Rethinking Foster Care

News that our government plans to separate immigrant children from their families at the border has provoked widespread revulsion among people with the capacity to feel.  Separating families is an age old tool of social control that never seems to go away. But while family defense practitioners look on this new policy with familiar sadness, it seems important to mark the ways in which this development is new.  Since the Progressive Era, family separation has been cast in terms of aid to children – saving them from their troubled or backward families of origin – whether that was the “dirty” Italian families of Boston or all of the Native American children placed in Indian Boarding Schools.  The good people were just trying to help. What is striking about the current rhetoric about removal (“foster care or whatever”) is that it is no longer cloaked in a noble purpose.  This policy is purposely violent and purposely callous.  Our government knows that it is hurting children to achie

Last week, I finished a presentation by telling the story of my student’s recent court victory.   To my (very pleasant) surprise, they persuaded a judge that homelessness is not grounds to place a child in foster care.   Accepting their argument, the judge dismissed the case, and ordered the immediate return of the children to their parents.   Upon hearing the verdict, my client dropped his face into his hands and started to weep. I’ve told this story several times, and it’s typically greeted with strong applause.   On a surface level, people resist the notion that the State should take kids away because their parents are poor.   But on this day, a woman raised her hand in the back of the room after my telling of the story.   She said, “Sir, that was a great story, but you’ve left out the most important part.   What happened to the children?   Where did they find housing?”   To which I replied, “I have no idea.   I suspect they are still homeless.   And living on t

On March 16, Jennifer Hart, who adopted six children out of the foster care system – including fifteen-year old Devonte Hart – drove off a cliff, killing herself, her partner and her children.  While we may never now precisely why she drove off that cliff, evidence suggests that she was drunk while it happened.  The tragic ending to this family culminated many years in which the children suffered severe abuse in the home.  On one occasion, the Harts forced the children to lie in bed for hours because they ate extra slices of pizza.  On another, the children got in trouble for laughing at the dinner table and for singing “Happy Birthday” to a sibling.  At least once, the children went to a neighbor’s home begging for food.  When suspicions were raised, their adoptive parents pulled them from school, kept them at home, and moved between states.  While child welfare agencies in multiple states investigated the family many times, at no point did any agency intervene to protect

Welcome to the Rethinking Foster Care Blog, where we will look to confront longstanding assumptions held by the child welfare system to try to generate creative solutions to wicked problems.  We look forward to the conversation we hope to generate.