"Sadly, there is a certain element within the child welfare industry that tends to look upon kids in the way that, say, Colonel Sanders looks upon chickens." - Professor Ronald Davidson, Director, Mental Health Policy Program, University of Illinois at Chicago.

This article and this report summary by the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform make compelling reading about the why's and wherefore's of children taken from their parents and placed in foster care or group homes (Free Press, 2/19/09). Although both deal only with the State of Michigan, many of the phenomena they describe occur nationwide.

The short version runs something like this: Far too many children are taken from their parents and placed in foster care and group homes; that's mostly the result of a foster care industry that thrives on per diem payments (i.e. payments made by the state for each child held in foster care or group home) to the detriment of children; the system doggedly resists change because of those same per diems; children tend to do better when families are preserved rather than torn apart; an emphasis on family preservation would cost no more than the present system. The report clears up one misconception I had. I always thought that child welfare people were trapped between a rock and a hard place. If they take a child from its parents, they're excoriated for splitting up families; if they don't and the child is injured or neglected, they're raked over the coals for that too. It turns out that's not true. NCCPR says it knows of no one who's ever been sued, jailed or been disciplined at work for taking a child, only for not taking one.

But the NCCPR report utters not a word about fathers, except incidentally. The fact is that in many situations in which the state considers taking a child from a parent, it's a single mother. But little or no effort is typically expended in trying to find the child's father. It may be true that the father is no better equipped to care for the child than the mother, but why no at least find out? Among other things, placing the child with its father costs the state essentially nothing. But of course who'd get those precious per diems?

In Choosing Foster Parents over Fathers (San Diego Union, 7/11/07), Glenn Sacks wrote about a California case which bears all the hallmarks of the Michigan system. In that case, the state went out of its way to keep the girl and her father separate, even telling her he was a deadbeat when in fact he had been desperately trying to find her. Ultimately the State of California ended up paying a hefty judgment to the girl for its outrageous behavior. The amount was not made public, so we'll never know how many per diems it represented.

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