Restoring families-A State That Really Cares About its Citizens

Restoring families

Laws permitting reinstatement of parental rights are admirable, but in many cases the rights shouldn't have been terminated in the first place.
Cynthia Godsoe
May 31, 2010
New York state will likely soon enact groundbreaking legislation to restore parental rights in limited cases to neglectful parents who have been rehabilitated. Only a few other states, including California and Washington, have enacted similar laws to help restore families. Although New York Bill A8524/S03868 is necessary to help some of the many children waiting in foster care "limbo" with no prospects of adoption to return to safe and loving families, it wouldn't need to exist in a world that cared more about keeping families safe and together.

More than 8,000 children in New York were in foster care waiting to be adopted in 2006, the most recent year for which numbers are available. (New York state has the third highest number of children waiting nationwide.) As is true with children in foster care nationwide, they are disproportionately from low-income or minority households. Adoptive families are scarce for many of these children. Many, especially older children or those with special needs, live for years in foster care as legal orphans after their parents' rights have been terminated. The sad statistics reveal that children in the United States remain in foster care an average of 38 months after a termination. Many will remain in foster care throughout adolescence without being adopted.

Often, these children maintain a relationship with the person who is the only parent they have ever known — regardless of whether that person remains the legal parent. And youth frequently return to their birth parents after they "age out" of foster care at 18. As one teenage client once told me, "I don't care what they say. She'll always be my mom. A piece of paper doesn't change that."

Children whose parents' rights have been terminated need a permanent legal connection to an adult — something that the foster care system is not designed to provide. The pending legislation would allow parents who are rehabilitated to have their rights restored if a court rules that restoration is in the child's best interests. There are numerous safeguards in the legislation so that restoration occurs only when the parent is capable of caring for the child in a loving and safe home. The parents' rights must have been terminated more than two years before, termination cannot have been on the basis of serious abuse and both the child protection agency and the child must consent.

Although efforts to reform current policy are admirable, they do not get to the root of the problem. The tragic thing is that, in many cases, the parents' rights shouldn't have to be terminated in the first place. Certainly, some parents abuse their children or cannot care for them safely. Yet most parents lose their rights because of "permanent neglect," a nebulous designation often masking the real problem plaguing these families — poverty. Many children end up in foster care because their families do not have adequate housing, appropriate child care or access to services such as drug and alcohol rehabilitation, parenting support, domestic violence shelters or respite care.

Recognizing this socioeconomic disparity, 85% of states have identified poverty as one of the top two challenges facing families reported to child protective services. But services supporting families are in short supply, and preventive services to help families at risk of involvement in the child welfare system are now being drastically cut. It is both morally wrong and economically foolish to focus our resources on paying for the administrative costs of terminating parental rights and then reversing them. Instead, we should spend resources to help families grow strong and healthy, so that they are not torn apart in the first place.

New York is a leader on many issues important to children and families — for instance, offering state child and earned-income tax credits to help working families, mandating some paid family leave and expanding coverage of public health insurance for children beyond the national minimum. The New York state Legislature should follow the example of other family- friendly states and enact legislation restoring families. But why not set a better example still, by helping to keep them together in the first place?

Cynthia Godsoe is an instructor of law at Brooklyn Law School. Previously, she represented children and youth in delinquency, education and child-protective matters.


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