Naomi Schaefer Riley joins to discuss this month’s policy focus: Fixing Our Child Welfare System to Help America’s Most Vulnerable Kids. This is an important topic because data show that children increasingly lack a safe, permanent, and loving home in America. We discuss the specific reforms that need to come from many different sectors in this country and why the underpinning of any policy needs to focus on children’s safety instead of adults’ needs.
Naomi Schaefer Riley is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, focusing on issues regarding child welfare, as well as a senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum. She also writes about parenting, higher education, religion, philanthropy, and culture.
She is a former columnist for the New York Post and a former Wall Street Journal editor and writer, as well as the author of seven books, including, most recently, “No Way to Treat a Child: How the Foster Care System, Family Courts, and Racial Activists Are Wrecking Young Lives,” (Bombardier, 2021). Ms. Riley’s writings have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the LA Times, and the Washington Post, among other publications. She appears regularly on FoxNews and FoxBusiness and CNBC. She has also appeared on Q&A with Brian Lamb as well as the Today Show.
TRANSCRIPT
Beverly Hallberg:
Welcome to She Thinks, a podcast where you’re allowed to think for yourself. I’m your host, Beverly Hallberg, and on today’s episode, we delve into this month’s policy focus: Fixing Our Child Welfare System to Help America’s Most Vulnerable Kids. And this is an important topic because data show that, increasingly, children lack a safe, permanent, and loving home in the States. So in this episode, we’re going to get into the specific reforms that need to come from many different sectors in this country, and why the underpinning of all policy reforms need to focus on children’s safety instead of adults’ needs.
And joining us to break it down is the author of the policy focus; Naomi Schaefer Riley is joining us. She is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, focusing on issues regarding child welfare, as well as a senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum. She’s with us. And she also writes about parenting, higher education, religion, philanthropy, and culture. She is a former columnist for the New York Post and a former Wall Street Journal editor and writer, as well as the author of seven books, including, most recently, No Way to Treat a Child: How the Foster Care System, Family Courts, and Racial Activists Are Wrecking Young Lives. And it’s a pleasure to have her on today. Naomi, thank you for joining us.
Naomi Schaefer Riley:
Thanks for having me, Beverly.
Beverly Hallberg:
So your book, and also this policy focus, delves into something that I think most people in this country would agree on, and that is we want to make sure that children are protected, that they are cared for. Yet many of us have heard horror stories about the state of foster care. I think the most notable one is we hear often that there just aren’t enough homes to take in all the children who need foster care. So can you first break down just the data? Where are we on foster care? Do we have enough homes for the children that need them?
Naomi Schaefer Riley:
So unfortunately, I don’t think we do. Most states report that they have a severe shortage of foster families, and that’s not really surprising. When you look at the data, about half of foster families actually quit within the first year of getting trained to do this work. We treat foster families terribly. We treat these parents who volunteer to do this important work like glorified teenage babysitters. When they call to volunteer, often their calls are not even returned. We drop off kids at their house without giving them relevant information about a child’s history of abuse, of sexual abuse even. We don’t even tell them, in some cases, about a child’s allergies. Obviously, many child welfare workers are overworked and underpaid and undertrained in a lot of ways. But these people who are volunteering to do foster parenting are largely just doing some of the most difficult and important work that you can volunteer to do in this country, taking in a traumatized child into your home. And we have to find a way to elevate that and treat those people better.
Beverly Hallberg:
Now, this was years ago, but from personal experience, I remember my parents tried to become foster parents to take in one child that we knew, that we were friends with, and they weren’t allowed to do so because we didn’t have the sufficient number of windows in a house. And so that’s why my parents were declined. Do you find that some of the stipulations can be too strict at times? That seems even kind of ironic, considering they don’t seem like they prepare the foster parents in other ways.
Naomi Schaefer Riley:
Yeah, some of the regulations are just crazy. There’s actually a story. The former governor of Kentucky actually talked about how he and his family — I think they had five kids, and he was a wealthy businessman — wanted to take in a child that they had actually met through their other children who was in the foster care system. And Kentucky’s system told him that they were not allowed to take in another child because that would just be too many children. I mean, he was married to a woman who was staying at home. They had plenty of money and resources. They were doing a great job with their own kids. But this regulation prevented them from offering that child a loving home. And there are all sorts of other ones. I mean, a lot of people try to use the child welfare system to get their own social agenda passed. So there have been regulations, like you can’t have a gun in your home if you want to be a foster parent even if it’s a registered, locked up gun because people just don’t like guns.
But what’s terrible, though, is that a lot of the way we recruit foster families is that it seems on the one hand, the regulations are too stringent. But on the other hand, what happens is that we sometimes tend to recruit people who are not the people that we want to be doing fostering, people who do it for the money, for instance. But what happens is because our foster system and our child welfare system is set up for the convenience, in many cases, of child welfare workers, they’ll say, “Oh, we’re going to come visit tomorrow at 10:00 AM to check on the child.” And you say, “Well, I have a job.” And they say, “Well, you just have to do what I say.” So it’s not really set up for ordinary middle-class parents who often have a job and other things to do and other kids. But if you are a parent who is doing this for the money, say unfortunately, you’re like, “Oh sure, show up at my house at 10:00.” And that seems much more convenient for the system.
Beverly Hallberg:
The incentives seem backwards in so many ways, and that’s why we do hear horror stories about children having awful experiences in foster care. How often does that take place?
Naomi Schaefer Riley:
So it’s pretty rare, and I think people should understand that. Obviously, those cases make headlines. And also, it’s important to understand that if we take a child into state custody, we should be doing everything we can to ensure that child’s safety. But foster parents typically have a much lower record of abuse and neglect than the average American parent. So as much as those cases make headlines, they are pretty rare. You do hear a lot about the bad outcomes for kids who have been in foster care, and I think what people often fail to understand is that it’s hard to separate what happened to that child prior to entering foster care from what is happening to that child in foster care. So all of the maltreatment, the abuse and neglect that that child might have experienced before they entered the system is going to impact things like whether they graduate from high school and what their emotional state is and their likelihood of substance abuse. All of these things which are the end of a long record of a very difficult life.
Beverly Hallberg:
I thought that was an interesting point you made in this policy focus. You talk about the maltreatment of children, and you say that there is a presumption that kids that are removed from their families weren’t necessarily in danger, that maybe it was just the families couldn’t afford the proper treatment, proper nutrition for their child, let’s say. You’re actually saying many of the children who are taken out of homes typically and sadly do come from unsafe environments.
Naomi Schaefer Riley:
Yeah. The narrative that you hear, and this is the myth, that is most of the kids who are coming out of these homes are being removed for neglect, and neglect is something that is harmless. Neglect is not something that is harmless. In fact, most child maltreatment fatalities that happen in this country happen as a result of neglect. Now it could be a symptom of neglect that you’re seeing is that a child is going to school without a coat on or that a child hasn’t eaten over the course of a weekend or that a child is being left at home unsupervised. Those may seem like, “Oh, well if we just gave this family more food stamps or a housing voucher or more child care, that that would solve all those problems.” But in fact, what’s often the case, and in as many as 80% of these cases, is that a parent is suffering from some kind of mental illness or substance abuse. And that is preventing that parent from properly caring for a child.
So neglect often includes not only substance abuse on the part of the parent, but things like leaving a child with a known abuser. As a mother, you would be accused of neglect if you left a child with a man who you knew was going to be beating your child. Medical neglect is another big topic, so where a child is clearly severely ill or disabled in some way and you have not sought any kind of medical attention for that child. It could put that child, especially a young child, in severe danger.
Beverly Hallberg:
And so let’s talk about some of the negative impacts too of not having enough homes for them to go to. We’re seeing children…. Well, let me ask you this because I know you do outline this some in your policy piece. Where do kids go if there aren’t enough homes? What are you finding? Do you even find that sometimes kids aren’t even taken out of unsafe situations because the welfare system knows they have nowhere to put them?
Naomi Schaefer Riley:
Absolutely. So there are two things driving that. The first is that I think a lot of child welfare agencies and family courts have a policy of always wanting to leave the child in the home, or if they do remove the child, wanting to reunify that child with their family as soon as possible. And I do tell people, think about this in the context of domestic violence. Imagine if a woman called the police because her boyfriend or husband was beating her, and the police showed up and the first question they asked was, “How can we get you guys back together?” Now, I’m not saying that these children should never be reunified with their parents, and in most cases, they are. But we need to ask important questions about what led up to that situation and whether it’s in fact safe for that child to be reunified.
Once we do take a child out, what we find is that there are very few places for them to go, especially for older kids and kids who have severe behavioral or mental health problems. You can’t just drop them in some ordinary family and expect that they’re going to be able to adjust to that kind of life. Often they’re going to need some kind of real psychiatric intervention, behavioral interventions. We’ve shut down a lot of group homes and congregate care facilities that can provide those kind of services. And now what you’re seeing all over the country is kids actually sleeping in child welfare offices. Hundreds, thousands of kids in the past year have slept in offices because we have no place for them.
Beverly Hallberg:
And so let’s talk about what the solutions are. We hear all these stats, we hear the data. I know in 2018, Congress did pass the Family First Prevention Services Act, maybe trying to address some of this, but has Congress done anything yet that’s really helped? And what should we do?
Naomi Schaefer Riley:
So the Family First Prevention Services Act, I think the people who passed it had very good intentions. Obviously if we can prevent these children from going into foster care, we want to do that. But first of all, many of these interventions are not prevention in the literal sense, in the sense that these kids have already been abused or neglected.
The second thing we found out is that there’s not a lot of evidence behind the prevention services that are offered. So things like anger management or parenting classes just don’t turn out to have a high record of success. Things that Congress does need to do, especially when you think about the urgency of children sleeping in child welfare offices on cots or on the floor and in potentially dangerous situations, they do need to fund congregate care. We need to remind ourselves that there’s a reason that these beds existed and that there are kids who really can’t right now function in family homes on a temporary basis.
Congress should also be, we should also be rewarding states for recruiting quality foster homes. And every time a child goes into foster care, we should have multiple options for where that child should be, depending on the severity of the problem that they’ve experienced, and different kids are going to fit into different homes. So right now what we have is we’re trying often to fit square pegs into round holes, and a family volunteers to take in a teenager, and a child welfare worker shows up with a toddler because that happens to be the only open home. We can’t have that continue.
Beverly Hallberg:
Well, I want to take a brief moment to talk to you, our listeners. You may know that IWF is the leading national women’s organization dedicated to enhancing people’s freedom, opportunities, and wellbeing. But did you know that we are also here to bring you, women and men on the go, the news? You can listen to our High Noon podcast, an intellectual download featuring conversations that make a free society possible. Hear guests like Ben Shapiro and Dave Rubin discuss the most controversial subjects of the day, or join us for happy hour with At The Bar, where hosts Inez Stepman and Jennifer Braceras chat on the latest issues at the intersection of law, politics, and culture. You can listen to past episodes at iwf.org or search for High Noon or At The Bar in your favorite podcast app.
Well, Naomi, I want to also talk about the importance of adoption and how that factors into trying to reduce the amount of children who are looking for homes. Do you think that our adoption system isn’t easy enough so that people can adopt children they want to get them out of foster care?
Naomi Schaefer Riley:
Sure. Well, there are a few things going on there. The first is that, in order for a child to be adopted out of the foster care system, their parental rights typically have to be terminated. So we have a law on the books called the Adoption and Safe Families Act, which has come under a lot of criticism recently. But basically it was passed in the late 1990s by a bipartisan group in Congress that said kids should not languish in the foster care system forever. This is supposed to be a temporary solution. So the law says that if a child has been in care for 15 of the last 22 months, the state is supposed to begin the termination of parental rights, that you can’t just have a child going in and out of the system forever, that we need to find a permanent, safe, loving home for that child.
So what is happening is that states all over the country are flouting that law and kids are remaining in foster care for 3, 4, 5 years at a time — by which point they have been so traumatized that it is difficult to find a family to take them in. So the first thing we need to do in thinking about adoption is thinking about the timelines for foster care and what our courts and child welfare agencies are doing to enforce those timelines.
But in terms of the actual adoption system, there are a lot of things that we could do to improve that as well. A lot of times it is not clear which children are available for adoption, and we don’t do a very good job of matching families to children. There’s an interesting program called Adoption Share, which started in Florida, and it actually uses an algorithm to match families and potential children. And it’s done this amazing work of trying to figure out exactly which adoption placements are going to be most successful for kids based on a lot of information that we already have about families and kids and based on surveys that they use. Actually the guy who created the eHarmony algorithm has actually been involved in that. And so I think there’s a lot of things we could do to make our system more efficient and better able to find places for these kids, like I said, safe, loving and permanent homes for these kids who really deserve them.
Beverly Hallberg:
What would you say to somebody listening to this program who has wanted to help, but maybe they have children of their own or they’re a little fearful about children coming into their home that have been or need to be in the foster system so they’re just not sure how that’s going to blend with their own family. What advice would you give?
Naomi Schaefer Riley:
So a lot of faith-based organizations have really gotten involved in this space, and one of the important insights that they’ve had is that if you want to help children in foster care, you don’t have to necessarily be a foster parent. There are lots of things that you can do, for instance, to support foster parents in your community. It’s a very hard job that other people are taking on, and you could be doing things like bringing them meals or helping to set up furniture, just praying for them and really understanding what it is they’re going through and making your community as foster-friendly as possible.
The other thing you can do, I recommend people thinking about wanting to understand the system better, is becoming a CASA, a court appointed special advocate, which will allow you to develop relationships with kids who are in the system. And you sort of report to a judge whenever that child is in the courtroom on how you think the child is doing and what things you think are in the child’s best interests. Not only do I think that gives you a good view into what is going on in the system, but I also think it’s important that our court systems and our child welfare agencies know that we are watching, that there are middle-class professional people with an interest in these subjects, and you can’t just get away with doing whatever you want with these kids anymore.
Beverly Hallberg:
And just final question for you. Anything happening in a specific state, let’s say, or on the federal level, from a legislation policy perspective that people should be encouraging their representatives to vote for or vote against?
Naomi Schaefer Riley:
Well, there’s definitely a move in Congress to overturn the Adoption and Safe Families Act. I don’t know what kind of traction that’s getting, particularly with the kind of new split Congress that’s coming in. But if that comes up, I definitely would say we need to support that law that’s on the books.
Another law that activists are looking to overturn is the Multiethnic Placement Act, which bars discrimination on the basis of race or ethnicity in foster care or adoption out of foster care. I think people need to recognize that these kids need, like I said, safe, loving, permanent homes regardless of the color of their skin and whether it matches the color of the skin of the people who want to adopt them. So those are policies that are already on the books that are often flouted, but we need to do a good job of supporting them.
Beverly Hallberg:
Well we so appreciate your work on this and dedicating so much of your life to focusing on this issue and for joining us today to talk about the latest policy focus, Fixing Our Child Welfare System to Help America’s Most Vulnerable Kids. People can find that at iwf.org. Naomi Schaefer Riley, thank you so much for joining us.
Naomi Schaefer Riley:
Thank you.
Beverly Hallberg:
And thank you all for joining us. Before you go, Independent Women’s Forum does want you to know that we rely on the generosity of supporters like you. An investment in IWF fuels our efforts to enhance freedom, opportunity, and wellbeing for all Americans. So please consider making a small donation to IWF by visiting IWF.org/donate. That is IWF.org/donate. Last, if you enjoyed this episode of She Thinks, do leave us a rating or a review. It does help. And we’d love it if you shared this episode so your friends can know where they can find more She Thinks. From all of us here at IWF, thanks for watching.
