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WHEN IT COMES TO FOSTER CARE in the United States, the statistics are not surprising: in 2001, only 50,000 of the 131,000 kids in the system waiting for permanent homes were adopted — a mere 38 percent. And this is actually a huge improvement over years past, when the number adopted annually hovered at around 28,000.
What may come as a real shocker is this: the problem isn’t parent recruitment. Aside from relatives and adults already serving as foster parents, plenty of people show an interest in adopting foster kids — nearly a quarter million nationwide every year contact their state child welfare agency.
The real problem, say Jeff Katz MPA 2000 and Julie Wilson, director of the Malcolm Wiener Center on Social Policy, in their new research on foster care and adoption is this: for most states, welcoming these potential parents into the system and keeping them there has been a real struggle. Of the 50,000 foster kids who were adopted, only a small share were adopted by someone among the nearly quarter million (240,000) making the phone calls to the state agency. The vast majority were adopted by someone related to the child or someone already serving as a temporary foster parent.
“I look at it as a funnel,” says Katz, who spent 10 years running an agency in Rhode Island that recruits families to adopt kids in foster care. “All of these people say they want to adopt, but it’s very narrow at the bottom: very few actually do.”
And no one, they realized, has ever tried to figure out why.
Contributing Factors
What’s particularly puzzling about this paradox — lots of kids waiting for homes, lots of potential parents interested, few kids getting adopted — is that this is a time in our nation’s history when babies are hard to come by and so adopting through foster care — where the average child waiting for a home is 8.1 years old — is more appealing than ever before.
For starters, although infertility isn’t the only reason people choose to adopt children (Katz says many interested people simply prefer raising an older child or one with a medical need or have already raised children but feel they have something more to offer), infertility is certainly a big issue these days.
“If you look at the demographics of adoption and fertility, there are many more people looking to adopt,” says Katz. “There are more older people, and people are getting married in their 30s and 40s. Many are deciding they want to have kids later in life than they used to.”
This trend has meant an increase in infertility rates over the years. In 1995, about 6.1 million women in the United States had difficulty conceiving, compared with 4.9 million in 1988.
That in and of itself wouldn’t be a problem, but as Wilson points out, at the same time, the nation’s birthrate is also declining. In 2002, the rate was 13.9 per 1,000 people — the lowest in government records dating back to the turn of the 20th century. Factors contributing to the decline include not only increased infertility, but also more people opting not to have children or to have fewer, as well as a drop in teen births.
In addition, more single people are choosing to raise their children rather than put them up for adoption.
“There aren’t a lot of babies in the system,” Wilson says. “If someone is really intent on getting an infant, then they are in the [private] international adoption market.”
For many, however, private adoption (with a for-profit agency or individual, not the state) isn’t an option because it costs too much, upwards of $30,000.
For others, it doesn’t morally make sense, says Katz.
“A lot of people say, why go to China when there are kids in my neighborhood who need families? We discovered doing this project that a lot of people really, really resent the issue of money in adoption,” he says. Foster care adoption is basically free. “People say it’s like buying a child. It’s immoral. They say there are two types of adoption: rich people adoption and then the kind for people like us.”
In the end, many people — at least 240,000 — decide having an infant isn’t critical, and so they pick up the phone and call their state child welfare agency.
“What happens frequently is they say, ‘my first choice is to adopt a baby,’” Katz says, “but really, what people want to do is be a parent. They become aware of foster care and realize there are all these kids.”
The Research
To figure out why, then, despite the huge demand, the adoption rates haven’t been higher in foster care, Katz, Wilson, and Co-Research Director Rob Geen of the Urban Institute pulled together information from four major sources: federal data collected for three years; their own national survey of state welfare agencies; an analysis of 132 case files from applicants who had completed a mandatory home study; and an in-depth case study of three cities — Boston, San Jose, and Miami — that included focus groups and individual interviews.
What they found was shockingly straightforward: one of the biggest problems is that most state agencies still haven’t figured out how to treat the potential parent as a “critical customer,” as Katz puts it.
“The potential parent is the most valuable resource imaginable to a child in foster care with no family to go back to. This is the moment,” Katz says. “If this works out, this child has a shot at a normal life. A shot at people who worship the child, which is what every child deserves. A chance for a decent education. If it doesn’t happen, the other end of that trajectory is continued insecurity in foster care. People don’t get better in foster care. There are wonderful foster parents, but at the core, what every child needs is permanency. You can’t have a normal life if you don’t know who you belong to. You need some grounding. The outcome for kids who don’t get adopted is horrible. Teen pregnancy and crime and homelessness.”
“There are kids who are resilient and do survive and maybe get a lucky break or a foster home that gives them what they need,” says Wilson. “Then there are other kids who don’t have the internal capacity and just keep getting beaten down.”
“Kids who do well, who emerge from foster care and lead productive lives, are generally doing it despite the system, not because of it,” says Katz. “Everybody needs a family. That’s at the core of it.”
Very often, their research found, the initial phone call gets mishandled by agency workers, which can make or break a potential caller’s decision to go forward in the adoption process. Those in the three-city focus groups often described this phone call as the most difficult part of the whole process. Callers felt the tone of the agency worker was often insensitive or not
welcoming. Some left messages that were never returned. Some got lost in voice mail. Others were seemingly screened out if they said they weren’t interested in hard-to-place children. Often the phone was never even answered.
“It’s striking when we talk to people about what it’s like before they pick up the phone,” Katz says, referring particularly to the ones who have battled with infertility and miscarriage. “The pain involved, the loss, and the struggle. Then they say, ‘Ok, we’re going to do it. We’re going to call today.’ This is a major thing in their lives, and the person answering the phone is, very often, the person at the front desk and they have no background in this. Or it’s a busy caseworker whose job is to find a family for a 12-year-old kid, and since the caller’s preference would be a younger child, well, this isn’t for them.”
Katz says that on some level, it’s almost better for an agency not to get a call at all than to handle it badly because, as their research shows, most people become aware of adopting foster children through a personal connection. Although public awareness campaigns like “Tuesday’s Child” segments on the local news are helpful, the project found that, by far, word of mouth — a friend or co-worker who made a call or adopted a child from foster care — was the most effective way to draw in prospective parents.
Wilson, who spent three years directing policy and research at the New York State Department of Social Services, can understand why it’s difficult for state agencies to overcome what seems like a simple problem.
“When you think about this, you’re an organization, you probably get lots of phone calls, and you have somebody sitting at the desk who just triages calls. You’re not thinking about what those phone calls are,” she says. “You have some callers with enormously intense feelings. For others, it’s just a fling: ‘I saw that kid in the newspaper and thought it would be a great idea. Can we get him by Christmas or Hanukkah?’ From an organizational point of view, I can see why you’d be tempted to put some of your least experienced people in triage positions.”
In their report, the researchers recommend that agencies be aware of this critical problem and instead of putting the least experienced on the phones, hire professionals who specialize in adoption or counseling. They also recommend setting up an adoption hotline so that calls always get answered and routed to the appropriate person.
“When people do make a personal connection with staff at an agency, it makes all the difference,” says Katz. “Under the absolute best of circumstances, adopting a child from foster care is a long and emotionally challenging experience. Connecting with someone at the beginning is often the difference that allows someone to succeed in this inherently difficult process.”
The History
When thinking about how to change the adoption side of foster care, Wilson says it’s important to understand that the system’s history is fairly short and has historically focused more on protecting hurt kids than on wooing potential parents.
“We think of this foster care system as having gone on for a long time, but the whole concept of child abuse only became a public policy issue in the 1960s, when a guy by the name of C. Henry Kempe, who was a pediatrician in the emergency room, put data together to acknowledge something he had not wanted to acknowledge,” she says. “He was seeing bunches of kids who had injuries that could not be explained by accidental falls or other types of accidents. These were deliberate injuries to kids.
“What happened from that point is we started with a medical model. The doctor said we can
identify these injuries. We have X-rays and other machines. We can figure out who the perpetrator is, we can do something to the perpetrator, and we can heal the child. It’s only later, over time, that people began to understand that there was emotional neglect and sexual abuse of kids — abuse of doing something to a child and neglect of not doing, of not taking care of their daily needs.”
In a sense then, it wasn’t until the 1970s that the modern day foster care system really developed, she says.
“They set up reporting systems, and lots of kids came into the system. This is a relatively new system of foster care and taking kids out of the home. When you think about social systems
and the fact that we’ve had 30 or 40 years at maximum to figure out how to handle these kids, it’s not surprising that we’re still groping.”
Out of this model grew the mindset by many working in child services that, first and foremost, they need to weed out more bad parents.
“A child welfare agency has two competing roles,” says Katz. “They have to recruit families for all of these kids in foster care who need to be adopted. They also need to screen out people who are inappropriate.”
Typically, people get screened out and disqualified from adopting foster children for various reasons: certain types of criminal records, substance abuse, and how they interact with children, for instance. State rules can also vary. In Miami (but not San Jose or Boston), being gay is a disqualifier.
“One of the things that was fascinating to us was how states balance this. In San Jose, they bring everyone in and screen him or her out later,” Katz says. “Miami — because of limited
resources or philosophy — screens out in the very beginning. The first phone call is a two-page form that someone is reading, asking what kind of income you have or if you have ever been arrested. That can be very intimidating.”
Florida, he says, also fingerprints potential parents during the first information session.
“My philosophy, having done this, is you want to welcome people,” Katz says. “You can screen out later.”
A good analogy, he says, is one that Kennedy School Professor Elaine Kamarck came up with.
“It’s like the immigration and naturalization service. Ninety-five percent of what they do is keep out people who shouldn’t be in the country. Five percent is welcoming new immigrants. She said they do that really poorly because philosophically what most of them do is screening,” Katz says. “In child welfare, there’s the same kind of analogy. Most of what they do starts out with an abuse or neglect situation.”
The worker goes into a home with lots of power and a belief that the child needs to be protected. Ten years later, that same worker, with that same power and same belief is now helping to place foster kids in homes. Applicants, the researchers found, end up struggling with how open to be during interviews and training because the social worker is their “judge” and has the power to grant or deny placement.
This is one of the reasons that Wilson says she’s “intrigued” with the Massachusetts model, which contracts out adoptions to private groups.
“The adoption agency gets fully paid only when kids are adopted. They have real incentive to find the right home for kids and make sure that adoption sticks,” she says. “They’ve separated the adoption function from the screening function.”
“You certainly can’t let inappropriate people adopt, but there’s a balance,” says Katz, noting that in their report, they highly recommend that agencies separate the screening and adoption functions.
What They Want
Wilson says the goal of this project wasn’t about putting all the blame on people in state child welfare agencies, who are trying their best, including the caseworkers.
“I don’t want to disparage caseworkers. They’re often underpaid and overworked, and they often don’t have the support they need or the training they need,” she says. “When you think of someone in their mid- to late-20s, and he or she has to make a life or death decision about taking a kid out of a home, you realize what this system is built on because we’ve underfunded it.”
Instead, the goal of the project, the researchers say, is to help agencies meet the core mandate of the 1997 Adoption and Safe Families Act — permanency for all foster kids.
“For a child welfare agency, this is the success,” Katz says. “The first success is a child goes back and can be safe in his or her own home. But for kids who aren’t safe in their own home, this is the only success you can have: to find a permanent family.”
Katz says that the project, with the help of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, where he is currently a senior fellow, hopes to accomplish its goal by not only putting out a research report that the three cities they focused on can benefit from, but also by reaching out to legislators, policymakers, and state child welfare agencies in other cities and states.
“There are kids in foster care who need families, and there are institutional barriers that keep those children from being adopted by perfectly good parents. I have no doubt we can greatly increase the number of parents who adopt from foster care if we welcome them more,” Katz says. “So our goal is for this to actually accomplish something, for a state legislator to hear about this and say: ‘What are we doing? How are we asking potential parents what their experience is? Are we listening to them?’ You just have to listen to potential parents. It’s shocking how they don’t get listened to.”
To access the full report, go to www.ksg.harvard.edu/socpol/listening_to_parents.pdf. For more information, contact Jeff Katz at jeffkatz@earthlink.net. To read about the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, go to www.adoptioninstitute.org/.
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