Putting Families First

News article

By: Anonymous

Date: November 24, 2005

Source: "Putting Families First." The Economist, November 24, 2005.

About the Author: The Economist, published since 1843, is one of Britain's premier magazines devoted to international business, finance, and politics.

INTRODUCTION

Before the advent of the foster care system, parentless or abandoned children were historically cared for by family members, community members, or left to their own devices. Many were victims of physical and sexual abuse, taken advantage of in labor settings, or became sex trade workers or thieves. The 1562, English Poor Law required that all orphaned children work as unpaid apprentices until they reached the age of majority. This law was imported when the British settled portions of North America, and in the 1800s in Britain and the United States some children went to "pauper houses." Orphaned, abandoned, or in some cases the children of parents imprisoned in the poor house for debt, these children were raised by the state or private charities, turned out into the labor force to work in grueling conditions while their wages went to the pauper house, and faced cruelty and hardship as a result of the absence of protective parents.

Although having one or two parents was no guarantee of a life without abuse, in the 1800s, children without a parent faced a wide range of obstacles and dangers that often lead to disease and malnutrition, high crime and incarceration rates, and early death. Young girls and teenagers often became prostitutes; boys turned to muggings and robbery to support themselves. In 1853, the first organized foster care system in the United States was designed by Charles Loring Brace, the director of the New York Children's Aid Society. Concerned about the thousands of poor parentless children he saw sleeping in the streets, digging through trash for food, and selling their bodies for money to survive, Brace placed advertisements in southern and western newspapers, encouraging families to take these children in and raise them. In many instances the children were as exploited as they had been living in New York City, but Brace's program was the beginning of the modern foster care program.

Between 1854 and 1929, more than 100,000 children made the trip by car and train to the southern states and into the Midwest and western states. The children were viewed as a cheap source of labor; their welfare was secondary to that fact, though the majority of families treated their foster children reasonably well. Once the child reached the age of majority he or she was free to leave, though in many instances the foster children were considered to be family for those mothers and fathers who raised them.

The issue of child abuse gained attention in 1874, when Mary Ellen Wilson, a nine-year-old girl living in Hell's Kitchen in New York City, was found by a local nurse with extensive injuries from beatings by her foster mother. The nurse, Etta Wheeler, approached a wealthy businessman, Henry Bergh to intercede. Bergh was the leader of the New York Society for the American Prevention of Cruelty to Animals; he offered assistance with Mary Ellen's case, and the girl was removed from her home. Societies for the prevention of cruelty to children were founded in the aftermath of Mary Ellen's case; this, combined with Brace's foster care system, converged with new notions in society about childhood.

The Victorian ideal viewed the child as a naive, guileless creature in need of proper nourishment, nurturing, and guidance from a moral mother and a hardworking, respectable father. Childhood became a separate life stage, and social workers—part of an emerging profession—worked to protect children from abuse and neglect. Child labor laws, coupled with an expansion of social work and government action such as the 1912 founding of the Children's Bureau, and the 1944 U.S. Supreme Court case Prince v. Massachusetts, which affirmed the government's right to intervene in family issues, changed how poor and abused children were treated as a policy issue.

The fields of social work and psychology added to research on the impact of abuse on children, and by the 1960s the concept of child abuse as a syndrome, or a damaging experience for children, was clear. The foster care system, however, struggled with funding, finding appropriate foster parents, and a host of family-stressing issues surrounding growing drug abuse that exploded in the 1980s and continued into the twenty-first century.

PRIMARY SOURCE

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SIGNIFICANCE

With more than half a million children in foster care, and a patchwork system of state policies, each differing from the next, many politicians and child development researchers consider the foster care system to be in crisis, with children "aging out" and living on the streets, children placed in questionable foster care homes, and a focus on family reunification that often leaves the child in limbo for years.

In 2002, five-year-old Rilya Wilson, a foster child in the Florida system, could not be found. Her caretaker, Geralyn Graham, claimed that a Florida state social worker had taken her in 2000 upon request by Graham, but authorities had no such record of that interaction. At the same time, Florida child welfare officials admitted that they had not been keeping good records on social worker interactions with children and foster parents; as of 2006 Rilya Wilson remains missing. A 2006 follow-up to Rilya Wilson's disappearance revealed that more than 652 children in Florida in the foster care system were missing; among them "one-year-old Destiny Booth, one-year-old Geraldo Duarte, two-year-old Angelica Rodriguez, 18-month-old Sheena Ruiz-Lopez-Meeks, two-year-old Mackenzie Spears-Bennett, one-year-old Noah Samuel Varble-Rhoads, and one-year-old Louanne Wise." While the vast majority of missing children are teenagers, whom officials presume are runaways, the Florida Department of Children and Families has come under sharp criticism for losing track of so many children.

Methamphetamine abuse, extremely widespread throughout the Great Plains and portions of the west, has created a sudden and dramatic strain on foster care systems in such states as Nebraska, Kansas, and Minnesota. Unlike heroin or cocaine, "meth" can be made for very little money, and meth abuse has led thousands of parents to abandon or severely neglect their children. As Chip Ammerman, a case worker manager for Cass County in Minnesota notes, ""Before, it [meth] was one or two percent of the cases, now it's about 25 to 30 percent of the cases we're getting involved in," and the strain on the foster care system—with babies removed for testing positive for meth at birth—is echoed in bordering states' foster care rolls as well.

In the 1990s, approximately 20,000-30,000 children were adopted out of the foster care each year, 5% of the total within the system. In 1997 President William J. Clinton signed legislation that made the child's safety more important than family reunification and cut the time required in foster care before adoption from eighteen months to twelve months. The law also provides states with bonus money for each adoption above set goals.

Since the passing of the legislation, adoptions from foster care have risen steadily, to more than 51,000 in 2004. Each year more than 20,000 teenagers "age out" of the system as well, receiving no further support from the state. With 70,000 children leaving the foster care system, but nearly 300,000 entering each year (for short and long term foster care), the foster care system continues to expand and manage the lives of more and more American children.

FURTHER RESOURCES

Books

Askeland, Lori, ed. Children and Youth in Adoption, Orphanages, and Foster Care: A Historical Handbook and Guide. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2005.

Hegar, Rebecca L., and Maria Scanapieco. Kinship Foster Care: Policy, Practice, and Research. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Murphy, Patrick T. Wasted: The Plight of America's Unwanted Children. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee Publisher, 1997.

Web sites

Bradenton Herald. "Number of Florida Foster Kids, Who Are Vanishing, Is Skyrocketing." June 6, 2006 〈http://www.bradenton.com/mld/bradenton/news/breaking_news/14752222.htm〉 (accessed July 9, 2006).

Minnesota Public Radio. "Methamphetamine Use Driving an Increase in Foster Care." May 3, 2005 〈http://news.minnesota.publicradio.org/features/2005/03/31_rehab_methfoster/〉 (accessed July 10, 2006).

New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. 〈http://www.nyspcc.org/〉 (accessed July 7, 2006).