Comm 181 | deewilsoncon

Knowledge, Values and Public Policy in

Child Welfare Services: 1985-2005

(Originally published March 2025)

This commentary is the second in a series about the relationship between knowledge, social values and the development of public policy in child welfare. Last month’s Sounding Board discussed the creation and early development of U.S. child protection systems from 1962-1984. This commentary reflects on the large increase in foster care between 1986-1999, the passage of the Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA) in 1997 and the effect of the law in increasing adoptions; as well as the scholarly debate over family preservation services that began in the 1990s. I also discuss issues related to racial disproportionality of children in foster care, especially Black children, that increased during the late 1980’s and 1990’s before beginning to decline in the early 2000’s. Every part of this story is controversial, including among scholars, and continues to influence debates regarding child welfare reform.

Regarding the large increase in foster care across the U.S. from 1986-99, there is a simple story, a complex story and an alternative story. The simple story is that a substance abuse epidemic, arguably a delayed reaction to the recession of the early 1980’s, led to a substance abuse epidemic (cocaine on the East coast, methamphetamine in the Western U.S.) among low-income populations, which doubled the U.S. foster care population to 567,000 in 14 years. ASFA became law in 1997 after it became apparent that too many children had been in foster care for years, with no permanent plan in sight.

The complex story is that estimates of the number of children in foster care at any point prior to the late 1990’s is not supported by reliable administrative data, and should be regarded as well-informed guesses at best. In her outstanding history of foster care, Raising Government Children (2017), Catherine Rymph asserts that during the late 1950s the U.S. foster care population was approximately 255,000; and then increased to 315,000 -320,000 in the early 1970s. In one scholarly account (Pelton, 1987) there was an increase of 200,000 children in foster care from 1970-75 and then a decrease of 200,000 from 1977-1979, official data that seemed highly questionable to Pelton (and me). It appears that following the creation of child protection systems in all 50 states and Washington D.C. from 1963-67, the U.S. foster care population increased by about 10% in two decades. The nation’s foster care population then doubled from 1986-99, largely due to a substance abuse epidemic mediated by a three-fold increase in the rate of maternal incarceration (Swann & Sylvester, 2006). However, it may also be true that some states and large cities chose to better support kinship care placements through Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC-FC), which required putting legal structure around these placements. In effect, a social welfare benefit utilized by large jurisdictions to better support kinship care became entangled with permanent planning laws that threatened permanent family disruption.

There is a third alternative story: the alleged substance abuse epidemic of the mid-1980s was greatly exaggerated because the impact of cocaine abuse fell most heavily on low-income Black neighborhoods. The social myth of an “epidemic” was developed by the media, child welfare agencies and policymakers to justify the large-scale disruption of Black families. In this story, public child welfare agencies were complicit in racism that targeted Black families (Roberts, 2002). This story suggests why discussions of racial disproportionality in child welfare have been emotionally charged for decades.

Up close and personal

For most of the years from 1985-95, I was a child welfare supervisor or middle manager in Spokane, Washington, a modest size city with a small Black population, and a large enough American Indian population to justify a specialized Indian Child Welfare (ICW) unit. I was also the coordinator of a state wide risk assessment initiative during this decade. In this role, I did trainings in many child welfare offices in Washington state. There was, in fact, a large increase in substance abuse among child welfare involved families across Washington, an increase among families of all races/ethnicities, with the largest impact in Eastern Washington among American Indian families. Child welfare offices were overwhelmed with CPS reports and investigations, along with large increases in foster care and dependency actions.

After several years of being inundated with CPS reports of alleged parental substance abuse, the increase in substance abuse began to seem less like an epidemic and more like a fundamentally altered social environment.

Child welfare offices were not prepared with assessment practices, resources or engagement skills to meet this challenge. There was a learning curve that took 10-15 years to have major impacts on practice. In the meantime, child welfare staff in Washington and other states had one main programmatic response at their disposal: foster care. Furthermore, about a fifth or more of children placed in foster care were infants, many of whom were placed at birth or during infants’ first few months of life.

These same developments had astonishing effects in some large cities (New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles) where the number of children in foster care approached 50,000 in the 1990s, more than seven times larger than New York City’s current foster care population. According to AFCARS statistics, the percentage of children in foster care nationally who were Black increased from 35% in the 1986 to 42% in 2000, three times the percentage of Black children in the population (Roberts, 2002). This increase had a powerful negative effect on Black communities (Abramovich & Albrecht, 2013). The percentage of first entries into foster care of children who were Black began to decline after 2000 (Wulczyn, et al, 2007). During fiscal year 2022, 23% of children in foster care at a point in time were Black (AFCARS report # 30).

The sudden and continuing increase in foster care had lasting effects on child welfare agencies and priorities:

Overwhelming workload demands became endemic in many states.
The quality of foster care services deteriorated due to foster home shortages and overloading of foster homes, and due to lack of adequate support of foster parents by child welfare caseworkers. Some public agencies lost track of foster youth and were forced to mount initiatives to find missing foster children.
Many children remained in foster care for years without movement toward permanency, even when parents did not comply with court orders to enter and complete substance abuse treatment. The longer children remained in foster care the more likely they were to experience multiple placements. Black children and American Indian in foster care had longer lengths of stay on average than children of other races/ethnicities.
Well before the passage of ASFA in 1997, many child welfare agencies developed initiatives to increase timely adoptions, in part because reunification was a legal impossibility for parents who did not enter and/or complete substance abuse treatment. A few studies in the 1990s found that no more than 25% of substance misusing parents with a child in foster care completed a court mandated treatment program.
Several states developed subsidized guardianship programs as an alternative to termination of parental rights and adoption. In Washington state, dependency guardianships were often used to create legal structure around kinship placements, and to accommodate strong tribal opposition to termination of parental rights.

ASFA reflected widespread commitment to timely permanency among child welfare managers and staff, judicial officers and stakeholder groups. Initially, there was little or no opposition to ASFA timelines for permanent planning or to adoption subsides that created incentives for increased adoptions, but no incentives for increased reunifications. I participated in many child welfare policy discussions between 1997-2010 without hearing any criticism of ASFA, either in Washington state or at national conferences. During these years, there was strong support of permanency for children of all races/ethnicities, along with an emerging consensus among child welfare leaders that child welfare could not be reformed without a large decline in foster care, which required an increase in timely adoptions and guardianships. Dual track concurrent planning with goals of reunification and adoption or guardianship became child welfare policy across the country.

The history of ASFA suggests the hazards of responding to child welfare challenges with legislation. Major changes in law are usually difficult to pass and difficult to revise without engendering strong opposition. During the decade following passage of ASFA there were several important developments:

There was a large increase in adoptions, an ASFA goal, but not an increase in reunifications. ASFA offered states fiscal incentives for increased adoptions but not for increased reunifications.
Some child welfare agencies began to utilize more effective approaches to safe reunifications, including family treatment drug courts, Safe Baby courts, Pregnant and Parenting Women’s (PPW) residential treatment programs, peer mentoring. Pessimism regarding the possibility of safe reunifications was replaced by cautious optimism among caseworkers and judges in communities in Washington state as their reunification rates steadily increased during the early 2000s. Some juvenile courts in Washington with a reputation for rarely reunifying children with parents became strong proponents of reunification.
Rates of permanent family disruption, either through adoption or guardianship, for Black families were at least double the rate for White and Latino families.

The refusal, or inability, to revise ASFA to balance adoption incentives with reunification incentives, or expand timelines for completing permanent plans for school age children, or provide economic support for parents immediately following reunification, or bring to scale family treatment drug courts, Safe Baby courts and PPW programs, was a statement of social values that communicated a clear message from policymakers at the federal and state level: “we will not make major investments in practices with the potential to safely decrease permanent family disruptions for legally dependent children.” It is worth comparing ASFA priorities with the policies and practices of several Northern European countries and Australia, countries with higher rates of foster care but much lower rates of adoption.

family separation and permanent family disruption are not conflated in these countries, as they often are in the U.S.

High profile child fatalities

The preceding discussion may create the impression that from 1986-2000 public child welfare agencies in the U.S. were mainly focused on developing responses to increased reports of parental substance abuse. This was not true in Washington state (and many other states) where child welfare systems were roiled by high profile child maltreatment (CM) fatalities, e.g., Eli Creekmore (1986), Lauria Grace (1995). These fatalities led to public outrage and demands for child welfare reform hard to fathom currently when the horrific murder of children elicits little or no concern from child advocates, or apparent interest among policymakers. The lack of much interest in child maltreatment fatalities is a huge difference from 30-40 years ago when a few CM fatalities led to the complete reshaping of child protection laws, policy and practice in Washington. For many years, governors in Washington declared that there was no level of acceptable CM fatalities, but were never willing to staff the state’s child welfare system to a reasonable workload standard. As a result, child welfare managers were left to cope with overwhelming workloads demands, while reshaping CPS practices to reduce serious inflicted injuries and CM fatalities.

CPS responses to parental substance abuse developed in this social milieu. Organizational priorities were determined by powerful political pressures to prevent CM fatalities. To this end, child welfare agencies spent years developing and implementing risk assessment and safety assessment practices. Reducing entries into foster care was not a policy priority, which is possibly one reason why progressive voices among advocates committed to family preservation currently ignore CM fatalities to the extent possible, or minimize their significance when pressed for public comment.

Of course, there was backlash to the goal of child protection achieved through foster care placement. From the early 1990s, the federal government and state child welfare agencies began to fund and increasingly utilize family preservation programs based on the Homebuilders model, a crisis intervention program developed in Washington state. Given 20/20 hindsight, it appears that Homebuilders and similar models were effective for some families, especially families of school age children experiencing family conflict, but ineffective and even dangerous when used with parents who had chronically relapsing conditions such as substance abuse and chronic mental illness.

The scholarly view of family preservation services (FPS) began to divide along ideological lines after a few randomized trials found that FPS had little or no effect on placement rates, largely because children in the control group were rarely placed out-of-home (Littell, J. & Schuerman, 1995). Caseworkers (it appears) had learned to fudge eligibility criteria given the lack of other in-home services for troubled families, so that children served in both experimental and control groups were often not at risk of imminent placement. This eligibility standard appeared to be virtually meaningless when agencies lacked other family support services.

Research of specific FPS programs that found no effect of these models on placement was sometimes misinterpreted as an attack on the goal of family preservation, rather than an indication that these programs were poorly designed for many families (especially chronically referring families) with open child welfare cases.

The child welfare staff I worked with had little interest in the scholarly debate over FPS. What they wanted to know was how to make the best use of FPS, and when use of FPS was ill advised. For these answers, they were forced to rely on hard earned practice wisdom. In addition, the need to develop effective FPS models for families with chronically relapsing conditions was delayed for years due to a lack of clarity regarding the practice implications of FPS research.

Summary

The years, 1985-2005, was a second decisive phase in the development of the U.S. child welfare system. The huge increase of children in foster care strengthened the commitment to timely permanent planning reflected in ASFA guidelines, while convincing child welfare leaders that foster care populations had to be reduced, both through reduced entries into foster care and increased exits. However, the first generation of FPS programs was poorly designed to meet the needs of families affected by substance abuse and mood disorders, often co-occurring. Child welfare agencies were far more successful at increasing adoptions than preventing entries into care or increasing reunification. There was a very large effect on Black and American Indian families and communities that experienced high rates of family separation and permanent family disruption. Even after these effects became apparent, ASFA was not revised to increase safe reunifications, inaction that has convinced some scholars and advocates that the U.S. child welfare system cannot be reformed due, they believe, to its racist legacy.

Next month’s commentary will discuss the debate between child welfare abolitionists and reformers; and set forth an agenda for change.

References

Abramovich, M. & Albrecht, J., (2013), Social Service Review, vol. 8, #4.

Famularo, R. Kimscherff, R., Fenton, J. (1992), “Parental substance abuse and the nature of child maltreatment,” Child Abuse & Neglect, 16, 475-483.

Littell, J. & Schuerman, J., “A Synthesis of Research on Family Preservation and Reunification Programs,” Westat, James Bell Associates & Chapin Hall, April 30, 1995.

Pelton, L., (1987), “Not for Poverty Alone: Foster Care Population Trends in the Twentieth Century, Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare, vol. 14 (2), Article 4.

Roberts, D., Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (2002), Basic Books, New York City.

Rymph, C., Raising Government Children: A History of Foster care and the American Welfare State (2017), The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, N.C.

Swann, C. & Sylvester, M. (2006), “The foster care crisis: What caused caseloads to grow?”, Demography 43 (2), 309-335.

Wulczyn, F., Chen, L. & Hislop, K., (2007), “Foster Care Dynamics, 2000-2005: A Report from the Multistate Archive,” Chapin Hall, University of Chicago.

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©Dee Wilson

deewilson13@aol.com