The Children Money Can Buy

by Anne Moody

  All of these financial arguments aside, surely it also makes sense to improve the lives of children in foster care simply because it is the kind and right thing to do. Every year, approximately twenty-three thousand children “age out” of the foster care system and find themselves suddenly living as adults, without a family or any other sort of safety net. They have no one to rely on in hard times and no one with whom to share the good times. They have no place to stay for a month or two if they lose their jobs and no place to go for Christmas. Few eighteen-year-olds have the self-sufficiency to make it in the world on their own, and children whose families have been so dysfunctional as to warrant their removal from the home are obviously already at an enormously increased disadvantage. A heartbreakingly high number of these kids end up homeless, in jail, with an unplanned pregnancy . . . or dead.

  I look back at the children I knew in the foster care system with tremendous remorse for all I couldn’t do for them. I wasn’t derelict in my duties, but the scope and certainly the goal of those duties (to reunite the family, remember) was often beyond me. In fact, I think we should acknowledge that the scope and goal of the entire foster care system is often beyond all of us and come up with a more realistic approach. My experiences were a long time ago, and I’m sure there have been numerous overhauls and improvements in the system since my days as a foster care worker in Michigan. I’m certain that there are many, many good people currently devoting their energies, their expertise, and their hearts to the plight of children in foster care.

  So I want to believe that things have gotten much better for these kids in the past forty years, but I keep hearing stories that force me to acknowledge that the situation remains grim. The media bring us increasingly frequent accounts of children who somehow fall between the cracks but finally come to everyone’s attention by being horribly abused or killed, usually by a parent or stepparent. Typically in these cases, the family was already known to the child welfare system, and there was an abundance of warning that the child was at risk.

  It horrifies us each time we hear these all-too-familiar stories about how the parent had a long history of problems, perhaps with substance abuse and impulse control. We might hear about how the child had been in a foster home and was doing well despite having been born drug affected and suffering abuse and neglect during his first year of life. And we might hear that after a couple of years spent with loving foster parents, the now three-year-old had recently been returned home to his mother because she had gone through rehab and had tested clean for three months. The mother had completed her part of the bargain, and the caseworker and the judge were giving her a second (or third or fourth) chance. They understood that the odds that she had permanently ended her dependence on drugs, changed her abusive behavior, and would now be a “good enough” parent were not great, but they wanted to at least give her the opportunity to prove them wrong.

  Quite probably, they had no other legal option but to return the child to her care. They were working to reunite the family and, too frequently, with the best of intentions, they were also setting this woman and her child up for tragic failure. In this particular case, the child died shortly after being returned to his mother’s care, leaving the foster family that had loved and nurtured him for most of his life bereft. And leaving most people saying, “How can this sort of thing happen?” and assuming that someone, somewhere, was at fault, and that this sort of tragedy is an anomaly.

  Each time we hear one of these stories, we react with shock and disbelief. It makes sense to react with sadness, horror, anger, and frustration, but how is it that we can keep being so surprised? We act as though we just can’t imagine that these things happen, despite a steady dose of evidence to the contrary.

  It seems that, between horror stories, we just blot these children from our memories. I understand that, just like caseworkers who need to keep an emotional distance from the situations they confront, we all need to distance ourselves from life’s tragedies. It would be neither healthy nor helpful to dwell on the sadness and anger we all feel when a child is harmed. But it certainly isn’t healthy or helpful to stick our heads in the sand and act as though we just don’t know what’s happening or that we couldn’t possibly do anything about it. We have the ability and the responsibility to voice our opinions about child welfare to our lawmakers, just as we do about other matters of public concern. I suspect that our inaction is due in large part to the fact that we have accepted the problems in the child welfare system as unfixable and in part because, for some reason, these children just aren’t all that high on our list of priorities.

  Let’s go all the way back to the beginning of my career and look again at my supervisor Charles’s question about promising to always work to reunite the family. After a career spent primarily on creating new adoptive families rather than trying to rebuild broken birth families, it is obvious to me that there were plenty of circumstances in which I did not work to keep biological families intact. One of my main goals in working with birth and adoptive parents was to avoid exerting influence over their decisions. Instead, I wanted to help them decide for themselves on the course of action that was right for them. I certainly didn’t want to have pressured someone into either a relinquishment or an adoption they would later regret. I figured out a long time ago that if I took any credit when things went well for my adoption clients, I also needed to be prepared to take the blame when things went wrong. I didn’t want to be held responsible for such important decisions in people’s lives, whether they turned out to be very good decisions or very bad ones.

  But it wasn’t that way with my foster care clients. With them, it was my job to make decisions about their lives. No, I did not promise to always work to reunite the family. Sometimes I worked tremendously hard not to reunite a family, and I believe that some of my foster care clients, both children and parents, could have benefited enormously if there had been a more nuanced goal for them. The clients who would have benefited most were the ones who were angry about losing custody but didn’t take any action to regain it. They were the ones who wouldn’t show up for visits or for court hearings, wouldn’t attend anger management or counseling sessions, wouldn’t do any of the things specified in their service plan, but would still profess to be unhappy about the separation from their kids. They too were clearly not working to reunite the family. Much of the time, they didn’t even seem to be particularly interested in their children, yet the stalemate between them and DSHS would drag on for years, sometimes for an entire childhood of years.

  It was difficult to avoid the impression that that status quo was actually somehow working for the parents whose kids lingered in foster care while they failed to take action to regain custody. These parents didn’t really have to change their behavior, nor did they have to permanently lose custody of their children. Occasionally they had to put up with some social worker or lawyer bothering them, but most of the time they were free to go about their business. It wasn’t that they were necessarily such bad people, it was just that their children weren’t safe with them. Chances were excellent that these parents weren’t simply willfully lazy, self-absorbed, or unloving, but that they had been victims themselves of other people’s (parents’) bad behavior, or perhaps just of circumstance. But whatever the explanation, they were not safe parents, they weren’t taking steps to become safe parents, and I was not going to recommend that their children be returned to their care.

  I think these people needed realistic advocacy and mandated counseling that included an honest and timely recognition of their limitations as parents and the possibilities for improvement. Instead, they got a few minutes every three months or so of legal representation and an ongoing adversarial relationship with DSHS. I know I had clients who did not want to raise their children (other than in an idealistic sense) and/or felt incapable of doing so, but who kept battling with DSHS because they could not admit this even to themselves. It was far more comfortable for them
to see themselves as victims, to believe that DSHS had taken their children away without cause, and to focus their anger on having been treated unjustly.

  That’s how it was with Michelle, the young mother who was mentally ill and whose impulsive actions and poor decisions, such as taking her baby out in winter weather wearing only a diaper, repeatedly endangered the child. Michelle could not realistically have been expected to understand her own limitations, but she could have been treated in a more caring and respectful manner if the system hadn’t been so adversarial and if the outcome hadn’t had to be all or nothing for her.

  In order to terminate her parental rights, I had to create a case against Michelle, and she had to sit in a courtroom and listen to all her failings. Although it was evident that Michelle wasn’t able to act as a responsible parent to her young child, maybe she could have had another sort of role in her daughter’s life. What if, instead of simply terminating her parental rights and ending all contact between Michelle and baby Ayla, we had encouraged Michelle to be involved in Ayla’s future? What if Michelle had been able to meet Ayla’s foster parents and to see for herself how kind and loving they were? What if we had been able to arrange for letters and pictures to be sent regularly, both while Ayla was in foster care and after she was adopted? What if we’d been able to arrange for ongoing visitation in a supervised setting?

  This sort of involvement wouldn’t be safe or realistic in all situations, but it might have worked for Michelle and Ayla. Michelle wasn’t a dangerous person, at least at that time; she was just dangerous as a parent. Maybe I’m being unrealistic in thinking that Michelle could ever have cooperated in an open adoption. Maybe her volatility would have made it impossible. But I wish we could have given her, and other clients like her, the opportunity to find out.

  In later years, when I worked with clients like Trevor and Amanda on an adoption for their baby, it seemed so obvious to me that it would be mutually beneficial for the foster care and adoption systems to work together, as happened in their case. It also seemed obvious that parents who were facing the termination of their parental rights by the state ought to be given the opportunity to explore their options to voluntarily relinquish, instead, thereby having input into the decisions made about their children.

  Trevor and Amanda were on schedule to lose their daughter and to be put through the same sort of excruciating experience that Michelle endured. They escaped that fate simply because someone they knew had done a private adoption and suggested that they explore that option themselves. In other words, it was a complete fluke that Trevor and Amanda did not find themselves embroiled in a courtroom battle with DSHS in the lengthy and painful process of having their parental rights terminated. Instead, they initiated a private adoption and were, at least at that time, happy about the outcome. Even more importantly, after having been placed in three different homes during her first nine-and-a-half months of life, their daughter was safely removed from the state system that would have greatly prolonged her stay in foster care and was legally adopted by the family her parents chose for her.

  After working so successfully with DSHS on Trevor and Amanda’s adoption, I allowed myself to imagine that the DSHS caseworkers in their town would have a change of heart about private adoptions. Maybe they would even come to see that the process of freeing a baby for adoption (which they were already planning to do in this case) didn’t always have to be a ponderous, demeaning, and expensive undertaking. My own relationship with the baby’s caseworker evolved over the months we worked together, and her outright suspicion and negativity about private adoption abated a bit. But even after the adoption had been accomplished and everyone was happy, the caseworker still seemed to not quite be able to believe that the attorney and I hadn’t done something illegal or irregular. She was a nice person who was no doubt doing her job, but she embodied the glass-half-empty attitude that afflicts so many people who work in large bureaucracies. Trying to work with her took me back to the days of trying to get $400 for Darcy’s rent so that her children could be returned to her care. So often, the sensible course of action (spending $400 in order to get three children out of foster care that was going to cost much more than that every month, in Darcy’s case) is resisted simply because someone, somewhere, has deemed it against policy, and no one wants to take the responsibility or the time to think about it further.

  There is too often a pervasive “can’t get there from here” attitude in working with DSHS that is both extremely discouraging and extremely confusing. Why didn’t Trevor and Amanda’s caseworker recognize that we were all working together toward the same goal? Why didn’t she understand that Trevor and Amanda were saving the state a great deal of time and money by doing a private adoption and thereby avoiding an expensive legal action and the ongoing need for foster care? Why didn’t she see that my involvement was helpful to her personally, in regard to both her time and the decrease in drama and unhappiness in her dealings with Trevor and Amanda? Why didn’t she educate (and thereby reassure) herself about the legality of private adoption and about the attorney’s and my credentials at some point in the process? Most importantly, why didn’t she feel the sense of urgency that the rest of us felt about getting that baby into her permanent home? And, finally, why didn’t she, and the staff in that DSHS office, learn from the experience they had that was such a success for the baby, her birth parents, the adoptive family, and the taxpayers? As I’ve said, it was both discouraging and confusing.

  I know the response to this criticism will be that no one outside of DSHS could possibly understand all the constraints the agency must work with, and I accept that that is certainly true. However, while I know I don’t understand all the issues that DSHS workers contend with these days, I am extremely sympathetic to the position they find themselves in when dealing with an elaborate system of rules and policies that seem to prevent them from doing what they feel is right for their clients. I feel sure that most of them care about their clients every bit as much as I did when I worked for DSHS and that they understand that the current system often fails them and therefore fails us all.

  Most of my experiences with DSHS are ancient history now. But, sadly, I recently encountered new evidence that things haven’t changed a great deal—at least in their most important aspect—since that time.

  The most important aspect, of course, is in the damage done to the children who find themselves in the child welfare system. I was recently contacted by a woman who wanted to adopt a fourteen-year-old girl for whom she and her husband had been providing respite care for the past five years. It seemed that respite care was needed in this situation because the girl and her adoptive mother didn’t get along. A little further questioning revealed that they didn’t get along to such a degree that Child Protective Services had been involved. But let’s go back to the beginning of Lily’s story.

  Lily came into foster care as an extremely skinny little three-year-old, with knobby knees and a head that had been shaved in preference to tackling her lice-infested mat of long blond hair. Along with an eight-year-old brother and a six-month-old sister, she had been taken away from her birth parents, who were meth addicts. CPS was contacted by the woman who had grown weary of babysitting for the children after their parents failed to return for them.

  The first tragic mistake DSHS made was to place the children in separate foster homes. I’m willing to believe that the eight-year-old boy may have had behavioral issues that made finding the right placement for him difficult, and it may even have been unsafe for him to be placed with his sisters. But I cannot imagine that it was impossible to find a foster home that would take three-year-old and six-month-old sisters, if not immediately then at least within a few months. Lily must have been traumatized by finding herself separated from everyone she knew and loved at an age when she couldn’t possibly understand what was happening to her.

  Nevertheless, Lily did well in her foster family and, according to the foste
r parents, they were told that it was extremely unlikely that the birth parents would be able to regain custody. This family had entered the foster/adopt program with the stated goal of adopting a child. They thought they had made their feelings clear, about taking only foster children who would eventually be available for adoption (as much as anyone could know), to the social worker who called them about Lily. The foster parents, their young son, and Lily all got busy with the process of adapting and bonding to one another. Lily’s adjustment to her new life is chronicled in a beautiful photo album/scrapbook that her foster mother made for her. In the early pictures, her shaved head appears in stark contrast to her beautiful clothes and the happy events the photographs are recording. Here’s Lily at a party, here’s Lily with her Easter basket, here’s Lily with a new stuffed animal. Each page is decorated with lots of little embellishments and a description of what is happening. As you thumb through the pages, Lily’s hair begins to grow, and eventually it starts to seem less incongruous that this child could actually be part of a normal, happy family.

  The happiness of the family—and of Lily—was being sorely tested at this point, however. The social workers were doing their best to reunite the family, and Lily and her little sister, Abby, were being taken to their birth parents’ home for weekly visitation. Then, when the social worker thought things had gone well enough during daytime visits, the parents were allowed to have the girls for weekends. It would take Lily several days each week to calm down after these visits and she began to “act out” in various ways, but the foster parents were still hopeful that they would eventually be able to adopt Lily if the state didn’t return her to her parents’ care.

  And the state didn’t, but it also didn’t move to terminate the parents’ rights, so the situation dragged on until Lily was six years old. Finally, the social worker let the foster family know that, although they weren’t planning to return Lily to her parents, they were planning to place her with one of her grandmothers. Heartbroken, the foster parents decided that there was no point in prolonging the inevitable. They told the social worker that if they weren’t even going to be considered as adoptive parents, after three years of what seemed to them to be a successful placement, the state should go ahead and move Lily to the new home.