Mention the phrase “foster care” to nearly anyone and you may evoke one of several images: maltreated children; kindly strangers; abusive strangers; bureaucratic bungling. One image not likely evoked will be the sheer enormity of the foster care system. Foster care is big business. In 1989, the federal government spent 1.2 billion dollars to reimburse state spending on foster care. This year it will be over 6 billion dollars, an increase of more than 400%!
Foster care is a way of offering children a stable home while their own parents are unable to care for them. Some children may have been neglected or mistreated. Social workers and lawyers work with biological and foster families to help parents and children sort out their problems in order to make the biological home a safe place to which the child can return. Usually, foster care is a temporary arrangement. Some children return to their own families in a matter of days, weeks, or months. Those who cannot (two-thirds will stay more than a year) may stay in long-term foster care or may be adopted. Ideally, each child is placed in a foster home that is thoughtfully chosen to meet their unique needs. The principal goal is to significantly reduce the length of time a child spends in the frustrating wait to return to their own home, to find a permanent home, or to be adopted.
This book galvanizes and centralizes a great deal of legal and social work information about foster care into one easy-to–understand primer. The child welfare services system in general and the foster care system in particular are both amalgamations of federal and state law, hazily defined standards, policies, and practices. Public policy is defined by broad strokes; law is defined in its details.
Forster Care Law - A Primer catalogues and organizes numerous disparate bits of policy and legal information into a single volume that new or seasoned social workers and lawyers will find invaluable, even as public and private agencies are hampered by high staff turnover and inexperienced workers.
While anyone can apply to be a foster parent, to be an effective foster parent is a challenging task that calls for specific knowledge, skills and abilities. Even armed with these, foster parents too often find themselves unappreciated and criticized. Every new report of child abuse by a foster parent further weakens the desire of would-be foster parents and undermines the ability of agencies to retain their veteran foster parents. To combat this pessimism, one of the virtue’s of this book is the authors’ ability to provide a comprehensive review of risk and liability issues. This is accomplished by citing numerous legal cases without dragging the reader into a quagmire of legal jargon.
There is unanimous agreement that the American family is in a state of crisis. Births to unwed parents are still at record high levels, marriage rates are down, and divorce rates are up. Legislators, lawyers, social workers, and public policy makers are constantly pondering ways to evaluate such family changes in an attempt to determine possible responses to them. Schweitzer and Larsen have unraveled one strand of the family crisis mess. This book does what few child advocacy books do. It deftly communicates real-life practice, policy, and law to front-line workers without sounding like a training manual. It is a book that should truly help many of us lawyers and social workers do our jobs better.
Guest book review by
Daniel Pollack, MSW, JD
Professor at Yeshiva University’s School of Social Work in NYC
Senior Fellow, Center for Adoption Research,
University of Massachusetts Medical School
Dan can be contacted at (212) 960-0836
Dear Professor Patton:
ReplyDeleteI am the grandmother of two young black boys who have been in the foster care system since 2001. Currently they have not seen each other in two years as siblings. I have been travling back and forth since 2001 as the grandmother from Harrisburg, PA. to New York State, Bath. I have had a state police report done, and paid for an interstate compact, they have had a child's sex theaprist talk with me because my daughtewr who is mentally chanllended thinking that if she lied on me that she would be able to keep her children, anyway I have gone through their firey hoops and I pass every time, the social services department which is this social worker and her mate who is the counselor continues to keep my grandsons separated and disconnected with their family, my grandsons are in different placements and have not been allowed to have any type of communication. This is extremely crule, and it also goes against the federal law called the Safe Families Act. I was just in Bath NY on May the 2, 2005, the judge, and law guardian has ordered a trail that is to take place on June 7, 2005 at 9:30 A. M.. This is a the typical way that the system primes BLACK BOYS into becoming furture inmates because they are stripped and disconnected from family, and folk who look like them so when they become of age they are confused and not able to communicate with their own because they were not allowed to have anything to do with their own folk, and what and who they were made to be with was not reality for them so they don't fit in anywhere and this causes problems that theses black children end up in prison.
I hope that I am not confusing you.
Doris