There's an interesting dialog started by Claudia from the Adopt America Network. It's a very obvious foster care adoption question. Why do counties and agencies keep recruiting families who are interested in adopting young children? Why do they keep perpetuating a system where a healthy 5-year-old has 100 families interested in adopting, and a 17-year-old has no one, and ages out of the system?
Claudia takes the question in a certain direction.
One of my missions is to recruit families who are willing to life through the horrors to end up to be resilient people of faith who will take on the harder things. As Bart said, quoting Jaiya John this morning, "what we currently have in our country is not a "child welfare" system, but a "help parents get the child they want" system, when it comes to adoption."
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If we were looking at the issue of waiting children in foster care, we would be recruiting families for teens with on probation with an array of mental illnesses. We would be looking for families willing to take large sibling groups. We would be looking for parents willing to parent children with FASD or RAD or sexual acting out or the dreaded "fire-setters."
FosterAbba has already responded with a personal analysis of how her family both can and can't answer the call. I'd like to take it in a different direction, and use a cold, hard, cynical "follow the money" approach. Please don't take this as an attack on anyone involved in the system trying to do good work, but rather a critical examination of the system itself.
I don't think the current system is really geared towards adoptive parents. It's geared towards saving the government money. An adoptive placement costs the government less than a foster placement over the life of the child. An adoptive parent will agree to take over much of the cost and labor of raising a child. Why? What reward do they get? Do they do it out of love? Altruism? Selfishness? It doesn't matter from a cost perspective.
Economically speaking, adoptive parents are not really clients of the government, but neither do they actually work for the government. They're a cross between an intern and a volunteer. They're willing to work for very little material reward, as long as they get some
intangible benefits. Foster parents are not full-time workers either; they're more like a cross between interns and temps. Some do it mainly for the money, others do it mainly for the intangible benefits.
You have to keep adoptive and foster parents a little bit happy so that they'll continue to work for you or absorb some of your costs. The children are not as important a priority. They can't go on strike or quit. But if you behave really badly to them, child welfare advocates will sue you, so there
are limits. You also have indirect accountability to "client" families. Bad and incompetent behavior might result in unwelcome media attention, lawsuits and bureaucratic shakeups.
I need to detour here and talk about the problems of voluntary charity. I'll disclose that I'm a leftist with an MBA, and I don't like charity but I donate to it… I don't find any of this be contradictory, but I realize it might be confusing to some readers.
The problem with charity is that it relies too much on appeals to the emotions. Successful charitable appeals involve three characteristics: 1) cuteness 2) visibility 3) ego. People are more likely to give money to something cute. Pandas get a lot more attention than beetles. Young children are cuter than older children. Children are cute, but they're often made invisible. Visible problems are easier to address than hidden problems. Issues hidden behind closed doors or looming in the future get less attention, and less money. And then there's ego, which is kind of obvious, what with all the charitable foundations named after rich people.
My family used to sponsor a child when I was young, but I decided I don't agree with sponsoring anymore. I just give money directly to Save the Children. Why do I need a thank you letter from a child for my donation? It makes me feel better for a few minutes, but it's really just feeding my ego. The few cents it took to mail me that letter could have gone to more useful purposes.
For me, an ideal wealth distribution system wouldn't involve charity. It would look more like taxes. An equal percentage is taken off the top of your paycheck then distributed by experts --
accountable experts -- to where it does the most good. This system has plenty of potential problems, of course. However, it's the only system where hidden, non-cute, ungrateful sorts of problems have any chance at all of being addressed.
Then there's the problem of charitable volunteers. Anyone who has worked for a non-profit knows that volunteer burnout is a major issue. A volunteer who works for a living can't have their volunteer job as their highest priority. If their family member gets sick, or their paying job is in danger, guess where they have to cut back. On the other hand, if your volunteers are all well-off people who have the resources to put volunteering as their number one priority, your organization starts reflecting a narrower, upper-class set of values and stops being representative of the general population.
For Claudia and the Adopt America Network to succeed in recruiting more parents for hard-to-place children, they need to find people with the right combination of altruism, insight and resources. I think altruism is the easiest part. That's where I stop being cynical… I think almost every human being (except for the true sociopath) has the capacity for altruism. It may not be expressed very strongly, but it's there and it can be stirred up with the right appeal. The insight is much harder. Can you stifle your own impulse to feel protective not just to children who are small, soft and helpless, but also those who are tall, looming and hard-faced? Force yourself to see and even jump into problems that used to be invisible? Know how much you can really handle, without believing you are weak, or a superwoman?
The resource portion makes the goal incredibly difficult. Looking back over my blog you can see how many times I have bitched about the fact that we only have one bedroom for children which means the sibling group would have to be two boys or two girls. I'm not a good example, really, because we're pretty well-off for a middle-class urban couple. But our house that we own is 1050 square feet with a third of an acre yard. If I earned the same amount of money and lived in New York City, we'd probably live in a 500-square foot studio and spend 60% of our income on rent. How can people like us adopt or foster large sibling groups? That's a very literal question. Special housing loan programs would be one partial solution.
Housing becomes much easier if you live in the country, but then you run into the representativeness problem then. For example, given that a) African-American children are disproportionately represented in the system b) African-American parents live disproportionately in urban areas then focusing more on rural placements increases cultural dislocation.
Many people who have the insight and understanding may not have the resources. Our economic system does not place a high value on human services. Elementary school teachers, social workers, foster parents… all professions that are culturally coded as female and low-paying. They're jobs that certain people find very fulfilling. And since they're so fulfilling, we don't need to pay them very much. It's nice to be nice. But if you really want to get ahead in life, be a lawyer or a CEO. That's the general attitude.
Foster care adoption is a dysfunctional system located inside a dysfunctional culture. That's kind of an obvious statement. Kids wouldn't
enter foster care, much less need to exit it, if things were better all around.
To get more foster and adoptive parents where they're needed, and to get them to perform better, what are some practical measures that can be taken? By practical, I mean things that don't involve massive changes to society as we know it.
Telling them they need to be more altruistic isn't sufficient. If they answer the call as altruistic volunteers, they'll have high burn-out rates just like altruistic volunteers.
Religion is not sufficient. This is according to what I heard from a plainspoken, very religious woman at an orientation meeting. She said she kept a close eye on the parents who told her that God told them to take the hardest cases. Too often, they would call her up in the middle of the night and say "I can't handle this child, take them back." She joked she would ask them, "Now where is your 'patience of Job?'"
Paying them more money would help a lot. It would also make foster and adoptive parents more representative of the general population. On the other hand, you might get people who do it for the money and not the passion, so more money needs to come with stringent controls and training requirements.
More education would help; not just top-down training, but horizontal information sharing. There are a lot of foster parents blogging and communicating on the web, but I don't trust the internet to be truly representative of the general public.
Stop moving kids around so much. If a child is reunified with their family, but the reunification effort is uncertain, pay the foster carer to reserve the bed. If they are removed again, they go back to the same foster carer. If the child has to be shuttled back and forth, at least it should be back and forth between the same two homes. This would help children
and keep foster parent morale higher.
How about a special union? Once you get your foster license and join, you have access to a credit union and special housing loans. The union encourages information sharing and sponsors training events along with the government. It sponsors a youth club "Future Child Welfare Workers of America". The military has ROTC! Encourage the ideal of pride in service. Wear special hats in parades. Offer AA, BA and MA degrees in therapeutic foster care drawing on fields of psychology and child development. Pay people who have those degrees higher wages.
I've heard foster parents complain they have the image of "those people in the neighborhood with too many kids running around a messy yard". Change that image to "the people who have the great union and job security and high standards and fun social events and I want to be one when I grow up." I hear PSAs on college radio that say "you don't have to be perfect to adopt a teen from foster care". It's a good PSA for now. But in the future, it would be nice if the message could evolve into "can you meet a high standard of excellence in child welfare?" from the current "we're desperate, do you have a pulse?"
Of course all these ideas require vast amounts of money which are currently being spent on more important things like the war in Iraq. Sigh... I wish I could end on a more positive note.
Foster Care System Perspectives
