Treating Problems Piecemeal Won't Help Foster Children

Excerpt from an article written by Miriam Krinsky

Being a parent in our fast-paced and complex society isn't easy. We find ourselves racing from doctors' appointments to parent-teacher conferences to soccer practice to music lessons, fueled by gallons of Starbucks and by the understanding that our children's welfare is in our hands.

As parents, we don't just take responsibility for one piece of our child and pass on the other issues to someone else. We collect and share information with everyone significant to our children's success and future.

If we acknowledge that this type of involvement is essential to the well being of our own children, we must also ask ourselves what happens to the thousands of youth in foster care.

Without someone to coordinate all these elements, children end up suffering. "The court ordered a one-day visit with my mom," explains one foster youth, "but it was on the day I was supposed to enroll, so I missed a whole month of school."

No one intended for this child to miss school. The court-ordered visit could easily have been arranged for another day. It was simply that no one knew the scheduling ramifications for that child. But this story is all too common. Foster youth regularly miss weeks of class and frequently change schools and homes. This disruption often causes them to fall behind.

Our child welfare system is organized to attend to one need at a time. But this method causes further harm to already traumatized children. Rather than a parent's centralized oversight, our disjointed governmental foster parenting results in a failure to share critical information and a lack of coordinated or thoughtful decision-making.

Compartmentalizing the various government entities that "raise" these children leaves health, mental health and emotional needs unattended. This results in poor educational attainment and an adult life of homelessness, unemployment and despair for too many former foster youth. Yet we are not doing enough to improve these dismal outcomes.

The National Commission on Children issued a harsh assessment in 1991: "If the nation had deliberately designed a system that would frustrate the professionals who staff it, anger the public who finance it, and abandon the children who depend on it, it could not have done a better job than the present child-welfare system."

As the system currently operates, there is still a lack of collaborative parenting and no collective sense of accountability for the individual child. As a result, far too many problems are not identified and resolved because no one is taking overall responsibility for the well being and success of foster children.

The results of our system's shortcomings are visible daily.

A youth gets a ticket, but there is no one who can arrange transportation to traffic court, so a warrant is issued for her arrest.

A health problem affects a child's ability to perform in the classroom, but no one advises the teacher, and he enters the downward spiral of educational failure.

Foster parents are not informed of a child's connection to a prior neighbor, mentor or coach, and relationships that might ultimately provide a lifelong anchor for the child are not nurtured. The messages we are sending these children are unmistakable: No one is in charge of your life; no one truly cares about your future.

All the systems and entities involved in child welfare must come together at a leadership level and demand a more thoughtful, collaborative and productive way of doing business.

Some states are creating collaborative approaches to foster care. In Arizona, a groundbreaking Children's Cabinet formed by Gov. Janet Napolitano ensures high-level leadership, visibility and support to addressing the needs of that state's foster youth. The Children's Cabinet was created with the express purpose of coordinating - at a state leadership level - all government agencies that provide services to abused and neglected children.

Similarly, the Minnesota judiciary and Department of Human Services have come together to craft a more effective model for attending to the needs of foster youth. A joint effort known as the Children's Justice Initiative bridges the gap between judicial and child welfare leaders.

According to Minnesota Chief Justice Kathleen A. Blatz, the Minnesota initiative looks at the system through the eyes of the child. It breaks down traditional communication barriers among those who work in the child welfare system and creates a vehicle for collaborative and informed decision making on behalf of children. All stakeholders are part of a leadership team that meets regularly to resolve barriers inhibiting the children.

All states should seize the opportunity to embrace these proven approaches. Each state should create a Child Welfare Council that would pull together leaders from judicial, child welfare, health, education and mental health agencies to identify and resolve barriers that keep many foster children from finding a better future.

While children are in foster care, they require more than safety and shelter. Their needs are often complicated - doctors for overlooked health concerns, therapists to help them cope with the trauma inherent in abuse and neglect, remedial education assistance and a host of other sometimes-conflicting requirements.

What they don't need is to become lost in a system that doesn't recognize they are more than the sum of these parts.

As one foster child put it, we should "realize that everyone is a whole person, with educational needs, emotional needs and social needs."

Our own children's lives aren't parceled out piecemeal. Neither should we segment the oversight and care we extend to the abused and neglected youth we raise collectively.

Attorney Miriam Krinsky heads the Children's Law Center of Los Angeles, a nonprofit organization that provides counsel for children in the foster care system. She lectures nationwide on criminal law and child welfare.

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Published: September 15, 2005