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When Children Become Parents

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The young woman on the phone recounted a story all too familiar. She had aged out of the foster care system after living in 25 different placements. Upon exiting the system, she became homeless, suffered from mental health issues, and had her own child. She checked herself into a mental health facility and let her child live with the father’s relatives.  After the child’s father severely abused the child while the young woman was away, the agency immediately petitioned for the child to not only be put into foster care, but to be available immediately for adoption. Just a few years after the agency was this young woman’s legal parent, it was now asking the court to immediately terminate her rights to her own child. It had given up on her, not even wanting to give her a chance to participate in services. In their mind, she was permanently unfit, hopeless as a parent. Attend any meeting or conference discussing the child protection system and you’ll hear advocates coalesce upon our need t
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Measuring What Actually Matters

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  A few weeks ago, I received an email inquiring whether my clinic measured the outcomes of my students’ work representing parents and children involved in the foster care system. Did their legal representation result in kids being sent back home more quickly? Or getting into permanent homes expeditiously? How much money did our work save the child protection system? These questions didn’t surprise me. They are the standard questions being asked of so many legal representation programs these days. I get it. We live in a data-driven world, singularly obsessed with cost savings and efficiency. The language of accountability and performance is everywhere. Innovative programs are always asked, “Where is your data?” I proudly drafted a response to the email explaining that we, in fact, keep track of none of those metrics. Because in my mind, those numbers don’t capture the meaningful impact of my students’ work with clients. In fact, as I reflected on my cases, traditional measures would li
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Child Welfare Reform Begins By Simply Following The Law

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Say an anonymous person calls Child Protective Services and says that three weeks ago, you and your children were sleeping outside. The person also claims that the day before that, you were protesting for eight hours and it was unknown whether you fed your children during the protest. You never learn who made the allegations. Would you be okay based on these claims alone – without any evidence to actually support them – if a trial court permitted a social worker to search your entire residence? Probably not, I’m guessing.  The Pennsylvania Supreme Court, confronting these facts, agreed this past December, ruling that the Fourth Amendment prevents social workers from entering a parent’s home without first establishing probable cause. The Court held that when determining probable cause, trial courts must assess the nexus between the alleged neglect and the area to be searched, as well as the reliability of information from anonymous reporters, and the timeliness of the facts in the peti
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The Power Of Asking Why

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            Observing court one day, I heard one of those remarks that should stun anyone within earshot.           Testifying in the case being heard, in which a family separation was on the table, the caseworker remarked, “No, I didn’t make reasonable efforts to reunify because the mother was homeless and was living in a room in a shelter.”           When I heard the worker say that, I geared up for the heated inquiry that I thought would ensue. Why didn’t the worker make any efforts? Couldn’t she have explored whether any services could have kept the baby - who had special medical needs - with her mother at the shelter? Was there any reason to think that services wouldn’t be effective? Did the law excuse her from making these efforts? Without even exploring these efforts, could we possibly say that separating the child from her mother was the only - and best - course of action? My mind was spinning with the possibilities.           But none of those questions were asked. Instead, th
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The Shift From Saving To Supporting Families

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            Our client’s children remained in foster care for months because she was homeless. Each day, she’d wake up, hoping – praying – that a voucher would become available for her to access affordable housing. Despite experiencing a daily dose of disappointment for nearly a year, she remained hopeful. Then, one day, it arrived. The long-awaited voucher finally materialized and my client quickly found a place to live. Her children would be coming back to her soon. Her family would start working on becoming whole again, ending years of tragedy. But as we all know, having a house is different than having a home. A house is simply a place to stay. A home brings with it a sense of belonging. A house meets the physical needs of a family. A home goes beyond that, serving their emotional needs as well. A house provides stability. A home is the first step towards something much greater – a sense of community.            So while a voucher provided my client with a house, she and her ch
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The Family Justice Gap

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     In July, the Governor of Minnesota signed a critical piece of legislation requiring courts to appoint lawyers in foster care cases for parents who cannot afford them. Years of tireless advocacy culminated in the enactment, and local leaders predicted it will help reduce Minnesota’s foster care population and address glaring racial inequities in their foster care system.       Certainly, those who worked hard to achieve this legislation should take pride in this accomplishment. But the rest of us in the child welfare system should take a step back and reflect about how we have been complicit in allowing a system to separate children from their parents with affording families a basic modicum of due process. Consider these realities. In Montana, a child welfare agency can take children away from their parents for 20 days before a court must even hold an initial hearing. In Georgia, a lawyer representing a parent in a termination of parental rights appeal might not even get the court
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Evaluating Evaluations

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  In 2001, Karen S. Budd wrote a paper titled “Assessing Parenting Competence in Child Protection Cases: A Clinical Practice Model.” In that paper, Budd cites a study of 190 mental health evaluations completed on parents in child welfare cases in a large urban environment. The study identified “numerous substantive limitations in the content and comprehensiveness of assessments.” The evaluations were completed in a single session, used few sources of information other than the parent, rarely included parent-child observation, and often failed to describe the parent’s caregiving qualities, the child’s feelings about the parent’s caregiving ability, or the child’s relationship with the parent. As a result, Budd found that the evaluations fell short of the American Psychological Association’s guidelines for child welfare evaluations.  Although Budd’s paper was published in 2001 we have not made much, if any, progress in implementing meaningful changes to either the content or context of t
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