When the Families First Preventive Services Act was signed into law in 2018, it included provisions to expand the number of foster families in the United States. The legislation also sets aside $8 million for the Secretary of Health and Human Services to “make competitive grants to states, Indian tribes, or federations of tribes” to support the recruitment and retention of high-quality foster families to increase their ability to place more children in family settings.
Putting aside the fact that $8 million is hardly indicative of federal priority and may be enough for one state to take on the project, the real problem was one of measurement. Many states did not, and still do not, have an accurate count of the number of nursing homes. How do we know if they were able to scale it successfully?
Furthermore, some families have effectively stopped accepting children, even though they have been licensed. Some people may have had their licenses expired, but would be happy to return to foster care if someone asked them to.
Seven years later, there is still a shortage of foster parents in nearly every state. This contributes to the problem of children sleeping in offices, hotels, and homeless shelters. More than half of foster parents quit within a year. And many foster parents, frankly, are not up to the level we expect, and some are in foster care more for the money than anything else. And to add to the problem, many states have all but given up on foster care, saying they can solve the foster parent shortage by hiring more relatives or keeping children out of foster care altogether. Neither solution has been proven to be particularly effective in promoting child safety.
Currently, the second Trump administration is trying to take another crack at this issue. The Administration for Children and Families (ACF) has told states that they should focus on “homes for all children,” rather than many other indicators that may be less relevant or useful. They want to see foster parent to child ratios greater than 1:1 in every state.
The importance of having more options available to all children in need of foster care cannot be underestimated. All children are not the same, and neither are children's homes. Younger, older, boys, girls, sibling groups, children who need more structure, children who need less, children who can get along well with other children, and children who need to be the only child in the house. Some foster parents can handle medically vulnerable children, some parents can deal with behavioral issues, some can take children in for short-term emergency shelter, and some can keep children for years and even adopt them.
Placing a child in an unsuitable foster home is, as ACF Assistant Secretary Lynne Johnson once put it to me, “like putting a square peg in a round hole,” and the child is more likely to have to be relocated, the child will be further traumatized and violent in the next home, and the foster family will feel powerless and leave the system.
Government agencies need to recruit enough foster parents so that caseworkers can choose where to place their children. You also need to keep in touch with and support your existing family. Tennessee recently launched a pre-Thanksgiving campaign asking already licensed foster families to consider giving their homes “another seat at the table” to welcome children into their homes who are otherwise forced to stay in hotels, offices or group settings for several days over the holidays. The program was so successful that some families agreed to keep their children for long periods of time.
The only problem with the new ACF strategy is that you can manipulate the numerator or denominator just as you would if you were trying to achieve any ratio. And while ACF is focused on recruiting more foster parents, the state also suggests it could reduce the number of children entering foster care. They suggest that through better mental health services and addiction treatment, more families can stabilize and stay together.
But the number of foster care facilities is near an all-time low, and there are many reasons to believe states are reducing the number of foster care facilities and sacrificing child safety in the process. If the federal government gave them an excuse to double down on plans to reduce the number of children in child care, many states would jump at the chance.
We hope that the message gets across to states that quality foster care is an important part of the child welfare system. The benefits of increased focus on recruiting and supporting them will reverberate to the safety and well-being of our nation's most vulnerable children.
