Of all the people in the child welfare system who get paid, the ones who might put the money to best use are the parents at risk of losing their children to foster care.
Attorneys, advocates, and kin families are all compensated for their roles, and rightly so. Yet most mothers and fathers deemed to be failing their children through poverty get no specific financial help to turn their family situations around and save their children from the system.
A growing body of research and small pilot programs hope to prove that even a few hundred dollars a month might make a huge difference in keeping kids out of the foster care system.
It’s time Colorado gives this a try. Direct, no-strings cash payments might sound like a radical approach, but if it can keep kids with their birth families it would be money well spent. Each year about 200 teens age out of foster care here without ever being adopted or put back with their families — and later end up homeless or in trouble with the law — at a lifetime cost of between $66 million and $73 million.
Even in a state such as ours that’s shown itself open to considering new ways of improving the lives of foster children, sparing kids the trauma of being moved from their birth families in the first place could save significant dollars.
About 4,500 children are currently in foster care in Colorado, with hundreds more awaiting placement — a fraction of the 600,000-plus children in foster care across America. So, a relatively small group might qualify for this trial program.
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To be clear, I’m not talking about cases of child abuse, or where serious neglect is suspected. I’m also not conflating poverty with poor parenting. There are plenty of families and single moms teetering on the financial edge who make sure their kids are fed, clothed and in school.
But as someone who’s represented thousands of foster kids in court, I’ve seen firsthand the harm that a lack of resources can do to families trying everything they can to ensure their children thrive.
Last summer, for instance, New York launched a pilot program to study how cash stipends affect families reported to child protective services for child neglect tied to poverty. For one year ending this July, 150 families across three counties are receiving $500 a month. That’s an investment of $75,000 a month, or $900,000 for the entire year – a small amount compared with what it costs to keep a child in foster care.
Washington, D.C., is part way through its Mother Up program, which gives stipends to Black mothers of children 14 or younger who have also had contact with the district’s child and family services agency. The privately funded program is stretched out over three years, so no conclusive results are available.
Still, it’s a well-known fact that families lifted out of poverty are under less stress. Moms who don’t have to work numerous part-time jobs to put food on the table have more time to give to their children. Dads who aren’t constantly worried about being one missed paycheck away from financial distress are more likely to notice struggles in his children’s lives.
COVID-19, of all things, helped demonstrate the veracity of this. A variety of studies has shown that the jobless benefits and other relief payments poor families received during lockdown pulled them out of poverty — and kept millions more from falling into it. By the time we were allowed to leave our houses and gather together again, poverty rates had fallen by their largest amount in five decades. A Columbia University study estimated that the American Rescue Plan of 2021 alone reduced poverty by 12 million people, almost half of them children, and that the follow-up program cut it significantly further.
Unfortunately, the expanded Child Tax Credit ended with COVID and hasn’t been renewed, likely reversing any benefits that had accrued to poorer families despite evidence that the programs reduced maltreatment of children, if not specifically their interactions with child protective services.
That’s not to say money solves every problem. Wealthy people can be poor parents just like poor parents can be great ones. But in all of the cases I’ve handled over many decades, only three young clients came from wealthy families.
What we do know is that about 85% of families investigated by a child protective services agency have incomes that fall 200% below the federal poverty line, according to a report by the Penn State Social Science Research Institute.
Poverty should be a consideration in whether families are intact or apart. The goal, barring exceptional circumstances, should always be to keep the kids with mom or dad, or to reunify the family as fast as possible. That’s the idea behind Colorado’s Family First Prevention Services Act, which aims to prevent children from being removed from their homes whenever possible and allows for new interventions.
I say let’s start a pilot with small cash payments to test a cohort of parents already familiar to Colorado’s Division of Child Welfare. Sure, it sounds like it’s for the adults, as too many foster-related programs already are, but this one would actually be for the children. And let’s keep kids out of foster care whenever we can.
Shari F. Shink is the founder of the Rocky Mountain Children’s Law Center and executive director of Cobbled Streets, which is focused on changing the lives of foster and homeless children.
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