Foster Care  (continued)

   But foster care is a system that faces many troubles. One problem is that the federal government, likely inadvertently, encourages people to place children into the foster care system. For example, many times kinship foster care is the first placement a worker will look to once a child is removed from the natural home; keeping children with relatives is ostensibly the next best thing. Biological parents who rely on cash assistance programs and food stamps can expect to get about $100 per month per child, however the government will pay as much as $500 per month for a child to foster parents (Forsythe, 1992). Some foster parents receive even more: up to $933 per month, per child (Barth & Price, 1999, p. 102). Such an imbalance, biological parents getting only $100 per month versus foster parents getting up to $933 per month, has the potential to encourage families to give up children (in many cases to their kin) for monetary reasons.
An average stay for a child in foster care is three years or more (Association, 2002). The problem is that the longer a child stays in foster care, the harder it is to be adopted. Final placement for foster children is often a long and drawn out process. Getting a child adopted into a family or returned to the parents is not an easy choice. Many times a child is removed from a home where being returned is a difficult decision given that safety is hard to ensure. Equally difficult is moving a child to an adoption path. These two difficulties often leave child welfare professionals in a quandary, and ultimately foster children get stuck in the system (Association, 2002).
   Another important issue for foster care is the question of what aftereffect it has on children who were placed in the system. Just how well do foster children do once they leave it? a California study looked at 149 children between the ages of 7 and 12 who entered foster care between May 1990 and October 1991. All of the studied children had been in foster care for at least five months. The youth were assessed after they had been reunified with their family of origin and were compared to youth who were not reunified. The children who were returned to their original families, after a foster care placement, showed a higher incidence of risk behaviors, such as, self-destructive behavior and substance use; they also had a higher incidence of tickets, arrests, dropping out of school and lower grades (Taussig, Clyman, & Landsverk, 2001). The summary of the study states "these findings suggest that youth who reunify with their biological families after placement in foster care have more negative outcomes than youth who do not reunify" (Taussig et al., 2001, para. 5).

Adoption

   Keeping family of origin members together, first and foremost because they are blood relatives, is not always a good solution to an abusive crisis. In cases where children can be placed with nurturing, caring, safe, and supportive people, those children will bond and adapt successfully (Leon, 2002); attachment occurs very well, for example, in adoption cases where biological connectivity is not necessarily key to a child's success. Schechter (2000) calls the perceived natural and biological attachment of children to their birth parents nothing more than a "bond of fantasy." The fact is, that a child who is abused and neglected by parents hardly can attach to them when the bonding experience is detrimentally obstructed.
   Adoption is one alternative to temporary placements for children who enter the child welfare system. And because adoptions offer permanent homes for children, the children are able to receive the benefits of no longer being moved from one place to another, as is the case with foster care. By receiving a home with parents who desire to have a child, bonds can develop that mirror the bonds of natural parent/child connections. The argument has been made that removing children from the biological parents is a devastating blow to the child and the parents. The psychological effects of such a loss is said to contribute negatively to a child's ability to transition well into a new foster home, new school, new neighborhood, etc., etc. Leon (2002) suggests that the losses often felt by children and parents are magnified by a social construct that is perpetuated in American society. "Adoption is most commonly viewed through the lens of loss--the child's loss of his or her first set of parents and biological heritage, the birthmother's loss of her child for whom she continues to grieve, and the adoptive parents' loss of their wanted biological offspring" (Leon, 2002, Introduction section, para. 1).
   Children (in adoption cases) indeed experience losses, but those losses do not overshadow or outweigh the benefits of being given to new caregivers, particularly to those who are motivated to care for and love the child. In other words, the idea that taking children from their biological parents is a bad one is not necessarily true. The parents who adopt children benefit from having their own child, and the child benefits because the child is no longer staying with a parent who may not want to or cannot adequately care for the child. "As common place [sic] as it is to associate losses with adoption, what, ironically, may be most naturally and biologically based in adoption is the parent-child attachments formed and sustained in the crucible of actual experience" (Leon, 2002, Conclusion section, para. 1). In essence, the permanent placement of a child can be successful when the caregiver is appropriately skilled and adequately supports and cares for the child and where time will allow for developmental bonds to occur.
   There are intrinsic and complicated problems related to the adoption process however. Race, age and special needs, all impact the adoptability of a child. One study points to the reality that many African American youth who are available for adoption are left un-adopted by Caucasian, would-be parents, and to exacerbate the problem 85% of the people who adopt children are Caucasian (Brooks, James, & Barth, 2002). In one study from 1999, for example, where 127,000 children were waiting to be adopted, 42 percent of those (the largest ethnic group) were African-American. African-American children were one-fifth as likely as other ethnic groups to exit child welfare via adoptions (Brooks et al., 2002). In general, the study finds that prospective Caucasian adoptive parents "prefer younger foster children [five years old and below], Caucasian foster children, and foster children without special needs" (Brooks et al., 2002, Discussion section, para. 3). The average age of children in foster care, according to the study, is nine. So, Caucasians make up the larger adoption pool; they do not adopt the race that is most prevalent. They do not adopt from the age categories that dominate the system, nor do they want to adopt special needs children, who represent 70% of children in the system (Brooks et al., 2002).

Family Preservation

   According to Forsythe (1992) family preservation services (FPS) usually involve: "1) children who are at risk of 'unnecessary' removal from their home, 2) services are provided in the family's home, 3) the response time, from the time of the reported abuse and neglect, is 24 hours, 4) intensive service is provided 5 to 20 hours per week, 5) workers have a caseload of only two families, 6) services last four to six weeks, 7) supportive services are available to the family 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 8) emphasis is placed on the family system and interactions between family members and the family's relationship to the larger community, and 9) family members are taught skills to remain together, and to stay safe" (p. 41).
   Success rates according to Forsythe (1992), that of keeping families together and preventing out of home placements, are reported to be as high as 80 percent one year following FPS. The data is from a composite of numbers based upon the Homebuilders program that was (in 1992) 18 years old. It is also noteworthy to indicate that in one experimental design when child protective investigators worked closely with family preservation caseworkers, the study "demonstrated that the [family preservation services] model was effective and needs to be implemented" (Walton, 2001).
   FPS is more cost effective (at an average of $5,000 per family) than foster care services (at an average of $10,000 per year, per child) largely due to the fact that foster care services span an average of 15-30 months (Forsythe, 1992) compared to 1 1/2 months for more intense family preservation services (Barth & Price, 1999). Drisko (1998) found that families who participated in, and received FPS preferred the intense contact with workers, benefited most if the services prevented an out of home placement, and favored concrete services such as transportation assistance and appointment setting. And as long as parents participate in FPS, if caregivers are cooperative, compliant, and willing participants in the FPS interventions, the service is effective in preventing out of home placements (Littell, 2001).
   Not everyone agrees that FPS is the best alternative to placing children outside of their homes. Rossi (1992) points out that the goal of FPS is to prevent out of home placements, even while such a goal may be detrimental to a child. In reality some children are in significant danger and to keep them in the abusive environment is not a good goal, therefore out of home placement would be preferred. So to indicate that success depends on preventing children from being placed outside of the home is not appropriate, across the board. And oddly enough, in one study "no statistically significant differences in placement were found between the experimental [those who received FPS] and control families [those who did not receive FPS]: 25% of the experimental families and 20% of the controls experienced a placement….indeed, if these percentages show anything, it is that the experimental children fared worse than the controls in placement subsequent to treatment" (Rossi, 1992, p. 86).