To fix what’s broken

The three brothers were only 2, 1, and barely a week old when caseworkers took them from their meth-addicted parents and placed them with ­foster parents. Not many homes would be willing or able to take in all three. This family did, without hesitation. Long wakeful nights and screaming fits made for a challenging adjustment, but with loving discipline the boys gradually settled into peaceful routines. With no children of their own, the couple became attached: bought clothes and toys with their own money, brought the boys to church, and featured cute pictures of them on their Christmas cards that year.

Then the children were abruptly taken away and returned to their parents.

That happened twice: removal, placement, adjustment. The second time, the boys’ caseworker recommended terminating parental rights as a first step to adoption, but the judge disagreed. The biological parents had made only token moves toward reform, but after 13 months of stable care with their foster family, officials from another county are taking the boys away again.

They’re so little. How can they understand the convolutions of an overburdened system?

In 1854, Charles Loring Brace of New York’s Children’s Aid Society organized the first orphan train. It swept young indigents off the street and out to new homes in Midwestern farm country. This was the first experiment in what’s now known as foster care. Before then, homeless children were apprenticed to a trade or placed in orphanages. Both options could be abused but at least offered food and shelter for little orphan Annies and Olivers, as well as a stepping stone to productive adulthood.

Churches took the lead in providing for the least of these until the turn of the 20th century, when the developing welfare system began sending social workers to homes of the poor. These “friendly visitors” were sometimes too hasty to judge a parent “unfit,” and children could be removed from loving families with little justification.

Policies change, and today the assumed goal of fostering is family reunification. The Family First Prevention Services Act, passed in 2018, directs resources away from foster care and adoption toward “parental rehab and support”—namely drug treatment, anger management, counseling, or daycare. It’s a noble aim, but how it works in practice is the subject of No Way To Treat a Child: How the Foster Care System, Family Courts, and Racial Activists Are Wrecking Young Lives by Naomi Schaefer Riley.

Riley found that ideology often undermines the best interests of individual children. And ideology, added to bureaucratic inflexibility and poor quality control, can be deadly. Sometimes literally, in a few well-publicized cases. Caseworkers don’t receive adequate training to recognize when a child is in real danger, and bad judgment calls don’t reflect on their record. Family court is a low-status position attracting the least-­qualified judges. Foster parents are burdened with excessive paperwork, restrictive rules, and intrusive questionnaires. They have few rights to be informed or heard, and judges seldom ask for their views about the children in their care. Between 30% and 50% of foster parents quit within a year.

There are, no question, self-serving foster parents in the system. But “child welfare agencies and family courts are among the most incompetent and inefficient public bureaucracies in the country,” Riley observes. “The people they touch are the most vulnerable, and their ability to change the lives of those people is the greatest.” Too harsh, perhaps, but anecdotal evidence backs her up. One example: Our hospice social worker told me she started out in Child Protective Services but had to quit. It was too hard seeing children sent back to homes where they were likely to be abused again—all for a noble-sounding principle.

The good news is that the church, which once took the lead in salvaging neglected children, is stepping up again. Riley finds evangelicals at the forefront of child-focused care, such as Colorado-based Project 1.27, which provides training and support teams for foster parents. Christian Alliance for Orphans coordinates hundreds of churches, ministries, and nonprofits worldwide to “inspire and equip God’s people to care effectively for vulnerable children and families.”

Our church can’t snatch those little boys from the caseworkers who come to take them away. But we can pray for their protection, pray for their biological parents, pray for the broken-hearted fosters, and pray for change. To visit orphans and widows in their affliction is still the test of our faith.