Transcripts For CSPAN2 Naomi Schaefer Riley No Way To Treat A Child 20220810

Partnering with a thousand Community Centers wifi from lowincome families to get the tools that they need to be ready for anything. Comcast along with these Television Company support cspan as a Public Service. Hello and good afternoon, welcome to the American Enterprise institute this afternoon for our book event i am ryan streeter im happy to welcome you today and the director of domestic policies at aei and pleased to do this introduction for this book event Naomi Schaefer no way to treat a child, having the pleasure of being naomis colleague ive been able to benefit from the book being written over time and naomi along the way. If you ever spent time in State Government like i have, you realize how absolutely critical these issues are an intersection between government dysfunction, family dysfunction and trouble in our communities comes in full force and the Child Protective Services. , if you dont know naomi onto naomi shes a senior fellow where she specializes in Child Protective Services Foster Care Services in the role of nongovernment actors like faithbased Organization Role she is the author of six books you may have seen theme and read some of them they include not banning sea salt and start banning snapchat and so faith do us part how interfaith marriages transforming, naomi is a former columnist and a frequent to the papers that you read. We are joined today by emily who is a journalist and a contributor at the atlantic she was previously a longtimebu contributor and is dear prudence at the columnist for a decade you see her were Committee Publications that the New York Times, hofer magazine, esquire, Los Angeles Times andha more, ws were going to do today as a discussion about the book im going tong welcome naomi and emh to the stage and emily will lead the discussion with naomi and we will leave time for questions on the backend. Please join me in welcoming Naomi Schaefer and emily. Thank you so much. Thank you naomi and thank you for this terrific book on report and subject. How did you come to write this book, it is been two years investigating the people who are some of the most neglected and hidden in our society, abused children children who end up in the child protective system foster care were to go over a lot of specifics, what are the headlines from your research. I came into this research a . Couple of different ways, probably the most immediate i wrote abouts American Indians those who are not familiar have the worst child outcomes in the country. Very high rates of child abuse and neglect in a very dysfunctional foster care system. Writing about that big into wonder what the rest of the children in the system work treated like. I spent some time as a columnist in the New York Post where you see headlines about child totalitys and families known to be a administration for Childrens Services, these were not happy behind closed doors they were people who were regularly reported by the neighbors, by teachers, by doctors children showing signs of abuse in severe neglect. I wonder what was it why werent these children being rescued and what can we do to ensure that this did not keep happening, i remember asking that question in the context of conservative about 20 years ago i remember asking people what is the broken policy for Child Welfare, i did not get a lot of satisfactory answers. Typically the answer i got had to do the breakdown of the macon family which is a totally true and totally insufficient answer in my opinion, there are 440,000 kids in foster care right now saying that is the breakdown of the family and thats what you get, that did not help us move along with this problem, those are the things that are pushing me into this research, we know we are not going to abolish the police no matter what happens, there is a movement and the Child Welfare community to abolish family policing, that is the new description that is being put on this whole system with the idea that removing any child from a family is abusive ilin the wrong way to go. Is this getting traction, is this something that policymakers in the public need to be aware of is is being played out in the real world . If you asked me a couple of years ago i wouldve said there are a few people out there that think abolishing foster care is the way to go in the way to solve the problems of the families, i have to say in the last two years this movement has grown up alongside the fund or abolish the Police Movement unlike the abolish and defend the Police Movement where i think youve seen quite a backlash from communities that have said this is going to be a problem for s my family and my household and my kids who are not be protected from crime. You have not seen a parallel backlash against the abolish family policing in foster care movement. A lot of what goes on is not easily seen by most people. I think there is a long list of things that people in that Movement Want to see they have a manifesto of the up and movement they want to abolish mandated reporting by teachers and doctors, they want to abolish drug testing of newborns for pregnant mothers, they want to abolish foster care, they want to stop people from having police intervene in Domestic Violence cases because many times that is whereth we first learn of a child being where a boyfriend is beating his girlfriend and their Young Children in the home there is a long list of policy proposals that are a part of this andma theyre making their way from academia into the world. Throughout the book you blowup the myth that abused and neglected children exist primarily because the poverty, that is the cause. The New York Times sunday magazine has passed i dont know if you saw it had a cover story about a young girl growing up in new york with a large family of siblings who are mostly homeless through her childhood and what happens when trying to escape poverty means separating from a family of 13. You say poverty is not the central problem. What are the actual problems and how does the poverty stop us from addressing the real problems is. What is driving the Child Welfare crisis is the drug crisis. Last year we saw 93000 people in america die of drug overdoses this is an enormous problem we have not gotten herrm head arou. When you think about all of those adults affected by drugs think about all of the children those lives adults touch. When you look at the numbers triply you see typically drug abuse or alcohol abuse or Mental Illness which is often cooccurring with Substance Abuse account for 40 or 45 of the cases that are in the Child Welfare system if you talk to experts about what is going on they would estimate its closer to 80 . I would have a hard time thinking about foster family that i interviewed whom themselves could think of a case that did not involve Substance Abuse on some level. I think people dont understand because lets legalize drugs drugs are totally harmless. I dont think people stop to think how Substance Abuse affects parenting and childbearing and it particularly affects children who are too young to care for themselves in any way children from to three are obviously in particular danger because they cannot go to another adult for help when there. Is suffering from Substance Abuse or Mental Illness gets to see them or the electricity turned on workload them or properly supervise them. There is a stage i referred to in the book, with one of my favorite stages of parenting was the mobile but totally irrational stage where your child is basically about to run out the front door or swallow legos or touch a hot stove or jump into the bathtub. As a totally sober. Its extremely difficult to monitor that behavior, once you added Substance Abuse, alcohol abuse, Mental Illness it becomes almost impossible and those children are truly in danger. A major theme of your book how backwards the entire system is. Instead of placing the welfare of the child front and center you say we are paying way more attention to things like racial ideology not putting children in homes where their race is different from the Foster Parents. You say abusive or addictive parents are seen as victims who must be protected. You describe because reunification or keeping children with their biological families is the ultimate goal. Decisions are deferred, an entire childhood could be further away and no one has paid attention to the effects on the psychological emotional growth of the children. As you say in the book we dont say to abuse women youve got to work it out with this guy, were get into everything that we can to help you work it out but that is essentially what we are saying on behalf of the children, how do we change this. I think its very hard to change it, the thing about adults theyre very good at expressing their feelings and much better expressing them then children which makes us feel sorry for adults and frankly we should have sympathy and b empay for adults in the system, they often have been through the ringer and have experienced poverty and many have experienced the foster care system and we should not be turning our backs on these adults or in any way stopping them from getting every possible service and measure that is available to help them deal with whatever problems are leading to them mistreating the children. I am not suggesting that we even not see them as victims. In many cases they are victims of something. The question is, this is the hardest question we have to ask ourselves in Child Welfare. How long does a child have to wait. Especially if that parent when you have a young child a child 23 where we know so much about the importance of the Brain Development and the need for secure attachment in order to have proper social, emotional, intellectual development the idea that we would wait years for a parent to clean up their act never knowing if that will work out in order to finally decide that maybe the child does not belong without parent were furthering away their childhood. And we are essentially dooming that child once that child has been treated this way and shuffled from one foster home to another and back and forth from biological to foster homeos is failed to form the secure attachment they get to 11 or 12 for the aged out of foster care and then we say what are we going to do about the aging out problem, this is a hard problem to address, what were we thinking when this child was between the ages of and five. I think in order to change a system one thing that we need to think seriously about is the timeline. We have actual federal guidelines for what a timeline is, an appropriate timeline for child in foster care the adoption based families act which passed the midnineties with bipartisan support says if a child has been in foster care for 15 out of the last 22 months, estate is supposed to start proceedings for the termination of parental rights and that law is ignored left and right. The average amount of time that a child is in foster care according to 2019 statistics was 20 months in new york it is 30 months. Talk about not paying attention to the timeline, how do you get to an average of 30 months it is an incredible ignorance or willful desire to ignore the wall that you see in family court. To get to the second part which i think is really important to think about is a racial element that is going on. One of the biggest accusations that you hear about foster care and the Child Welfare system that isra structurally racist. In order to fix this problem. In order to fix the fact that we are disproportionately, according to folks targeting black families and separating black children from their black parents we should be limiting the amount, we should be catching on checking arched spreadsheets to make sure it comes out even in the end. These accusations take no account of the fact that black children are mistreated frankly at a much higher rate than white children in this country they are three times as likely to die from maltreatment as white children in this country that is a harsh statistic. Its really hard to fund it. Ic you can say youre being racist by accusing these black parents of mistreating you, these are children who are dying, i had this really interestingin conversation with somebody who can. If we had a lead Abatement Program, he said i imagine we have a lead Abatement Program in st. Louis and we said if you have led in your home, come tell us and we will offer you the Public Service where we will fix the problem. And you had all of these families come to you and you looked at your clipboard and says does anybody have a clip board anymore, there are to be black families on this list people would say thats crazy because obviously have black families living in neighborhoods disproportionately evading homes that havent had blood abatements of course you want to deal with all of those black families you would not turn some away but thats what were doing with Child Protective Services, we have too many black families on this list that were investigating into median foster care and we need to make our numbers, a little bit more even so lets fiddle with this a little bit have a little bit less surveillance of black families and make sure we take away fewer children who are black into foster care, not understanding this is the service we are providing to protect children. You talk about this law that passed in the 90s to be up termination of parental rights. Arent you describing the pendulum back and forth that was an era where it wasnt the emerging consensus with to act more swiftly and remove children early, even though the law is still on the books is there any system in which that is the goal to sever the parental rights and get the children adopted. I think that is the problem, a lot of Child Welfare policy is determined by the culture of the agency and the culture of courts. I think this is a problem. If we have legislation on the books we either need to have a debate whether the legislation should be there in repealed or we need to follow it. Instead you have everybody deciding for themselves how they feel about it maybe we should give the parents another chance, maybe they didnt fully take, the child has only been returned three or four times and maybe the parent seems, this is a federal law, i dont think we treat most of the balls this way. When we do it suggest that we dont have a lot of respect for the law. Also suggest the judges get to make up things as they go alongt and frankly that is a complaint that people on all sides of the foster care system have. Foster parents, biological parents, lawyers have this sense when they walk into family court its not real court that we dont have real laws and there is a retaliation that goes along with caseworkers that judges are deciding or based on their gut feeling then what the law says. I prefer if we want to have a debate about the appropriate timeline we should have that debate but making of the law as you go along is not a good idea. You see the dramatic cases on either end and not really representative of whats going on. You mentioned the dead child, the child has t been in the system, everyone should have seen what was coming and did not. On the other hand the other case that gets headlined the middle class child who is a nine or 10yearold walking home from the park and someone calls the police and the middle class. How Child Protective Services come in and take the kid away. Can you talk about or give some examples about what were talking about what are the lives like of the kids that ended up in the system who are typical. A typical case there is a couple that i interviewed, they got married when gay marriage was first legalized, they wanted to adopt and then they decided they would adopt out of foster care system. They did their training and they got this call one evening we have a one and a 2yearold who needs a foster home. It was probably like half an houret, maybe a couple of hours they got the call when the caseworker showed up, they ran to walmart and they both called their mothers and asked what they should buy in they get home in the caseworker is there, the kids have cigarette burns on them there is evidence of sexual abuse, the mother was probably not the person responsible, it was probably the men who were in their home and the guy who was in her home at the time was not the father of either of the two children. By the way this is not atypical, the people who are disproportionately dangerous to small children unfortunately ini these cases are nonrelative mail, that is a typical situation that you find in foster care. They took these boys into their home, what are the boys ended up in reunified with his father and the father really met well he felt like he was unable to fully care for the child, he was a truck driver and he was so happy about the way the couple had taken care of his son that he coparent with them now. He is the boy most of the time but they regularly have the boy visit them and hes become part of the family. The other child is probably more typical in the sense that he spent years going in and out of foster care, hes been reunified with his mother and his mother had serious addiction problems, she would not show up for visits on months on end she would tell the judge she was getting clean she would say she was interested in reunified in with the child it did not work this went on and they talked about how they would pack up all of the things that you need to take care of a baby in the bottles and the change of clothes, drive more than an hour to see this woman and she would not show up, they would try to describe this to the judge and the judge told them on more than one occasion im just not interested you are just Foster Parents, these people who knew this point better than anybody their voice was discounted in the system. This went on for more than two m years before they announced the mother was going to reunified with the child, they did not see him for more than a year and ita turns out somebody else reported the mother for another violation and they never found out what it was for, the child was brought back to their home after more than a year, two years away from them. So this was the case, these are the development of years of a child, this boy by the time he was returned is five years old after having gone through all of this. Obviously they are thrilled hes back in their home and they have been able to permanently adopt them but they are angry and i think we all should be, what led to this and the trauma and he came back a different person after all of that because he had to reexperience all the abuse and neglect and they dont know what happened. I would say the back and forth is really typical in the discounting of Foster Parents they are treated like glorified teenage babysitters in the way they are not privy to information about whats going on in the life of children that they care for for years at a time that is a system that is typical in mostth outrageous. You describe in the book where we are attracting the wrong kind of people in every part of the system, though wrong caseworkers in many cases not the ones you just described the wrong people become Foster Parents, the wrong people in the family court, what is wrong with them and who should be there instead . Starting with the beginning of the system i would say theres plenty of caseworkers that mean well sometimes Young College graduates that want to help families and im going to go into work i for c. P. S. Becaue im going to help families andp help put families back together to. They are often ill trained if they get training its trading about cultural sensitivity and about understanding that different people in different cultures treat their children t differently but they are not prepared for police work they are being asked to go to not nice neighborhoods, knock on doors of strangers not knowing who is on the other side and say i heard you were abusing your child, this is not a recipe for success. There is like a 40 turnover rate for Child Welfare agencies. Then you have a huge slate of inexperienced people doing this work you have not trained them well and they quit and then you start the process all over again. I think if we wanted to fix that we would treat not the whole Child Welfare agency but c. P. S. Worker should be treated like first responders, like Law Enforcement and the sake of their own safety and because we are asking them to look around the home, you have to be very quick, what do i see evidence of before this person gets angry and kicks me out of the house, i have to be able to talk to a child. We saw evidence that a lot of Child Welfare workers did not do their job. This covid thing is contagious i will stand on thes. Front lawn d you show me the kid. That is not an investigation, we would be outraged if Police Officers pretended that was an investigation during covid but thats what happened in california it was two months of no investigations going on because gavin newsom said we dont need the Child Welfare agency that much. That would be where i would start with the caseworkers. In terms of family court if you talk to lawyers and i talked tod a lot of lawyers it does not attract for a variety of reasons the highest caliber folks in the legal profession. Its not a wellpaid profession its really hard there is a lot of law that is hard but dealing with family court cases in foster care cases is heart wrenching for folks. A lot of people dont stay in it for a long time. Even at the time you get to a level of judge i talked to one Family Court Judge who would not tell me the story on the record but he said i know what judge who screwed up and another part of the court system and demoted to family court as a result. Sadly i think that is true. Do these family courts need more resources, i think probably that is true, we need more judges they cases seem to bee multiplying but the bigger problem they never get included this is the timeline if you have more and more cases coming in what do you think is going to happen, is going to force lawyers to stick to timelines to make sure everybody is there, just spending a day at family court is the most frustrating experience i watched one day and i watched eight of which had continuances nothing is settled and some of them have continuances because someone did not show what the paperwork was not filed properly and someone decided they wanted to appoint a new lawyer and when the public is providing for them and this can go on endlessly, we have to d say you need to put these fols on a timeline. Finally the question is fosternt parents this is an interesting discussion i talked to a lot of people about the discussion of pain Foster Parent we dont pay them very much should we pay the more or will that further attract people who are interested in fostering for the money. Comparing the donating blood and platelets which you can actually pay for, it turns out with platelets they ask a bunch of questions about the level of contamination like what kinds of problems you mightve had but they also check it and they find and theyre not donating they are selling and lying about their exposure to things that would make the blood contaminated. So the question is how do we encourage people to do fostering especially because the kids are so aware of the money. If you talk to a foster kid some of them can tell you to the dollar exactly how much a family has been paid to care for them p because the family has made them aware or they have been in so many other families that made them aware. I think the question how do we get middleclass americans to engage in foster care. Right now the pastor i talked to his wife wanted to do foster care, he did not he was quite reluctant he went to an informational meeting and he said we have to do foster care because i dont want the other people in the room doing it which is terrible but he said the people are asking these questions one woman raised her hand and said you have to keep these kids in the same part of the house is my other kids, so outraged, how do we outraged more people like that, not that you want this people every information but how do you outraged enough people to say okay if this is whats going to be out there i better do it myself but i think a lot of the key to doing that is faithbased organization and churches that encourage many more middleclass stable families to do this work and before people jump on me and you dont need lots of money i know that they never come into contact and Foster Parents, once youre dealing with child that is already been traumatized in so many ways putting them into a home how theyre going to make their next rent check is not a recipe for success in this is not a couple screaming about each other you spend too much on food last night so im worried about how we can afford rent. How do we find both families to do it one of your solutions that you just mentioned religious organizations and people who are coming out this from a sense that im being called to do this but there is a lot of tension going on between the welfare authorities and religious organizations, can you elaborate on that and how we can make that better. I would start by talking about so people get a sense of the ways in which the religious institutions have a revolution when it comes to adoption and foster care. Prior to 15 years ago and, you would leave a message at an answering machine saying i want to foster at a time when no one would call you back this is a level o customer service, im volunteering is really hard dsaying anybody, anybody. The First Insight that a lot of the faithbased organizations had, lets make this recruitment process different lets talk to people instead of putting on the nightly news saying is this kid cute you want to take them home. They still do that, wednesdays child, mondays child, im not saying it never works but it would be what many people call broadcasting instead of narrowcasting, the audience for the nightly news and they may not feel compelled to get involved because of that picture is adorable. What many of the faithbased institutions did were going to talk to people in ouron congregation and many of these were evangelical churches were going to talk to people in our congregation about kids in our zip code who are in the now and that was a much more the folks that i talked to much more compelling message, that was the first thing they also said to the state you have these requirements how to train fostet families. It was an interesting book last fall it was by a woman that did foster care, she was describing how the training was mostly about what she can do and what she could do things about fire extinguishers and dont ever close the door while youre sitting on a childs bed just the stuff, these kids have been so traumatized and even somebody who has parented before often feels at sea when it comes toom understanding how to raise these kids and many of the faithbased organization in addition how many part extinguishers and explaining to the state laws were also good to provide Trauma Informed Care and help you understand what it is so youre prepared for. The next thing they did, they really supported these families, half of foster families quit within the first year if you look at surveys of foster families a lot of them dont say the problem is the kids or even the problem the toll that this kid was taking on my marriage oe my finance or anything like that, they will say the way they were treated by the system but even still the toll that it takes on your marriage and other children in your home was clearly a problem and obviously churches dont want to be in the habit of encouraging people to do foster care if they find families break up as a result. They provided this Amazing Community of support where they recruited other members of the community to provide respite care or help build furniture at the last minute or pray for them. I think that was a tremendous success. All of this is a preface to the answer of your question why i think even though these religious institutions have said for instance in many cases they wont place kids with the couples or nontraditional families, i think many do with single mothers we do not have the luxury of picking and choosing which agencies and people should be doing foster care right now. Based on their religious belief. My attitude let a thousand flowers bloom we should have agencies that specifically cater to gay couples, we should have agencies, because of their religious beliefs decide these are the couples we will cater to. I want all of that to coexist. When you think about the Supreme Court i heard this case last june between the city of philadelphia and a Catholic Social Services was sued because they were only marrying samesex couples. We in some ways looking at thisr question entirely wrong nobody has a right to do foster care. I think children should have a right to a stable loving home. Who is willing tog provide the n most cases religious families and organizations doing this work god was not telling me to do this i deafly would not be involved what doing foster care is like with some of the States Imagine going to the dmv everyday its like the experience that you have if there is somebody up there telling you this is a good idea we have to understand that is an important voice to have at the table. While you were researching or writing the book did you consider becoming a Foster Parent or did you realize no way. Is a question i get asked a lot. I thought about it its interesting my parents considered it briefly this is a funny story after my sister and i left for college because we were amazing. My parents decided maybe we should adopt more, i got this call i was in my college dorm room, the Child Services called me to ask me what i thought of my parents. Should we trust them with another kid. How often do you get that phone call they went through a long process trying to decide and eventually decided not to. I think one of the issues was they didnt know anyone else doing k this i think in some was they carve their own path and t willing to do things other people work this is outside of anything that the experienced and outside of their comfort zone and that it would be overwhelming. And theres probably something to that there is a Cultural Divide and partly because of the institution there are places where these organizations that support and recruit foster kids are in the south and the midwest and further out west. In the northeast i belong to what of the largest synagogues in westchester there are 800 families. When i talk to people about doing foster care they look at a me like i am crazy. I had people ask me dont christians do that because they want to convertrt the kids. We can talk about that another time you have to feel like your community that supports this and where its normal and fostering is normal i talk to people about what they call foster friendly churches. People who walk into a church with a child who has been traumatized like a child who might thing their head against therc wall or having outbursts,o you belong to the religious institution where people think that that child is totally welcome here, were not going to point and stare in wonder why that person under present state through the service. I am friends with kids who have developmental problems and i think they would even say that they dont feel welcome and a lot of institutions in their community. The way we think about parenting today how do i get my kid a higher sat score, they are not thinking about this level of dealing with the childs trauma or that much different behavior h different behavior. To foster their have to be so many changes. You talk to some people who are now older adults who were placed in such institutions, decent ones, who have a lot of positive things to say and in the New York Times magazine story we were talking about, the girl in it ends up at the Hershey School in pennsylvania which is essentially a boarding school model for llkids who are removed from their family so its not Foster Parents, its house parents and a group of kids living together but its not on your mom and dad, im your house parents. And in the times story it didnt work for this young woman and the writer said the younger of the women arrived at hershey there better their chance ofsuccess there. It seems to be a reasonable model but do you think we should try more institutional care . Use some cof these models, would that help . In the last number of decades i think very reasonably people came to the conclusion that children are best raised in families and i dont think that we should move away from that idea. I think thats generally true. The problem is what kind of families are children best raised in. Like you mentioned i had an interesting conversation with a guy named Richard Mckenzie who is now professor of economics at esuc irvine. Hes probably past 80 now but he wrote books about growing up in group homes and this started when Newt Gingrich was proposing a return to orphanages in the 1990s and he remembers all this outrage and he ended up writing an article from the wall street journal about why are people so outragedabout orphanages . I grew up in one. When he goes about speaking to people about his s success people asked him how he turned out this way despite his growing up in an orphanage and he says i am who i am because i grew wup in an orphanage. The way he described the dysfunctional alcoholic father he was living with, he and his father were out running the streets this was the alternative of the time. He went to i think of presbyterian home. He lived with house parents and learned to work, went to school there and this was how he grew up. Were not going to return to that a widespread basis now but i think theres a clear n place for whats called congregate care in the array of options that we have four kids so for instance theres a place called utah youth villages and thats for kids who cannot right now be living in a family. Their needs are too high. Thebehavioral challenges are two great. The challenges are too much for a foster family to handle and the way they talk about you talk youth villages is they have a couple of house parents who are fulltime employed. Like , this is their job and they have six or seven kids living in a whole. They view their job is to either make that kid able to go back to their biological home if thats an appropriate placement or a way to make them adoptable by a family. Teaching them how to live in a family again. How did we joke about potatoes but how to act around otherpeople living in a whole. I think its really, we underestimate how hard that is to teach a child who hasnt had that experience for a long time if ever. So i think that theres definitely a role for those kind of homes. I think theres also a very big need for homes that are going to deal with real psychiatric needs for kids and by the way, were seeing a shortage of these kinds of homes not just for kids in foster care buteverywhere. You have stories, there was a story the other day about a kid in boston that needed a psychiatric bed. He stayed in hospital, just a plain old hospital bed, i think he was in a hospital bed for 30 days while people were waiting to find him a psychiatric bed. When you think about the fact that a parent who is willing to have healthinsurance has that much trouble finding a child place, the kids in foster care i think have no chance. What weve done through congress and state funding is we have shrunk the options for those kids. Weve said congregate care should not be an option. Were going to close those beds, deep on much of the private care. Weve seen these institutions as abusive and magically apparently we twill find places for kids. This spring 400 kids in texas were sleeping in offices. Why are they sleeping in offices . Because we donthave another place for them because we havent found a good Foster Parents for them to be with because we close aggregate care options. To me, were the American Enterprise is here like we are fiscally responsible people. This is an area where i am happy to throw money at this problem because i think there should be empty beds because kids should not have to be shoved into, we should not be shoving square pegs into round holes just because thats the onelast available place we have lfor the child. They need, they really have severe psychiatric problems but all we have available is a foster home that says they can take an eightyearold so we will put that teenager there. This does not make any sense to me this is where we keep going twith the court system. Washington state just had a federal judge announced you can no longer have kids sleeping in offices. You read news story like you get to the 11th paragraph and it says everyone is so happy they reached thesedecisions, its not clear where these kids will be sleeping instead. Okay. I think congregate care needs to be on the menu for kids and i think we need toprovide them with as many options as we can. Were coming towards the end so i want to leave time forquestions. We have someone with a mic. Thank you, this is very interesting. I have a question linked to the New York Times story which i think a lot of people read about dasani but it speaks to something you talk about when you talk about the focus on cultural differences and i remember reading in that story out the reporter spent a lot of time focusing on how dasani was taught to speak appropriately at the hersheyschool and how the insinuation was this was somehow not right. That she shouldnt be made to speak well when in thfact as the description of her shes very clearly stated theyre trying to get College Kids College ready and workplace ready and when she ends up going back home because of she had several violent altercations at the school there was a sense of relief eamong her family that she was back because of course she taken on a role as a parent herself for most of her life and i made a horrible mistake of reading the comments on this piece which you should ra never do but people were outraged on behalf of everyone. Dasani, her mother, all the other siblings but no one spoke to these two issues. Why is it bad to teach a kid who comes from poverty how to present herself, howto buckle down and study and to be able to go out into the world . Why is that culturally inappropriate . Some of her teachers were africanamerican and they spoke to that issue and secondly are we on the overload with these kinds of stories in a way that doesnt speak to the solution as you do have to get to the 11th paragraph of the story when celebrating their empathy for this girl going back to her family when i read it as a tragedy. I read that story. Its a tragedy and part of the reason that i think you have empathy for her, i mean, you haveempathy for her for so many reasons. When you talk to kids growing up in the foster care system, many of them have this image in their mind of what their life have been like if they had been able toremain with their biological family. Either that they would have been able to prevent some problem that happened in their family. I mean, dasani was clearly helping to take care of her siblings but if they had stayed her mother would have cleaned up her act or things would have been okay if the administration for Childrens Services had tkept knocking on their door. And you feel sympathy for that attitude because you do understand they wish things decould have been different and we all wish things could have been different but the idea that Child Welfare was to blame for that i think is the problem. Its misdiagnosing the problem. The family had so much dysfunction. Drug use, mencoming in and out of home who were not related to the children, violence. As a society we have to be reacting to those problemsand the whole notion that it rywas , she was trying to escape poverty was the problem. This family had been helped by any number of social Service Programs but the money had been misused. The money was being used probably for drugs so the question is maybe poverty is not the problem and maybe it is asyou say. Er we can have as much empathy as we want but there are cultural problems here. Family structure is so tied to child maltreatment. If you are living in a home with nonrelative mail you are about 10 times as likely to suffer abuse as if you were living in a two parents married family. Its not that every single mother is having this experience, but when you are trying to diagnose what went wrong here, you cant just pretend its ecjust because they were poor there are so many other factors. Quick followup. Do federal agencies or State Governments, do their rules acknowledge that detail about nonrelated men at home being the biggest risk for abuse to the kid . Is that acknowledged in any of therules you came across . Its not acknowledged in the rules. Essentially when youre training caseworkers if you are properly training them you would say to them this nonrelative mail is clear risk and most caseworkers i would say understand that. Whether they understand how to weigh that risk is hard to say. One of the things i talk about in the book is the use of protective analytics in order to for us to better understand which children are most at risk so theres an interesting Pilot Program going on in Allegheny County outside of pittsburgh right now where when you call, when a report is made of maltreatment against a child, theres all sorts of data that we already have about most of these families. It involves data about whether theres truancy issues. Data about the prison records of people who are living in the home. Eta about who is actually living in that home and who is receiving all search of public benefits. Who has Substance Abuse issues. So when those older factors are put into an algorithm it gives us a good sense of which children should be visiting very quickly. It doesnt say well, we know these parents are guiltystof abuse so lock them up and take that child away but it does weigh these risks in an appropriate way based on past experience. The algorithm takes account of the fact that these numbers are high for nonrelative males, particularly nonrelative males with long that she so the algorithm would say its really important we visit this child in the next 24 hours. This follows from that question. Have you seen places where you feel like its being done right either because you see faith based communities, nonprofit organizations, states or municipalities that have lost four things in place that are doing it well . Where do you see Good Progress being made or do you see places that are continuing to move backwards . I would say the progress that ive seen is mostly on the recruitment training and support of foster families. These organizations are popping up all over the country. One place that i visited was interesting where theyve taken off is arkansas. Theres a group called the call which is now i think in 75 percent of the counties in ntarkansas and some of these are rural places so the idea that they been able to take hold their support parents there is important. Unfortunately i think Child Welfare as the state or sometimes countybased system , the ideology in those places as really just become pervasive. Its an ideology of family preservation and reunification at all costs. I think thats how social workers are trained, thats what family courts aretrained to do. To the extent they have passed their own laws its very much that way and you see so much of the system being in this direction. Many may be familiar with the cost of program, Court Appointed special advocates. I talk in the book about how i think theyre a great independent way for people of may not want to be Foster Parents but who may want to become involved in the system , its a great way to learn about the system but its also a great way for the system to sense that somebody is watching. That there are people inthe community who are really kind of going to family court and trying to understandwhats going on there and dont want all this nonsense to happen. Unfortunately i wrote an article recently about how costa is sort of this is too hard to turn but being coopted. Now people think we should not have Court Appointed special advocates who are supposed to only look out for the bestinterests of children. Now it should be fairly advocates so now there representing not tonly the best vestiges of the individual child, theyre having to represent that childs biological parents interest and i feel like the biological parents interests are already being represented. They have lawyers and they are also adults who can speak articulately inmany cases. So i think were kind of money in the water by saying the goal here even of cost is family preservation as opposed to saying you have one job as the saying goes and your job is to represent the best interest of the child. I worry so much of the system is headed in thedirection that im not seeing that kind of independence that i like to see. Thats the point we started with that puts the childsinterest in the center thats discouraging to hear. With this institution thats doing that is then told to expand to the family who the best interest maybe you dont go back with your family. Can you imagine if this was how regular courts work if we set the public defenders should be charge of representing not just the defendants but the accuser . We have an adversarial court system not because we are mean but because we think its important everybody have their own representatives in the court system. As we talked about in abuse cases, the goal is not reunification and keeping this coupled together even if in some cases that could be an idea but the whole system is not driving it telling the woman you need to work this out. Any other questions . Thank you. For people considering being Foster Parents, im not sure which way to go. Maybe their home is not big enough, maybe this, maybethat. What reason sticks out the mostthat people say i better not, i dont think i should do that right now . Probably the biggest thing that you hear and something that i hear Foster Parents imtalking to their friends about who asked them this question is i wouldnt beable to give that child up. I wouldnt be able to take care of this child fully, to love them completely, to provide them with a stable home and then have the state tell me time for this child to goback home. I would say more than any way they are treated by the system, more than any kind of year about the size of their house, i would say its this sense of can i do this to the best of my ability and still live through the process of ldseparation from the child even if its the best thing for the child. Even if the parents do clean up their act and should be reunified with the child. And i would say like every Foster Parent ive talked to has a different process for dealing with this. Definitely there is a sense of how important tethe communal support and spiritual support is here. I think the Foster Parents who pare happier about it or who deal with it better are the ones who do think the child is going back to a better situation. It becomes all that much harder if you think the child is going to be reunified with the family but now im read about that childs safety. That is a whole other level of heartbreak i think. But definitely the idea of forming this attachment and then having to suffer it in some way. I will say we have a different system now than we had before. There used to be a much clearer separation that was really more enforced by Child Welfare that once the child went back you really didnt have any contact with them and you werent supposed to. Now what i find is many of these organizations encourage if possible continued contact with the Foster Parents if the biological parents are willing because the Foster Parents can serve not only as a way to support the child but also a way to support the whole family. They will say to the biological parents if you need emergency babysitting, if you need somebody at the last minute to fill in i know this child well and i can do that. Sometimes the family needs finding jobs or other things. Foster parents can serve as a connection to community that many of these families are lacking. Related to that question is do some parents for potential Foster Parents not do itbecause theyre worried about getting a false accusation against them . I talked to parents who have had false activations made against them. I think its definitely a concern. There have been situations like there was a woman who i talked to extensively and she was in mississippi and she and her husband often have a home for children who need a lot of medical care and her husband is actually an emergency room nurse. And on one occasion like a child ended up getting access to medication that they were supposed tohave a whole investigation was opened up into their home. Their biological. These are people who by the way had spent more than a decade caring for you know, a child on a ventilator. Im talking about real medical needs so an investigation was opened up into their home. Its a very scary thing to experience that level of scrutiny and feeling like now my own family could be in danger owfrom this situation. But i wouldnt say its high on the list of reasons that people dont get into it in the first place. Finally, eating out. Kids are 18 or whatever it is. What can be done therefore kids who are aging out to shore up that part of the system . Many states have now at raised the age at which children can remain in the system from a high of 23 now where you can remain in foster care receiving being in transitional housing, receiving some kind of payment from the State Government. And other forms of support. I think that that is a positive move. Most 18yearolds are not equipped unto go out on their own but unfortunately many of them choose to. Theyre so tired of the system at that point that they want nothing to do with these people by the time they reach 18 and sometimes aging out sooner than that because they dont want any contact with the system. Suhow can we persuade them to do that . Theres so many ways these young people need support and i think that there are some civic organizations, faithbased organizations that are trying to do everything from provide mentorship to Laundry Services to drivers and courses to jobtraining to transitional housing to going with them to an actual landlord and sayingyou can trust this person. I think we will make progress on this but its really hard to solve this problem at the age of 18. And so a lot of the book is focusedon how can we fix this sooner. Thank you so much. I encourage everyone to read this book. Its so thorough. It goes over so much ground and as you started talking about some of the most hidden and neglected members of society you for bringing it to life. Thank you for coming. Book tv features authors discussing their latest nonfiction books. 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