Rethinking Foster Care

“Your father is as worthless as your mother.” Those words – said by a caseworker to a 13-year old child whose parents were addicted to heroin –  jumped out at me as I read the casefile. My heart immediately sank. I tried to imagine how I would have felt if someone had uttered those words to me as a child. And I tried to visualize the sadness on my children’s faces if they had heard those words. Devastated is the one word that kept coming to me. No child should ever hear someone talk about their parents that way. Ever. Many argue that the biggest challenge confronting child welfare is a lack of resources. We lack funds for prevention services. We don’t have enough foster parents. We need more high-quality lawyers. The list goes on and on. But perhaps what we lack most is compassion. Will we ever be able to engage families if we think of them as “worthless?”  Or if we think they are “too dirty to parent,” as I heard one lawyer tell his client?  Or if we ignore thei...

I opened my inbox to find an email titled, “I can’t take this life anymore.”   My heart sank.   These were the words of a former client, a young adult who had aged out of foster care after living in more than ten placements.   Now she had four children, was on the verge of being evicted, and was struggling to find a job because she didn’t have child care.   She felt alone in the world and was in crisis.   Hundreds of miles away, I felt powerless to help.   So I didn’t respond right away.   The email sat unanswered in my inbox for hours.   But it remained on my mind. Those of us who work with struggling families experience this feeling often.   Our clients have overwhelming needs.   They lack housing and money.   They can’t buy food for their children.   They don’t have access to a doctor.   They lack community.   So they turn to us – their lawyers – for answers to this cruel world that has le...

The Washington Post recently profiled the remarkable work of Judge Ernestine Gray to essentially eliminate New Orleans’ foster care system. Between 2011 and 2017, the number of kids in foster care in New Orleans fell by 89 percent. Of the kids who did enter foster care, seven in ten left it within a month. She’s achieved these results without any evidence that she’s putting more children at risk. In fact, the article notes the city’s rate of children being revictimized is lower than the statewide average. The article suggests that Judge Gray achieved these outcomes by simply applying the law and forcing child welfare agencies to meet their legal burden, not being swayed by general concerns about a family. It reads: “If protective services can’t make an ironclad case as to why children should be removed, Gray returns them to their families — even if DCFS investigators have described the setting as an ‘unhealthy environment.’”  The most striking aspect of the “reforms” inst...

Isn’t Housing Child Welfare? Yesterday, I finally got an appellate opinion in a case in which I represented the child’s mother.   The Court of Appeals unanimously reversed the trial court’s finding of dependency, determining my client had been penalized for simply asking the Department of Family and Children Services (“DFCS”) for help to find housing for herself and her child. In the first paragraph of a blistering concurring opinion, Judge Dillard wrote, As President Ronald Reagan once quipped, “ ‘[ t]he nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help’ ” V.G.’s mother learned this the hard way when she sought government assistance in securing suitable housing for her and her young son. Big mistake. The opinion highlights the ways in which the State utterly fails the most needy families. DFCS removed V.G. because his family was homeless and no one could help the family obtain housing. That’s it. This choice cannot be ...

For the past few weeks, I’ve been reading transcripts from child protective hearings. Hundreds of pages of transcripts. I’ve seen examples of clear legal errors. I’ve read many lines of parents’ lawyers grumbling and complaining. I’ve read even more of those lawyers simply agreeing to whatever the agency is proposing. I’m still waiting, though, to see one key phrase in the transcripts. I’m waiting for one lawyer to say it. “I object.” In fact, in the six years I’ve co-directed the Child Welfare Appellate Clinic at the University of Michigan Law School, I’ve rarely seen that phrase in a transcript. I’ve rarely seen motions filed by parents’ lawyers, even when confronted with obvious mistakes. I’ve rarely seen a hint of outrage about the process. Instead, I usually see very little advocacy. I’m typically struck by the acquiescence of the lawyers in the courtroom. This week, I experienced this feeling of acquiescence when I conducted a training for pa...