parent” with the birth parent to raise a child in foster care. That is, she envisioned that her job was to temporarily help care for the child – with the birth parent – while doing everything in her power to support efforts to reunify the family. This philosophy accords with the work of the Quality Parenting Initiative – organized by the Youth Law Center – which has “caregivers, agency staff and birth parents work as a team to support children and youth.”  Consistent with this, across the country, foster parents are leading a revolution to encourage birth parents – by supervising visits, bringing them to doctor’s appointments and school meetings, and helping them with their treatment plan. The foster care system needs an overhaul. But to do this, we must rethink our unproductive ways of conceptualizing relationships, particularly those that we have construed as necessarily adversarial. Foster par...