A few weeks ago, my friend Maralyn Beck, a child welfare advocate in New Mexico, received an urgent text message from a 22-year-old woman who had recently aged out of the foster-care system. She was panicking about the 15-year-old girl who had been staying with her for over a week. The teen was not attending school and was smoking pot in a spare room. The woman didn’t know what to do.
The story of how this young woman found herself caring for a teenager she barely knew is a demonstration of how well-meaning child-welfare policies can go awry. It also shows us how willful ignorance of unintended consequences keeps such policies in place long after sensible people see them failing.
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Only a few weeks earlier, the woman had been driving on San Mateo Boulevard in Albuquerque—an area plagued by crime and drugs as well as human trafficking. She spotted the teen and suggested that she come to an event she was hosting to help girls in the foster-care system. Within a few days, Beck’s friend said, the teen’s caseworker from the New Mexico Children Youth and Families Department had contacted her. Would she take the girl in?
The woman was not a licensed foster parent, but she says the caseworker told her that this was fine. The department would consider the teen a “kin” placement—despite the woman’s only having met her on the side of the road days before. (The department declined a request to comment on the situation, citing “protections under privacy laws.”)
A preference for placing children with kin has long been the official (and unofficial) policy of child-welfare agencies. This makes sense: if a child can’t be with his parents, shouldn’t he be placed with extended family members, whom he likely already knows and has a relationship with?
But child-welfare agencies have stretched the definition of kin to the point of absurdity. I’ve written about how relatives who have had no contact with a child or who live on the other side of the country are taking custody of children over non-relative foster parents who have cared for them for years.
The idea of giving preference to kin placements took hold for various reasons. One was that many people in the child welfare world believe that the most important consideration for placing a child in a foster home should be matching the child’s culture and race to those of the family. Kin placements were a way of accomplishing that goal without violating racial discrimination laws. Kin placements also became popular because they generally involved less effort for child-welfare workers. If something goes wrong while a child is with their grandmother, is anyone going to blame a government agency for the placement?
Some kin placements were formal, others informal. Child-welfare agencies would suggest that families take in a child without going through the formal removal, licensing, or monitoring processes, a practice sometimes known as “hidden” or “shadow” foster care.
The standards for kin placements are much lower than they would be for a non-relative. In the past few weeks, Beck has seen other requests for assistance like those of the 22-year-old woman. One came from a grandmother caring for six children ages three to 15 after their mother (her daughter) died of a fentanyl overdose. The grandmother asked for help procuring a long list of items, including toilet paper, food, and “wood pellets” to heat her home. No foster home in this condition would ever be licensed, let alone licensed to take in that many children.
In another instance, a police officer found several children in the custody of their grandmother living in sheds in her backyard. A New Mexico Children, Youth, and Families Department worker explained to another city employee who reported this situation that “if they were in foster care then they would have to have a bed but since they were with a biological family member . . . they had no way of enforcing anything.”
In Pennsylvania, authorities are grappling with the murder of nine-year-old Renesmay Eutsey, who was placed with relatives when she was three after being removed from her mother’s care. In August, Eutsey was found dead in a trash bag weighed down with rocks in the Youghiogheny River. Her relatives have been charged with homicide.
As an editorial in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review pointed out, “To become a foster parent in Pennsylvania, you must be 21 and pass extensive background checks. There are home visits and interviews. If there are problems with a particular placement, a child could be relocated. . . . But if children are simply sent informally to stay with an available family member, things become murky.” In other words, the editorial concludes, “simply being family is not enough.”
Then there is the category of “fictive kin.” It’s not clear when exactly this practice began, but in the late 1990s, California adopted a broad definition of kin—to include a “nonrelated extended family member” and “an adult . . . who has established a significant and family-like relationship with the child.” The federal government approved these definitions in its state plan for California. Again, there was a racial angle. According to an article on the American Bar Association website, “Black families typically define ‘family’ more broadly than White families, making fictive kin particularly important to Black children.”
Other states have since embraced the concept, including New Mexico. According to a press representative from the New Mexico Children Youth and Families Department, the department defines fictive kin as “a person not related by birth, adoption, or marriage with whom the child has an emotionally significant relationship.” Fictive kin placement includes background checks, home inspections, training, and other safety procedures, according to the representative.
The idea of fictive kin that was sold to the public is that a child removed from his family may have formed longtime relationships with a coach or teacher who is not a relative but should receive greater consideration as a placement than a nonrelative whom the child doesn’t know. Again, this seems reasonable in theory, but in practice it has meant that a woman who met a girl on the side of the road three days earlier is now considered family.
In a recent report about kinship care from the Government Accountability Office, the authors repeat the notion that “when parents are absent, most children thrive best in kinship families, in which they are cared for by family members who can offer stability and continued connection to family, community, culture and education.” This idea has been drilled into the heads of every child-welfare agency official. It’s time to acknowledge that it has been taken too far.
Photo by Maddie McGarvey/For The Washington Post via Getty Images