Dorothy Roberts

A private childcare arrangement where relatives substitute for parents has been adapted into a public system of foster care, forcing parents to sacrifice control over child-rearing decisions and even give up custody so their children receive better benefits and services.

Dorothy Roberts (IPR-Law) describes the dilemma more and more poor, black families face as kinship care becomes a public system of foster care. The research comes from a recent IPR working paper and is part of Roberts’ forthcoming book, Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (Basic Books, Fall 2001).

She concludes that the state can better preserve families by giving them more benefits and services instead of investing as much in foster care.

The demographics of child welfare paint a stark picture:
- In the last 30 years, the number of children receiving child welfare services has dropped dramatically while the foster care population has skyrocketed.
- In 1999, there were 568,000 children in foster care. The vast majority of these children are poor.
- Black children are grossly over-represented in child welfare caseloads: Nearly half of all children in foster care nationwide are black, although black children are only 17% of the nation’s youth.

Black communities have long relied on the tradition of “kinship care,” an informal system of childcare by relatives and neighbors. Parents used this system to lean on those close to them for financial support while children stayed in familiar surroundings. “Child rearing by relatives was often a response to poverty and other hardships that made it difficult for parents to raise children by themselves,” Roberts writes. Thus, kinship care was a family-preserving alternative to foster care.

Noting the benefits of keeping children in familiar surroundings, state child welfare agencies increasingly are using kinship care when placing children into new homes. As this once-private arrangement becomes public, families are finding it hard to turn down the increased benefits and services that accompany turning their children over to the state. But some families are unprepared for the battery of regulations and lessened autonomy in child-rearing decisions.

A major advantage that kinship foster care offers families is that it makes financial sense. Foster care stipends are much larger than TANF benefits that parents or kinship care providers would receive. Kin foster parents also are entitled to Medicaid, clothing allowances, and other assistance. Through child welfare agencies, parents may also seek drug treatment, mental health counseling, and housing assistance.

Roberts takes issue with the state’s commitment to foster parents and not biological parents. “Giving up custody to the state has become the price of public support for poor and low-income children. The state then provides to foster parents the very services it denied to the parents.”

But kin foster parents face a tradeoff between payments and privacy similar to that faced by mothers receiving TANF benefits: “The level of state support for kinship care givers is directly correlated with the level of state intrusion into their lives. The higher the payment, the greater the intensity of state supervision.”

“Kin foster parents must comply with agency rules specifying the type of home and care they provide, and they must allow periodic visits by caseworkers to check compliance. They must give the agency access to personal information and may have to undergo psychological evaluations… The family also runs the risk that the agency will move the children to another foster home if the relatives fail to comply with agency demands,” Roberts points out.

The child welfare system’s requirement that parents give up legal custody to secure services for their children points to the dire need for fundamental change in the system. Roberts notes that more money goes toward foster care than toward preserving existing families. “This difference in levels of support reflects the government’s perverse willingness to give more financial aid to children in state custody than to children in the custody of their parents.”

Roberts argues that society should feel more collective responsibility toward children’s welfare: “It is a society willing to pay [billions of dollars] a year on maintaining poor children as state wards outside their homes, but only a fraction of that on child welfare services to intact families.” Instead, child welfare agencies should take a proactive role to help families before parents are in a situation to give up legal custody of their children.

(The working paper, “Kinship care and the price of state support for poor children,” may be downloaded at www.northwestern.edu/IPR.)