Penguins could teach us about child welfare

My son and I recently saw "March of the Penguins," a likable documentary about life at the South Pole.

He sat transfixed by the sea of penguins working cooperatively to survive the unforgiving landscape of ice and snow. But I was struck by a different set of circumstances, the willingness of the penguin parents to protect their young at great cost to their own lives.

Alternating round-the-clock care, the parents went four months without eating in order to sit motionless atop tiny, furry bodies and protect them from a frigid wind that can freeze a living thing solid in seconds.

A lot was probably going on beneath the sleek, black coats of the adult penguins. But this observer saw only their indomitable will to suffer 80-mile-per-hour ice blasts so their children could stay warm.

If humans exhibited the same strength of will, we could, by sheer effort, change the country's child-welfare system from a complicated maze of unfunded mandates into an efficient, effective advocate of children.

Penguins are not people. But at its essence, protecting children of any species is pretty straightforward. It begins with summoning the will and determination to do so. Penguins have figured this out. Do we need them to draw us a map?

Or can we smartly and presciently start with how we fund, or fail to fund, child welfare? Congress recently considered capping federal funding for foster care. The as-yet-unborn suspicion is that a cap is the equivalent of a reduction.

Before counting the dollars, we ought to streamline the funding system. There are simply too many pots with very little cooking inside. There is a pot of federal money for mental health — but only for children who've actually been removed from the home — and another pot for child-abuse investigations. It goes on. As a result, case managers shuffle papers to comply with federal regulations when they ought to be in the fields where the children are.

Speaking to a congressional subcommittee two years ago, former Congressman Bill Frenzel, chairman of the Pew Commission on Children in Foster Care, astutely noted that federal dollars flow easily to pay for foster care for poor children, but much less is available for services to help keep families intact.

I don't know about easily, since states are having to pay more and more each year to serve the children in their care, but Frenzel's essential point about the too-narrow scope of foster-care funding is a good one.

We expect a lot from child-welfare authorities. We expect them to step in when families falter and maintain a zero body count. To comply, states make Hobson's choices of who is most needy in a given period — single mothers, the elderly or children — and fund accordingly. Sometimes, welfare and other social-service funds are used to pay for foster-care needs, other times it is the reverse. The result never wavers: less money for prevention and family-support efforts designed to prevent the need for foster care in the first place.

Funding is one piece of the solution puzzle. Another is tackling the corrosive dynamics between the system and the people it serves. Social workers, biological parents and foster parents frequently clash in a struggle to control the lives of children. Think about the result if they struggled together to save the lives of children.

About 50 percent of children who enter foster care, exit and return home within 60 days. This is a circumstance fraught with peril if all parties aren't working together. Social workers say it is hard to work with incompetent or uncaring parents and demanding foster parents. Foster parents say social workers approach everything wielding their master's degrees in social work and not much in the way of common sense. The truth is, unfortunately, in between.

In the movie my son and I watched, some baby penguins died. It is a fact of life and nature. There will never be a 100-percent success rate in foster care. Unfortunately, some child will die in or out of the system. But we can protect children with a system set up better than the one we have.

Like building a skyscraper or a transit system, we can do it whenever we decide we want to. Am I a pie-in-the-sky optimist? You bet. It would be the height of cynicism to be anything else.

Lynne K. Varner's column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times. Her e-mail address is lvarner@seattletimes.com