THE EVIDENCE IS IN Foster Care vs. Keeping Families Together: The Definitive Studies

National Coalition for Child Protection Reform / 53 Skyhill Road (Suite 202) / Alexandria, Va. 22314
(703) 212&2006 / info@nccpr.org / www.nccpr.org

THE EVIDENCE IS IN
Foster Care vs. Keeping Families Together: The Definitive Studies

NCCPR long has argued that many children now trapped in foster care would be far
better off if they had remained with their own families and those families had been given the right
kinds of help.
Turns out that’s not quite right.
In fact, many children now trapped in foster care would be far better off if they remained
with their own families even if those families got only the typical help (which tends to be little help,
wrong help, or no help) commonly offered by child welfare agencies.
That’s the message from the largest studies ever undertaken to compare the impact on
children of foster care versus keeping comparably maltreated children with their own families. The
study was the subject of a front&page story in USA Today, available here: http://bit.ly/5JpHmU
The first study, published in 2007, and available here,
http://www.mit.edu/~jjdoyle/fostercare_aer.pdf looked at outcomes for more than 15,000 children.
It compared foster children not to the general population but to comparably-maltreated children
left in their own homes. The result: On measure after measure the children left in their own
homes do better.
In fact, it’s not even close.
Children left in their own homes are far less likely to become pregnant as teenagers, far
less likely to wind up in the juvenile justice system and far more likely to hold a job for at least
three months than comparably maltreated children who were placed in foster care.
One year later, the same researcher published another study,available here:
http://www.mit.edu/~jjdoyle/doyle_jpe_aug08.pdf, his time of 23,000 cases. Again he compared
foster children to comparably&maltreated children left in their own homes. This time he looked at
which children were more likely to be arrested as adults. Once again, the children left in their
own homes fared better than the foster children.
Implications
● The studies use the term “foster care” generically; they include children placed in any
form of substitute care. That’s important because whenever information like this comes out,
people who want to warehouse children in orphanages try to use it to justify their schemes. But
these studies were not limited to family foster homes. And it takes three single&spaced pages just
to list all the other studies documenting the harm of orphanages. (Those pages are available
from NCCPR.)
● This does not mean that no child ever should be placed in foster care. But it
means many fewer children should be placed in foster care.
The studies excluded the most severe cases of maltreatment, a very small proportion of
any child protective worker’s caseload, precisely because, horror stories that make the front page
notwithstanding, these are cases where everyone with time to investigate would agree that
removal from the home was the only alternative.
Rather, the studies focused on, by far, the largest group of cases any worker sees, those
that can best be called the “in&between cases” where the parent is neither all victim nor all villain;
cases where there are real problems in the home, but wide disagreement over what should be
done. As the first study itself notes: “These are the cases most likely to be affected by policy
changes that alter the threshold for placement.” They also, are, of course, the cases most likely
to be affected by a foster&care panic – which also alters the threshold for placement. THE EVIDENCE IS IN/2
Even among these cases, the figures are averages. Certainly there are some individual
cases among the thousands studied in which foster care was the less harmful alternative. But
what the data make clear is that foster care is vastly overused, damaging large numbers of
children who would do better in life had they remained in their own homes, even with the minimal
help most child welfare agencies offer to families.
This says less about how well child protection agencies do in helping families than it does
about how enormously toxic a foster care intervention is. Anything that toxic must be used very
sparingly and in very small doses.
● Child welfare agencies have a disingenuous response to all this: “Why yes, of course,”
they like to say. “This research just shows what we’ve always said ourselves: foster care only
should be used as a last resort; of course we keep families together whenever possible.” But this
research shows that agency actions belie their words. These studies found thousands of
children already in foster care who would have done better had child protection agencies
not taken them away in the first place.
● The USA Today story quotes one deservedly well&respected expert as saying that the
2007 study was the first to produce such results. But that is an error. Actually it was at least the
second since 2006. A University of Minnesota study, available here: http://bit.ly/76Hhqk used a
different methodology and measured different outcomes, but came to very similar conclusions.
● Though the USA Today story says other “studies” go the other way, the one cited, with
less than 1/100
th
the sample size of the new studies, a shorter duration and at least one other
serious flaw (omitting foster children in care for less than six months) is the only one we know of.
And that study focused on reunification, not on children never removed in the first place.
And, of course, that study also compared foster care only to typical “help” for families in
their own homes, which generally is little or nothing. Providing the kinds of real help NCCPR
recommends (See Twelve Ways to do Child Welfare Right, available here:
http://nccpr.info/solutions-services/ ) would likely change the result and, in the case of the three
more recent and more rigorous studies, create an even wider gap in outcomes favoring keeping
families together.
● Perhaps most intriguing, these studies suggest it actually may be possible to quantify
the harm of a foster&care panic, a huge, sudden upsurge in needless removals after the death of
a child “known to the system” gets extensive news coverage.
Thanks to these studies, we now have an estimate of how much worse foster children do
on key outcomes compared with comparably&maltreated children left in their own homes. It’s also
usually possible to calculate how many more children are taken away during a foster&care panic.
So it should be possible to estimate how many more children will wind up under arrest, how many
more will become pregnant and how many more will be jobless as a result of a foster&care panic.
It also should be possible to estimate roughly how many children have been saved from
these rotten outcomes in states and localities that have reformed their systems to emphasize
safe, proven programs to keep families together.
These new studies and the Minnesota study are in addition to the comprehensive study
of foster care alumni showing that only one in five could be said to be doing well as a young adult
– in other words, foster care churns out walking wounded four times out of five. (See NCCPR’s
publication 80 Percent Failure (http://www.nccpr.org/reports/cfpanalysis.pdf)for more on this
study) and the mass of evidence showing that simply in terms of physical safety, real family
preservation programs have a far better track record than foster care. (See NCCPR Issue Paper
#1: http://www.nccpr.org/reports/01SAFETY.pdf)
The buzzword in child welfare is “evidence&based.” What that really means is: How dare
proponents of any new, innovative approach to child welfare expect to get funding if they can’t dot
every i and cross every t on evaluations proving the innovation’s efficacy beyond a shadow of a
doubt? Old, non&innovative programs, however, are not held to this standard. If they were, child
welfare would be turned upside down by the results of this new research.
Because now, more than ever, the evidence is in. Updated June 3, 2009