RICHARD WEXLER | Posted: Sunday, October 1, 2006 7:00 pm
When officials in Nebraska, the state that takes away proportionately more children than any other, held a three-day summit on child welfare, where did they turn for a keynoter?
To Alabama, which The New York Times singled out for transforming its child welfare system from a national disgrace into, relatively speaking, a national model? No.
To Illinois, another state recognized across the country for transforming itself into one of the nation’s best? No.
They turned to Minnesota — the state that used to have the worst record in the nation for tearing apart families, until it was surpassed by Nebraska.
And one of those who shares responsibility for Minnesota’s abysmal record is none other than the keynoter chosen for the Nebraska conference: the former chief justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court, Kathleen Blatz. (“Leaders working at Children’s Summit to fix foster system,” Sept. 26.)
Justice Blatz did one thing right in Minnesota: She opened all court hearings in abuse and neglect cases to press and public. But she left a system in shambles, thanks in part to the kind of vicious, family-bashing rhetoric she offered up at the Nebraska summit.
It didn’t sound vicious, of course. “We must separate culpability from capability,” Justice Blatz said — and tear children from parents whether they are evil or just not up to the task. Such attacks on supposedly incapable parents are seductive, conjuring up images of innocents rescued.
There’s just one problem: We’ve tried it Justice Blatz’s way for 150 years, substituting orphanages and foster homes for “incapable” parents — and it’s given us exactly the system we have now. Why would anyone say the answer is more of the same? In contrast, Illinois and Alabama figured out that the best hope for children is to help their “incapable” parents become capable — something that often involves ameliorating the worst effects of poverty. As a result, they have dramatically improved child safety while taking away children at a small fraction of the rate in Nebraska or Minnesota.
Justice Blatz would say she doesn’t want more of the same; rather she wants to rush to terminate parental rights and get all these children adopted. But that hasn’t worked either. Every year, the number of terminations exceeds the number of adoptions, creating a generation of legal orphans, with no ties at all to birth parents and little hope of adoption either.
In her most seductive line, Justice Blatz declared, “We do not call it a parent protection system or a family protection system.” But that may be part of the problem.
Consider a study of infants born with cocaine in their systems. One group was placed in foster care, the other with birth mothers able to care for them. After six months, the babies were tested using all the usual measures of infant development: rolling over, sitting up, reaching out. Consistently, the infants placed with their birth mothers did better. For the foster children, being taken from their mothers was more toxic than the cocaine.
Some birth parents really are so brutal or so hopeless that even foster care is an improvement for their children. States that are national leaders recognize this; They take far fewer children than Nebraska but they still take some children. These states also recognize that there are some children for whom the best answer is, indeed, adoption. But they also know that we would do a far better job of protecting most children most of the time if we did, indeed, have a family protection system.
Justice Blatz bolstered her case by reading a poem from a child trapped in foster care in Maine who committed suicide before she ever got out. But Justice Blatz didn’t tell her audience the rest of the story.
Just five years ago, Maine had, proportionately, more children trapped in foster care on any given day than almost any other state (except, of course, Nebraska).
But after a little girl named Logan Marr was taken needlessly from her mother, only to be tied to a high chair with 42 feet of duct tape and asphyxiated by her foster mother, the state was forced to confront the misuse and overuse of substitute care.
So Maine brought in new leadership. Today, the number of children taken from their parents has been cut by 25 percent. And when children still must be taken, the proportion placed with relatives instead of strangers has doubled. All of it has been done with no compromise of safety.
Today, it is far less likely that a child in Maine will suffer the way that 16-year-old did. But that’s because after decades of listening to the Justice Blatzes of the world, leaders in Maine realized the only hope for children was to move in precisely the opposite direction.
One can only hope a foster child doesn’t have to endure the fate of Logan Marr before Nebraska catches on as well.
Richard Wexler is Executive Director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, www.nccpr.org.