Mending broken families

WASHINGTON — If congressional lawmakers could see the great potential of foster-care reform in 23-year-old Julia Charles, improvements in this flawed multibillion-dollar system would be swift.

Charles is a poised, engaging recent college graduate and the author of a soon-to-be-published book on her experiences. We met during a two-day gathering of hundreds of young people in or emerging from foster care. Hosted by the Baltimore-based Annie E. Casey Foundation and Seattle's Casey Family Programs, the theme was creating a sense of permanency amid the impermanence of foster care.

But wait. If Charles is so impressive, doesn't the child-welfare system deserve applause over reform? No. This young woman, inheritor of a bright smile and heartbreaking childhood, had to navigate a path littered with the many failures and mistakes of the multibillion-dollar federal and state network designed to be de facto parent to 513,000 foster-care children.

This was the system's first failure for Charles: Police cars in front of her home and a plastic trash bag meant to hold her childhood were how Charles and her siblings were informed that they were leaving their parents' house, never to return. Cramped in a social worker's cubicle until a 3 a.m. placement was found was the way Charles said goodbye to her siblings, taken away one by one as foster homes were found.

Charles said she had always slept with her sister to banish the horrors of neglect and abuse. The blunt instrument that severed their bond is child welfare at its clumsiest.

States such as California and New York have made impressive strides reducing foster-care rolls, but every day, another 850 children nationwide find themselves in the system. Many still have a good chance of enduring experiences similar to Charles'.

The second failure of the system was the lack of a replacement for Charles' family. It wasn't until she was an adult that Charles was adopted and had a person to call — she blushes happily — "Mommy."

Not so for the bulk of the 25,000 teenagers turning 18 and on the cusp of leaving foster care. Raised by "a business," as some call the child-welfare system, they are set adrift in the world armed only with frayed ties to blood kin and legally restricted ties to foster parents.

No surprise many end up homeless, incarcerated or dead. At the very least, they grow into college students in search of a place to return during school breaks. They crave siblings to banter with and a parent to walk them down the aisle. They crave what most of us take for granted.

Casey, backed by a huge endowment from Jim Casey, the founder of United Parcel Services, is a powerful ally in new efforts to help foster children make lifelong family connections. Things that help include reuniting with parents, getting adopted or being placed with relatives as an alternative to foster care. These are smart efforts policymakers should build upon.

An important start would include rethinking federal laws that give states more money for foster care and less money for the programs that would prevent abuse and neglect. This backward strategy likely made sense to the lawmakers who made foster care an important and sustaining part of the Security Act of 1935. But now it simply encourages foster-care placement over other alternatives.

A quiet, solemn youth from Connecticut named Earl makes my point. Earl and his siblings were reunited with their mother after she kicked a drug habit and regained custody. All's well that ends well? Not quite. Earl's mother, Esther, had a single meaningful contact with the authorities, who removed her children. She was admonished to get clean or lose her children forever. On her own, Esther found the mental-health and addiction services that turned her life around.

Listening to Esther, I wondered how many other parents ordered to get clean were unable to navigate the system and ended up permanently losing their kids. That would have been a life-damaging thing for Earl. His mother was a drug addict who held down a job, loved her children and struggled to provide. He told a roomful of wet eyes that he would rather be the son of a woman helped by an array of services who turned her life around, than the foster son of strangers.

It is simple. We need foster care's safety net. Start small. Help parents be better parents. Encourage foster parents to be more than temporary shelter. Everyone needs family.

Lynne K. Varner's column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times. Her e-mail address is seattletimes.com">lvarner@seattletimes.com; for a podcast Q&A with the author, go to Opinion at seattletimes.com