As adoptive and foster parents, we believe our child welfare system needs repair

Back in 2000, we accepted a five-week-old baby girl into our lives as foster parents.

We were hoping to support her family until she could return to them. Seven months later, we got a call from the child welfare agency — they wanted to reassign her following the unexplained move of her sister from one foster family to another. When the case worker asked if we wanted to become adoptive parents instead, we leapt at the chance. It seemed the only way to protect her and us (including our two older children) from another abandonment and the randomness of the system. Today, our daughter is a thriving university student.

While working with the child welfare system was often challenging, our daughter has been a joy to our family. We have also learned important lessons about the lingering trauma associated with poor early care and the foster care system itself. Furthermore, since she is Black and we are white, we have developed a deeper understanding of the racism that still permeates our society.

Since the late 19th century, when social work emerged as a profession, American children deemed to be in danger have faced one of three outcomes: They stay with their family and receive services and visits from a caseworker to check on their welfare; they are institutionalized in a “congregate care” setting; or they are placed with a foster family.

Each of these paths has its flaws. Caseworkers have often been punitive and threatening to families rather than offering the community support that can be healing. Institutions are often run like prisons, with frequent stories of abuse and other mistreatment. Unless a child is put with a relative or close friend (as Michael was when, as an infant, he was sent to live with a neighbor family for eight months), being with foster parents piles additional stress on a developing child.

These imperfect solutions, along with the early abuse or neglect that led to child welfare intervention to begin with, have serious consequences. A 2019 study found that “juvenile delinquency is twice as likely among youth in foster care as it is for children that do not experience foster care.”

Let’s begin with a fact that is little appreciated: A child who is removed from a birth family experiences trauma. Picture child welfare agents or sometimes police arriving at the door, challenging the parents, threatening removal of the child from the only family they’ve known. Moreover, the decision to remove a child from their home has often been rife with classism and racism.

A study undertaken by Human Rights Watch and the ACLU found “neglect” cited in roughly 75 percent of child maltreatment cases nationwide, when it was actually more likely to be “conditions of poverty … misconstrued as neglect, and interpreted as evidence of an inability and lack of fitness to parent.”

In New York City, where we live, 95 percent of children in the foster system are non-white; nationwide, 53 percent of Black children will have experienced a child welfare investigation by the time they reach adulthood. You can recognize that something is deeply wrong.

So wrong, in fact, that a class action lawsuit was recently filed in federal court against NYC’s Administration for Children’s Services for using “invasive and traumatic entry” and “coercive tactics,” including the strip-searching of children, as they “directly threaten to take parents’ children away.” The suit charges ACS with violating the class’s Fourth Amendment rights.

For University of Pennsylvania scholar Dorothy Roberts, America’s approach to child welfare is little more than a “family policing system” not worth saving. She joins those who describe themselves as “abolitionists,” a purposely loaded label since it suggests that far from a system of benevolence, child welfare agencies are an extension of slavery. As one Chicago mother told Roberts, the government “kidnaps” children on the pretense of providing them better care.

Our child welfare system is overdue for significant reform.

First, we should make DNA testing of endangered and institutionalized children routine so that a child’s biological father or another relative can be traced — someone who, in cases where removal is the only remedy, can be given kinship custody.

We should allow parents who have fostered children for a year or more to be given kinship guardianship status so that teenagers can get out of foster care, find stability and not endure the pain of having their biological parents’ rights terminated. We should provide much better community-run mental health services for parents as well as treatment for substance abuse and support for those with intellectual disabilities. If we really want to help children, we need to help their parents.

We should stop mandated reporting — doctors, teachers and social workers shouldn’t be acting as agents of the police. And we should discourage the use of child welfare hotlines, which all too often are used not for reporting real abuse but as means for harassment of a former intimate partner, a tenant or others. Keep reports confidential but not anonymous, and stop terrorizing already vulnerable children and parents, because this largely happens to poor people. New York State legislation, now in committee, addresses this issue.

For now, we still need foster, kinship and adoptive parents. Thousands of children remain in institutional care in New York State and elsewhere. A stable, intact family will give them the best chance at participating in society. There are also many children waiting for adoptive parents.

But beyond that, we look forward to a time very soon when fewer families are harassed, and many more children remain with their biological families. Common sense and research show that this is a better emotional outcome for the child, the families and for society. As any foster, kinship or adoptive parent can tell you, it is far easier to prevent trauma than it is to fix it.

Sarah and Michael Gerstenzang have been adoptive, foster and kinship parents. Sarah is a licensed clinical social worker who specializes in adoption, foster care and attachment issues and serves as board president of the Adoptive and Foster Family Coalition of NY. Michael is the managing partner at the global law firm Cleary Gottlieb.