Five

Foster Parents

Regulation and Exploitation of Foster Parents

At its inception, the practice of “foster boarding”—the placement of children by the state or by charities to whom the state delegated its authority—was considered mutually beneficial to children and foster parents. Children received the benefit of a wholesome upbringing by substitute parents able to provide, food, clothing, a home, and access to education, while the foster family got household or farm labor at a time when such labor had considerable economic value. As economic, technological, social, and legal change minimized the value of children’s labor, the state subsidy for the upkeep of the child became the means by which foster parents recouped the value of the care they provided.

While in practice difficult to adhere to, certification requirements across the country tend to favor economically “stable” households meeting various normative standards. All states require that prospective foster parents provide proof of sufficient income to cover their housing costs and basic expenses without relying on a foster care subsidy (although there are some exceptions for foster care involving hard-to-place children and youth with “special needs” classification). They further require that the foster home meet space and facility requirements that vary from state to state.

In theory, the subsidy merely covers out-of-pocket expense, and foster parents are not interested in being compensated for the value of their labor or in receiving a contribution toward their rent or mortgages. Some of the system’s critics—including many in the communities most affected by the child welfare system—deride foster parents who are “only interested in the check.” The criticism is fueled in part by highly publicized cases of abuse. In one case profiled on a national news program, Jacqueline Lynch, a foster parent in Florida took in a large number of children with special needs (eligible for a higher foster care rate), and proceeded to abuse and neglect them for a seven-year period ending with her arrest in 1997. While she collected approximately $150,000 annually in payments, the state ignored the children in her care, failing to visit for roughly two years.1 Such extraordinary cases of abuse and failure of oversight provoke justifiable outrage, but they obscure a number of issues that deserve reasonable consideration.

To prevent the kind of abuse and exploitation found in the Lynch case, local social service departments vet prospective foster parents to ensure they have adequate financial resources. At the same time, pressure to keep enough homes to ensure children do not linger in institutional reception centers or congregate care means there is a tremendous incentive to get foster parents certified. After placement, caseworkers conduct home inspections, collect receipts, and administer special allowances for clothing, back-to-school supplies, and so on. Case records are in turn audited to ensure that the required oversight is occurring. Caseworkers and those involved in certifying and monitoring foster parents receive a salary for their work. They are not, however, routinely accused of exploiting children for financial gain.

In 2008, the CEO of the Children’s Aid Society in New York, who runs the organization founded by Charles Loring Brace, earned a base salary of $407,252, with total compensation including bonuses, deferred compensation, and nontaxable benefits of $676,424. CEO salaries at other foster care agencies in New York City are nearly as generous. The median compensation for CEOs of twenty-seven of the city’s foster care agencies reviewed by the author was $251,062, with the lowest being $139,120.2 High-
ranking officials with public child welfare agencies commonly retire or resign to accept executive positions within the nonprofit foster care establishment, allowing them to cap off their careers in the service of children with a high salary and generous benefits.

We should not conclude on that basis that they lack dedication or passion for the work they do or the children they serve. We should, however, question a system that polices the actual caregivers to make sure they are not benefiting in any financial way from the care they are providing, while generously compensating the executives, lawyers, and public administrators running the system. Caseworkers and other employees working under the managers are also paid, although in their case it’s likely to be barely a living wage.

The ideology of the system holds that the work that parents do cannot be compensated without destroying the substitute-family relationship the system seeks to create. If they are paid, the logic goes, they will be more like professional caregivers than parents. These relationships are, however, commonly subjected to intrusive oversight, supervision, and regulation of activity, features more consistent with employment than parenthood.3

Much of the oversight is necessitated by the fact that everyone involved in the system knows that many foster parents are in reality dependent on the subsidy. Foster children come from poor families living in poor neighborhoods, and in most jurisdictions foster parents are usually recruited from these same neighborhoods. There is a private adoption industry catering to middle-class and affluent families, but few of these families would tolerate the demands and supervision imposed on foster parents.

For years, the system has had the stated goal of preserving family ties and reducing the trauma of foster care placement by recruiting relatives to serve as “kinship” foster parents. Another goal is to find placements geographically close to the child’s family and home community. These goals make it even more likely that a child will be placed in a low-income household, perhaps only marginally better off financially than the one from which the child was removed.

Knowing that, of necessity, all the money coming into the home will be needed to cover the cost of housing, utilities, and food, the system nevertheless maintains the pretense that the subsidy can be segregated and administered for the sole benefit of one member of the household. The result may be tension and distrust between the caregiver and those responsible for monitoring her, although many foster parents and caseworkers forge effective, supportive working relationships.

Foster parents are overwhelmingly working class, and the need to comply with various obligations—including bringing the child to family visits and appointments scheduled by caseworkers—limits their ability to earn money outside the home. A study of households containing one or more unrelated foster children found that nationwide, the mean household income in 2006 was 24 percent lower than the mean household income for households containing children generally. Some 15 percent of households containing foster children were subsisting on less than $20,000, and nearly half were paying more than 30 percent of household income for housing cost (compared with a little over a third of households containing children generally). The same study cited evidence that households in which children are placed in kinship foster care are even less well off, and are twice as likely to be classified as low income.4

The idea that a foster parent is exploitive if she seeks to stretch subsidies to help cover the rent and other household expenses ignores the tradeoff of care for labor embedded in the origin of the system. It also betrays a bias in favor of families economically secure enough to pay for adequate space to house foster children without any contribution to rent and other basic household expenses, as if such economic security correlates to better parenting.

Foster parent recruitment also displays hostility to the poor and to people of color in the manner in which criminal history is screened. Background checks are necessary to ensure that the state is not placing children with people whose habits or propensities will pose a danger, but there are arbitrary and discriminatory rules about how criminal convictions are assessed. In Alaska, for example, any offense involving a controlled substance will automatically bar the convicted person from being certified for ten years. But drunk driving will trigger the ban only on the third offense. Some crimes with a direct bearing on responsibility for children, such as contributing to the delinquency of a minor or custodial interference, result in only a five-year ban. Thus, a misdemeanor marijuana possession arrest would bar an individual from becoming a foster parent for ten years, while an act directly jeopardizing a young person might bar an applicant for half as long. Since people of color, although no more likely to use marijuana than whites, are far more likely than whites to be arrested and convicted, the hierarchy of offenses triggering a ban will have a discriminatory effect.

Foster parent qualification standards enforce other norms not directly related to the ability to care for children. Seven states have requirements that any couple wishing to foster must be legally married. Virginia requires that foster parents have either a bachelor’s degree or a high school diploma/GED and one year of experience in childcare. Virginia further requires that not just the foster parent but any adult who assists in caring for the child or children be able to speak and read English.

Some Foster Parents Are More Equal Than Others

Foster parents are by no means equal in influence. In many states, fostering and adopting has become a form of domestic missionary activity for fundamentalist Christians. Harkening back to the Orphan Trains, these foster parents seek to inculcate children with certain values specific to their own movement. One foster parent runs a blog entitled Raising Servants of Christ where she describes her activities as a parent and foster parent. Among the children she and her husband foster are two siblings of color identified by the nicknames given them by the foster family, “Coconut” and “Cocoa Bean,” and a white child nicknamed “Blue Eyes.” The blogger writes: “This blog is about being Servants of Christ. We strive to be good servants every day by taking back our kids (and ourselves) from the world, homeschooling, living frugally on one income, and the joys and heartbreaks of foster care.”5

While the religious motivation is certainly primary, it’s noteworthy that in this case the mission coincides with the interest in “living frugally on one income” so that the mother can stay home to homeschool her birth and adopted children. As she describes in the blog, they receive foster care and adoption subsidies, calculated at the higher rate for “special needs children.”

In some states, foster parents are permitted to homeschool foster children if the birth parent doesn’t object. Other states allow it if the public agency gives permission, as in South Carolina, where the statute makes no mention of the child’s birth parent.6 States that permit homeschooling of foster children tend to be those in which Christian homeschooling exercises political power.

Adoption as a missionary activity attracted scrutiny to the phenomenon of “rehoming,” where adoptive parents disappointed with the children they have adopted seek to place the children they have adopted with different families. Rehoming has occurred with religiously motivated domestic adoption, although the practice is most common with international adoption. It exists in a legal gray area, but is basically unregulated once the original adoption is finalized. Websites and online forums exist for adoptive parents looking to give unwanted children away, similar to rehoming sites for pets.7

The practice attracted national attention after Justin Harris, a member of the Arkansas state legislature, and his wife, Marsha, adopted sisters ages three and six through the state’s Department of Human Services (DHS). Tiring of the children after six months, they “rehomed” them with a “youth pastor” who was briefly employed at the Christian preschool owned by the Harrises. About five months later, the man was arrested for raping the six-year old.8 Explaining the decision to rehome, the Harrises blamed DHS and the children for failed adoption and the “severe injustice” done to them, and blamed the newspaper that broke the story for “smearing” them. Justin and Marsha Harris faced no criminal charges, and Justin Harris continued to chair the Arkansas state assembly committee with jurisdiction for children and youth.9

The privileging of locally powerful religious groups extends beyond these states, however. In New York City’s foster care system, faith-based organizations have long dominated, and the biggest and best funded have been Catholic and Jewish organizations originally organized as private charities but now dependent on public funds. Until the 1980s, these organizations were permitted to discriminate in favor of children of their faith. Black children, who were overwhelmingly Protestant, were either relegated to poorly funded Protestant agencies or were given lower quality placements by the Catholic and Jewish agencies. In 1972, a class action lawsuit, Wilder v. Bernstein, was filed by the Legal Aid Society to force the foster care agencies to stop discriminating. The city attempted to settle with Legal Aid in 1983, but the agencies continued to fight it for five more years. In the meantime, of course, white Catholic and Jewish children nearly vanished from the system, and Black Protestant children became more and more overrepresented. By the time the litigation ended, discrimination was no longer viable for the foster care agencies, as they would have vanished from the market if they did not become nonsectarian in their placement practices and recruitment of foster parents.