Maureen Lane

Child Welfare in NYC: Good Policies Don’t Ignore Parents

For the past several days the Times has run a series on child welfare in New York City. While the series includes many important aspects of problems associated with child welfare and foster care, an important part of the story is missing from their articles: the parents.

Minority-run foster care agencies have been under review for the past couple of years, and in the wake of some major problems a few big agencies have lost their standing. John Mattingly, the Administration of Children’s Services (ACS) Commissioner, has enacted some reforms to monitor agencies and fix problems as they occur. “I don’t care who is running the agency or what the purpose of any program is, if you don’t do the basics, you can’t do the work,” he said. “And I don’t back off that at all."

Although on the surface the Commissioner’s tough stance seems fine, his reforms exclude an important voice in the discussion -- that of the families and parents of children who are removed by the ACS. Stereotypes abound about parents whose children are in the foster care system. The Child Welfare Organizing Project (CWOP) is working to correct this.

CWOP started in 1994 and is working with parents whose children are in the system to make sure policy and practice are coherent. Their mission reads “Through organized client involvement and collective advocacy both inside and independent of the system, the Child Welfare Organizing Project will change / transform the quality of services provided to New York City families through the New York City child welfare system.”

Most of the children in NYC child welfare system are from poor minority communities. Although there are families that have children removed for abuse, the percentage is very small. According to CWOP, “The stereotype of the abusive parent – the cruel, calculating parent who enjoys harming his or her children – represents a tiny fraction of the ACS caseload. “

The vast majority of children are in the system for what is termed neglect. However, much of neglect is a function of the lack of resources for poor families. As CWOP explains,

“A parent can lose a child to foster care because she left that child home alone to work to avoid becoming homeless and there was no Head Start program. That parent may be just like the parent who is on the Head Start board of directors in another neighborhood where the program happened to have an opening for her child. And the parent who finally succumbed to drug abuse, but is now in or through treatment may be exactly the right person to help design programs for the parent who may become addicted next year or the year after – or programs to stop the cycle of poverty and despair before it leads to addiction.“

CWOP and other advocates believe it is crucial to make parents a part of the decision-making process and to increase the funding allocated for prevention and family preservation services. The articles in the Times address important issues in child welfare and foster care, but are they adding to the discussion of causes, prevention and policies that will change the systems that need changing?

Parents are an essential part of this story and they are missing from it. Racism is not discussed beyond the minority run agencies that are being vetted. Solutions and policies of child welfare reform need to include more than the predominant groups who are administering, defining, and perpetuating the child welfare system.

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Posted at 2:03 PM, Nov 08, 2007 in Child Welfare
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