Kid’s Count

Someone noted – Foster Care causes 61% of All Child Abuse in America. So I went looking and found this, at The Annie E Casey Foundation – LINK>Child Welfare and Foster Care Statistics. KIDS COUNT is a robust source of the best available data on child well-being in the nation. This includes state-by-state data on child abuse and neglect and children living in out-of-home care from the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System, the federal Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System, and the National Youth in Transition Database. These data help our Foundation and leaders across the country to monitor trends, assess the child welfare system, and advance policies and practices to improve outcomes for children, youth and families — particularly for children of color who are overrepresented in the system and more likely to experience negative outcomes.

KIDS COUNT offers more than 60 measures of child welfare, encompassing how many children and youth are in the system, the rates at which they enter it, their demographic characteristics (including race and ethnicity when available) and their experiences in foster care, exiting care, being adopted when applicable, aging out of the system and more. In addition to child welfare statistics at the national and state levels, KIDS COUNT also provides data by territory, when possible. Policymakers, child welfare agencies and others have used these data for decades to understand how well the system is meeting the needs of vulnerable children, youth and families, and how it can be strengthened so that all abused and neglected children can heal and grow up with safe, stable families.

Children and youth who experience trauma, including abuse or neglect, are at increased risk for long-term emotional, behavioral and physical health problems, among other challenges. The data measures high-risk behavior, such as juvenile justice system involvement and substance abuse, difficulties with mental health, physical health and academic performance. The consequences of child maltreatment can be mitigated with equitable access to trauma-informed services and nurturing, lasting family relationships and support.

Foster care is meant to provide safe, temporary living arrangements and support services for children who have been removed from their families due to maltreatment, lack of safety or inadequate care. The rate of children entering foster care has hovered at 3 or 4 per 1,000 for two decades. Kids ages 1 to 5 make up the largest share (29% in 2021) of children entering care. National data also show that Black and American Indian and Alaska Native children continue to be overrepresented among those entering foster care. The reasons for this are complex, and efforts to improve racial equity in child welfare have been underway for many years.

In encouraging news, placements with relatives increased from 25% to 35% during 2000–2021, while placements in group homes or other facilities were cut in half, from 18% to 9%. Fewer children are placed in pre-adoptive homes (4% in 2021) or have trial home visits (5%), and some older youth live independently with supervision (2%). Over a third of foster children and youth experience more than two placements each year, meaning their living arrangements change at least three times a year. Child welfare agencies are working to minimize these moves, as they are disruptive, stressful and often traumatizing. Stable relationships and home environments are critical for healthy child and youth development.

Of the more than 54,000 kids adopted out of the child welfare system in 2021, over half were young kids ages 1 to 5, consistent with previous years. Most of these adoptions are by the foster parents (either relatives or non-relatives), who cared for the children while in foster care. Unfortunately, the median amount of time in foster care has increased over the last decade — from 13.2 months in 2011 to 17.5 months in 2021, based on children who exited care in each year. However, the percentage of kids who spent 5+ years in care declined slightly from 7% to 5% in the same time period. Among children who exited foster care in 2021, about a third (35%) were there less than a year, while nearly half (48%) spent 1 to 3 years in care and 12% stayed in foster care 3+ years.

More than 19,000 youth left foster care in 2021 without reuniting with their parents or having another permanent family home. Thankfully, this figure has declined since peaking at nearly 30,000 in 2008. The transition to adulthood is a significant and challenging developmental phase of life for all young people, but youth aging out of foster care on their own must face this without the support of a stable, loving family. Many also lose access to services and supports that were offered to them through the foster care system. Not surprisingly, these youth and young adults are more likely to experience behavioral, mental and physical health issues, housing problems and homelessness, employment and academic difficulties, early parenthood, incarceration and other potentially lifelong adversities. In line with the racial inequities noted earlier, youth of color are more likely to experience these challenges. The trajectories of these young people are not unavoidable. They can be positively influenced by policies and practices that ensure these vulnerable youths receive culturally-responsive, trauma-informed transition services and support to navigate the steps to adulthood, achieve stability and reach their full potential.

None of This is OK

And yet, there seems to be no other choice in today’s story. Everything this person tried to do – failed. The kids are now 3 and 1. Mom was incarcerated, but has since been released. She contacted this woman 7 months ago and asked her to adopt the children. She tried to convince her that her kids need her. She went into social worker mode and asked her what her barriers to parenting were. She talked to the mom about substance abuse treatment options, housing support, financial support, etc. She told her that the best place for her kids is with her. She repeatedly reassured the mom that she on her team and wanted to help her. She told the mom that she has rights and that this case is not over yet – don’t give up. She tried everything she could think of to convince the mom to come back (she’s left the state). The mom called her from an unlisted number and wasn’t in an emotional space to hear all she tried to say. She was asked to call me back in a week (this woman was hoping maybe they could then continue the conversation) but the mom has gone no contact.

The permanency hearing is now coming up in 2 weeks. Because mom hasn’t been in contact with the Div of Child and Family Services (DCFS) now for 8 months, the Guardian Ad Litem is asking for reunification efforts to cease and the goal changed to adoption. This woman has woken up to the problems in the system and previously said she was unwilling to adopt them because she didn’t want to add further trauma to their lives – she sincerely wanted them to go back with their mom or be placed with relatives but a search for family on the mom’s side has been unsuccessful.

Now she is conflicted because she loves these kids but to be honest her feeling is that adopting just isn’t ethical at this point. She even decided to close her foster care license because she no longer wants to be involved in a system that tears families apart. She told herself that she’d just see this last case through. The problem is that these kids are going to be placed for adoption, no matter what she does. If she says no, then DCFS is going to start calling other foster homes in the region and find someone who will adopt them. Another home would be strangers, as she once was. But they also may not be the same ethnicity (the kids are Mexican and so is she). The 3 year old is established in her preschool and she has formed a relationship with her therapist. More to the point – this woman does love these children, cares deeply about their needs and tries her best to be trauma-informed and listen to adoptive voices. Realistically, she knows that she can never take their mom’s place. She knows that they will likely always have a gaping wound.

She knows that simply loving them is never going to be enough. That going will be hard, lifelong work on her part. She is honestly conflicted because she doesn’t want to be a further part of a system that is actively hurting them. But not adopting them feels like a cop-out. And the very idea of passing them onto a stranger feels devastating. None of this is okay. However, she got herself into this and she is going to do whatever she has to do on their behalf.

Messy Complicated and Beautiful

The joy and heartache of friendships. We love our friends and they can break our hearts – just being the messy, complicated and beautiful human beings we all are. That said, some lives are much more challenging than ours. And when our dear friend has such a life, out of love, we do our best with the reality. This is one such story.

I’ve adopted two little girls from a childhood friend. They are ages 5 and 3. The five year old, I brought home when she was born, her mom was very ill at that time. The 3 year old came to me through the foster care system, when she was 9 months old at her mom’s request. My friend had stage 4 cirrhosis during both of the pregnancies, as well as substance abuse and varying illnesses and had been homeless most of her life, was suicidal and with a history of violent behavior. She was in and out of jail. She passed unexpectedly in December two years ago.

I knew the girls had 3 older sisters who were adopted out by the state years ago. I had promised their mom I would look for them but today, they found me. They are 16, 18 and 19. They were looking for their mom. They asked me point blank if their mom was still alive. I answered that and a few questions. I did let them know that she loved them and missed them and thought of them every day and wondered how they were doing. She had hoped to connect with them again. I let them know they had little sisters We exchanged photos.

I just don’t know how to navigate this. I don’t want to give them a negative image of their mom. I’m thinking of just letting them know that she had had a lot of trauma that led to her addictions and illnesses, kind of a negative spiral she got caught up in but that she was a beautiful, amazing person with a big heart and a brilliant mind who was funny and creative and one of a kind….

Some responses to this sad story about life’s more difficult realities.

You tell those sisters that she was a human being that battled a war. With her self, her world, and still loved her children. Even while she fought. There’s something terribly strong and loving about that.

Let them know the truth as much as age appropriate for them to grasp. The real truth is people are messy & complicated & beautiful all at the same time, and that’s something they can grasp at any age, regardless of depth of details.

Please tell the older girls everything – the good, the bad, the ugly. They can handle it and it’ll be valuable information as they navigate their own trauma and mental health issues (and questions about their lives).

The woman replied – I’ve talked to two of the older girls and answered their questions. I sent them videos of their mom telling her life story, about her paintings and stuff.

Not A “New” Life

This comment came up in a discussion about how adoptive parents change the name of their adoptee when the adoption is finalized. One woman commented – “Nothing wrong with that, we started using his new name too to get him used to it. New life, new name.” She was quickly corrected – “I need you to fucking not. Adoption isn’t a “new life”, it’s a continuation of the life they are already living. This comment is insensitive at best.” This one had started new childcare job. She is a domestic infant adoptee. One child in her class is in the process of being adopted and that X is their legal name and Y is the name the adoptive parents have chosen to change it to. This child isn’t an infant, so the childcare workers are basically having to train the child to respond to a new name.

I will admit, I did a little sleuthing into the one who made the insensitive comment but could find nothing definite except that she is relatively new in the all things adoption group. There are some interesting photos but nothing certain as to her status in adoptionland but her comment seems to indicate an adoption there.

Lacking that, I looked for some context and found this recent (Oct 2022) article in The Atlantic LINK>Adoption Is Not a Fairy-Tale Ending, with the subtitle – It’s a complicated beginning. While maybe not perfectly what I was looking for, I did see how it begins – In America, popular narratives about adoption tend to focus on happy endings. Poor mothers who were predestined to give their children away for a “better life”; unwanted kids turned into chosen ones; made-for-television reunions years later. Since childhood, these story lines about the industry of infant adoptions had gradually seeped into my subconscious from movies, books, and the news.

The author, Erika Hayasaki, notes – researching a book on identical twins raised in radically different circumstances, the reality of adoption is far more complicated than some might think—and, as many adoptees and scholars have argued, deserving of a more clear-eyed appraisal across American culture. Her book, Somewhere Sisters, chronicles identical twins Isabella and Hà were born in Vietnam in 1998, and their mother struggled to care for them. Isabella (born Loan) was adopted by a wealthy, white American family that gave her a new name and raised her in the suburbs of Chicago. Hà was adopted by a biological aunt and her partner, and grew up in a rural village in Vietnam with sporadic electricity and frequent monsoons.

Twins have always fascinated me. I was born a Gemini and have always wondered what happened to my twin. When I was a child, my 13 month younger sister and I were often dressed alike and sometimes people thought we were twins. When my daughter was preschool age, she used to claim we were twins. I suppose I’ve had at least two surrogate twins in my life. I digress.

The author discovered that when reunions with birth families do happen, they aren’t always happy; they can be painful, confusing, or traumatic. Adoptees who are parents, lawyers, educators, or activists are challenging the rosy image of adoption that stubbornly persists in our culture. Children are not offered up for adoption in a vacuum. Many of them “are available because of certain, very strategic political policies.” Often the reasons for removing children from their parents comes under the heading of “neglect.” Throughout adoption history, this broad category has encompassed homelessness, poor hygiene, absent parents, and drug abuse in some instances, or simply leaving a child with caregivers outside the nuclear family.

A happily ever story after adoption often comes at the cost of forsaking everything that came before. The process, known in the adoptee community as coming out of the fog, refers to when an adoptee starts to see beyond the narrative about fate and question their true feelings about the adoption system, and how it has impacted their relationships, personalities, and identity formation. As the child of two adoptees, I also had my moment of coming out of the fog because adoption had seemed like the most natural thing to me until I was over 50, both of my parents had died and I began to discover my families true origins.

For me, coming out of the fog was, and continues to be, a process that involves simultaneously holding my adoptive grandparent’s love and good intentions in my heart’s memories alongside all the ways that adoption robbed me of what, for most people, is almost an unconsidered common reality. There are all of these contradictory realities within one’s experience of belonging to a family created by adoptions. The duality of that space can be hard for those without such a background to reasonably understand.

A Mother’s Trauma

In learning my parent’s origins stories (they were both adoptees), I have learned a lot about trauma. So much so that I can now recognize it in my own self. Some thoughts from Psychology Today – LINK>How a Legacy of Trauma Affects Parent-Child Relationships.

In the 1998 Adverse Childhood Events study, in a sample of approx 10,000 individuals, over half of all the people surveyed experienced at least one traumatic childhood event, and one-quarter experienced multiple. Experiencing these traumatic childhood events increased the risk for mental and physical health problems. The more traumatic the events, the higher the likelihood of poor outcomes as an adult. These poor outcomes include substance abuse, depression, risky sexual behavior, obesity, heart disease, cancer, lung disease, and others.

Childhood trauma can be transmitted across generations. When a mother experiences childhood trauma, that can go on to influence her bond with her own child. In effect, the trauma reaches forward to disrupt the normal back-and-forth engagement of mothers with their newborns. Having more adverse childhood events can predict a mother’s stress and mental health before she delivers. Women with more childhood trauma had more depression (before childbirth), more family stress, more daily hassles, more economic hardships, and experienced more negative life events. Stress and depression before childbirth are associated with postpartum depression having worse symptoms. In effect, childhood trauma sets mothers up to fail. They are in a worse situation when they are about to have a child, and that appears to make their postpartum depression worse.

This is how childhood trauma is passed forward to the next generation –

A woman experiences trauma as a child.
This trauma leads the woman to experience more stress and depression and to be at risk for other health problems.
When this woman becomes pregnant, these stressors affect how she will respond to childbirth.
Because she has more stress, the woman is more likely to experience postpartum depression.
This postpartum depression disrupts the bond she is trying to form with her child. She is less able to engage fully and positively with her child.
The poorer interaction and bonding end up harming both mother and child. The child is more likely to be stressed and have behavioral problems, and the mother is more likely to be depressed.

Evidence shows is that maternal mental health is not something that’s isolated from the rest of the family. It’s something that influences the entire family system, including the bond formed between mother and child. Healing needs to occur.

Better Than Punishment

From an editorial by Dr Ruchi Fitzgerald in LINK>The Hill – It is unimaginable to think that seeking medical care could lead to losing custody of their children, yet this devastating predicament is all too real for pregnant women with addiction in the United States.

In our nation, the systems that aim to protect children from the negative effects of parental substance use often prioritize punitive approaches over proven public health strategies. Fear of being imprisoned, stigmatized, or having their children removed makes many pregnant women with substance use disorder (SUD) afraid to seek medical care, contributing to poor maternal health outcomes. Some state laws, including the law in Illinois where I practice medicine, even mandate that health care professionals report cases of detected controlled substances in a newborn infant as evidence of child neglect. While the federal Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA) has no such requirement, CAPTA’s overall approach has led to significant variation in how states, counties, and health care institutions implement its reporting requirements when substance use is involved during pregnancy.

Threatening child removal from a birthing parent with SUD without a risk assessment or evidence of danger to the child is not ultimately improving outcomes for children. Research has long shown that children affected by the trauma of family separation tend to experience worse long-term outcomes on a wide variety of indicators, including education, health, housing, employment, substance use, and involvement with the criminal legal system. With over 400,000 children in foster care across the US, the trauma of separation is widespread.

Forced separation also brings unimaginable pain to new families – triggering in some parents such despair that it deters them from seeking or continuing medical care, including treatment for their SUD. Study after study shows child removal is associated with parental overdose, mental illness, post-traumatic stress disorder, and return to substance use. Public health-oriented policies that can result in better outcomes for families are part of the solution.

As an addiction specialist physician, I am involved with the medical care of pregnant people with SUD, and I have seen counterproductive child welfare and criminal investigations launched after a newborn infant tests positive for a controlled substance. Too often, parents become hopeless about recovery once their children are gone.

Current policies and practices related to substance use during pregnancy also result in serious health inequities. Pregnant and parenting people of color are much more likely to be impacted by forced separation than their white counterparts. Black parents are more likely than white parents to be reported for substance use to the child protection system at their child’s delivery despite similar rates of drug use, while Black and Native American children are overrepresented in foster care relative to white children in the setting of parental substance use.

Meanwhile, health outcomes are unnecessarily worse for mothers of color. Since 80% of maternal deaths are due to overdose or suicide, we can save lives with policies and practices that encourage treatment, not punish pregnant women with SUD for seeking it. Policymakers need to remove controlled substance reporting requirements that overreach and contribute to the current punitive approach.

The American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM) encourages child protective services agencies not to use evidence of substance use, alone, to sanction parents—especially with child removal; supports eliminating in-utero substance exposure language in child abuse and neglect statutes, and supports policies that extend social services benefits and financial support to families in need.

The US Senate will contemplate reauthorizing and reforming CAPTA this year. Health care professionals who treat pregnant people with medications for addiction, like methadone or buprenorphine for opioid use disorder, do not need to involve child protective services for that reason.

Recovery is possible with the right medical care and support. A pregnant person with addiction seeking medical care deserves a chance to heal and recover with her children. If we want pregnant and parenting people with addiction to access the evidence-based treatment they need, our decision-makers must embrace public health over punitive policies.

NOT A Gotcha Argument

Whether this statistic is accurate or not, it is an issue close to my own heart and personal experience in life. That said, just passing this along as a kind of public service announcement from one such adoptee.

I am an adoptee whose birth mom was a drug and alcohol addicted teenager, who repeatedly abandoned me, abused me, and exposed me to abuse including child sexual abuse.

STOP USING ME AND PEOPLE LIKE ME AS A “GOTCHA” ARGUMENT FOR ADOPTION.

I couldn’t be more sick of reading, over and over, “what about the kids who actually do have abusive or neglectful birth parents, don’t they deserve adoption?”

No. There are still better ways. One of the biggest ways to prevent sad stories like mine is to fight for abortion rights, and fight against the societal narrative that vilifies aborting an unwanted child and glorifies adoption.

But most importantly, if you’re not one of us, you don’t get to use our existence as a talking point in your agenda.

(With my own apologies for making this my blog today but I thought it was important.)

Abandoned Babies

Will there be more with Roe v Wade being overturned ?

A story making national news recently is about a baby found, wrapped in a towel in a stroller outside of an apartment complex, by a Coeur d’Alene Idaho resident when they left for work around 6 am.

A woman, identified as an adoptee named Webster, in this youtube news story, is quoted saying “We are living in a time where people feel like they are alone and they don’t have a support system or a net under them.”

If you are considering abandoning your baby, you likely are experiencing many different thoughts and emotions as well as being faced with one of the toughest decisions of your life. You might have one or more of these factors occurring in your life –

Have a history of substance use and are afraid to share that information
Not have proper documentation to live in the United States and fear being deported
Be living with a mental illness or facing postpartum depression
Be afraid of the baby’s father or worried about what your loved ones might say

If you are desperate for help, you may see no other option but to abandon your baby. Perhaps, you even wonder what happens to abandoned babies after they’re found?

There are really only three ways a woman can abandon her baby:

A prospective birth mother can work with an adoption agency to make an adoption plan for her baby. This is one legal way a woman can release her baby from her responsibility to care for it.
With Safe Haven laws, women have the option to safely, legally, and anonymously leave their baby, unharmed, at a safe haven location — like a hospital, fire station, or a church.
Even so, some women, feeling completely overwhelmed and unaware of the first two options, will take drastic measures, such as the case with this abandoned baby, leaving them in an unsafe condition.

The way a baby is surrendered will affect what happens to the infant afterwards. Babies who are abandoned in an unsafe location often have tragic outcomes because help comes too late. Babies that are found safely, after they’ve been abandoned or surrendered to a safe haven location, become a ward of the state.

Safe Haven babies are typically checked out by a doctor and, if necessary, given medical care. Afterward, the state’s social services department is contacted. Once that happens, the baby will be placed into foster care and become a ward of the state. In some situations, a private adoption agency might be contacted.

When a woman does not contact an adoption agency for assistance or use the Safe Haven law locations, if she can be located and identified, criminal charges will be filed against her. That is why the police in Coeur d’Alene Idaho are actively seeking information about who the woman may have been.

Adding More Misery To The Suffering

Daisy Hohman’s 3 children spent 20 months in foster care.
When she was reunited with her children,
she received a bill of nearly $20,000 for her children’s foster care.

An NPR investigation found that it’s common in every state for parents to get a bill for the cost of foster care. Case in point –

Just before Christmas in 2017, Daisy Hohman, desperate for a place to live, moved into the trailer of a friend who had an extra room to rent. After Hohman separated from her husband, she and her three kids had moved from place to place, staying with family and friends.

Two weeks after living at this new address, police raided the trailer. They found drugs and drug paraphernalia, according to court records. Others were the target. Hohman was at work at the time. No drugs were found on her, and police did not charge her.

Even so, child protective services in Wright County MN placed her two daughters, then 15 and 10, and a son, 9 in foster care. County officials argued she had left the children in an unsafe place. After 20 months in foster care, her three children were able to come back home. Then, Hohman got a bill from Wright County to reimburse it for some of the cost of that foster care. She owed: $19,530.07

Two federal laws contradict each other: One recent law directs child-welfare agencies to prioritize reuniting families. The other law, almost 40 years old, tells states to charge parents for the cost of child care, which makes it harder for families to reunite.

The NPR investigation also found that: The fees are charged almost exclusively to the poorest families; when parents get billed, children spend added time in foster care and the extra debt follows families for years, making it hard for them to climb out of poverty and the government raises little money, or even loses money, when it tries to collect.

Foster care is meant to be a temporary arrangement for children, provided by state and county child welfare agencies when families are in crisis or when parents are thought to be unable to care for their children. It’s long been recognized that the best thing for most children in foster care is to be reunited with their family. While in foster care, children live with foster families, with relatives or in group settings. More than half will eventually return home. There were 407,493 children in foster care on the day the federal government counted in 2020 to get a snapshot of the population, according to a report from the Administration on Children, Youth and Families.

In 2018, Congress reformed funding for child welfare when it passed the Family First Preservation Services Act. That law tells state child welfare agencies to make it their focus to preserve families and help struggling parents get their lives back on track so that they can be safely reunited with their children. But a 1984 federal law still stands, as do additional state laws, that call for making many parents pay for some of the cost of foster care. Among the costs the federal funding pays for: shelter, food and clothing; case planning; and the training of foster parents.

Of parents who get billed for foster care: A disproportionate number are people of color. Many are homeless. Many have mental health or substance abuse problems. And almost all are poor — really poor. 80% of the families in a data analysis had incomes less than $10,000 annually. Try living off $10,000 a year. You’re in deep poverty, if you’re living off that kind of money.

Hohman followed the case plan set out by county caseworkers in 2018 and completed the steps required to get her children back. She went to family therapy sessions and submitted to random drug testing. She saved up enough money to rent an apartment in order to provide the children with safe and suitable housing. The $19,530 bill was just a few thousand dollars less than Hohman’s entire paycheck in 2019, for her seasonal work at a landscaping company. The debt went on her credit report, which made it hard to find an apartment big enough for her family or to buy a dependable car to get to work. When Hohman filed her income tax, instead of getting the large refund she expected it was garnished.

To charge poor families for the cost of foster care sets them up for failure. Mothers, often single, work overtime or take on a second job to pay off the debt forcing them to leave the kids alone and unattended. While it might not seem like that much to have to pay fifty or a hundred or two hundred dollars a month in foster care child support, if you are a very low-income, low-earnings mom, that can be the difference in being able to save money for first and last month’s rent on a decent apartment or not. The mom is at risk of losing her child again because of poverty. That doesn’t make sense from a child well-being, family well-being standpoint, or from a taxpayer standpoint.

Even a small bill delayed reunification by almost seven months. That extra time in foster care matters. It increases the cost to taxpayers since daily foster care is expensive. And it inflates the bill to parents. It matters because the clock ticking for the parents. They are given a set amount of time to prove they should be allowed to get their child(ren) back. Once a child spends 15 out of 22 months in foster care, it is federal law that the child-welfare agency must begin procedures to terminate a parent’s rights to the child with a goal of placing the child for adoption in order to find them a permanent home.

Today’s child welfare system also struggles with conflicting incentives. Laws meant to hold parents accountable can end up keeping families apart. When parents don’t pay, states garnish wages, take tax refunds and stimulus checks and report parents to credit bureaus. In the overwhelming majority of the people in the child welfare program, a significant contributor to the reason they’re in that situation is poverty. Abuse is an issue in only 16% of cases when kids go to foster care. Mostly, the issue is the parent’s neglect. Maybe there’s no food in the refrigerator or the parent is homeless or addicted. These are issues of poverty.

States don’t actually have to go after this money. There’s some leeway in the 1984 federal law. It says parents should be charged to reimburse some of the cost of foster care – when it’s appropriate but it does not define the term appropriate.

What Pro-Family Preservation Is And Is Not

I would NEVER advocate for ANY child to remain in an abusive or neglectful environment. That’s NOT what being pro-family preservation is about.

A family is a fundamental institution that provides a sense of identity and feelings of belonging. However, conflicts can affect the functioning of the family, which endangers a child’s development. In homes where there is a high level of conflict between parents, the children are at a greater risk of developing issues with concentration and managing their emotions.

A surprising 70% to 80% of Americans consider their families dysfunctional. While violence, abuse, and neglect are common forms of dysfunction, many families reported feelings of estrangement, emotional disconnection, and non-traditional family structures as well.

This has led to the development of family preservation services to strengthen the community and ensure safe environments for children. The aim is to create good quality parenting that advocates for emotional support and positive reinforcement within families to reduce conflicts.

Family preservation is a movement by state and child welfare agencies aimed at helping families cope with whatever stressors are affecting their ability to nurture children. This movement grew due to the recognition that family separation leaves some lasting adverse effects on the children. It’s possible to protect children from unwarranted traumas by offering information, guidance, and support to parents.

Millions of children worldwide live in care institutions worldwide, but a shocking 80% of kids living in children’s homes have at least one living parent. The increased number of orphanage-style institutions—coupled with an increase in people wanting to adopt babies—has motivated families in vulnerable situations to willingly take their children to the orphanage. Most of the parents who would do this are simply hoping this will give their children a better life.

Although these institutions offer refuge to such children, even the best caregivers can never replace biological families. The separation from family can harm the child emotionally and affect their cognitive behavior. The effects are worse the younger the child is and an infant is as much at risk of separation trauma as an older child. Do not think because they are preverbal that they don’t have an instinct for the mother who gestated and birthed them.

Family preservation services can benefit any parent who needs a non-judgmental environment to learn parenting strategies and other beneficial skills for their families. Typically, all families will face financial, employment, parenting, substance abuse, or illness cycles that affect the bond between members. In such challenging times, rather than giving up on your family, you need the proper support to help you safely stay together.

Much of the above (with some minor modifications from me) came from the source of my image – Camelot Care Center. There is more about their services at the link. I am not recommending them or do I have any complaint against what they do. I simply wanted to address that wishing to see fewer children adopted and more vulnerable families supported does not mean that I do not recognize that some families are in difficult straits for whatever reason. Some of those children will end up being removed. Some of those will be placed into foster care. Others may be adopted. If there is any good quality to their parents, that is where they need to grow up.