Keep Families Together: A New Perspective on Foster Care

Child Protection Services often mistakes children who live in poverty as living in deliberate neglect. Children should not be placed in foster care because of racism, classism, or sexism. Address poverty to lower rates of child removal and actively protect families from separation. 

Problem

CPS workers may introduce harmful biases into the foster placement process or use the neglect clause as a catch-all, which can cause undue trauma and emotional distress for the child.

Our Plan 

Our plan is to keep children safe, and families together as much as possible by addressing the poverty that may cause undue stress and hardship. In situations where children are removed, we advocate ensuring they remain connected to healthy support systems and routines, as well as, safe foster homes. 

• Advocate for equitable, racially informed, and realistic methods of universal basic income for each child. 

  • In the meantime, utilize Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) programming to low-income families.

    • Increasing income tax credit by $1000/year can minimize child protective services involvement by 7-10%. 

• Audit child protection offices to remove any workers with harmful biases.

  • Mandate anti-racism, intersectionality courses. 

• Ensure parents with disabilities are not targeted by the child welfare system and that their parental rights are protected 

• Reform the neglect clause, and ensure it has a specific and impartial framework to minimize misuse by CPS workers

• Rebuild trust between community and child protection agencies through relationship-building programs. 

• Hold foster parents accountable to quality care

  • Mandate random observations on households

  • Foster parents need to show receipts of how the money is spent for each child to their caseworker monthly 

  • If found to be abusive or neglectful, place those foster parents on the nationwide list to ensure they can never be foster parents again in any state 

• Prioritize family reunification and advocate for agency of the child

This Matters

There are cases when children, unfortunately, need to be removed, but when these instances become the norm, we are failing the families we are supposed to serve. Reducing child poverty and keeping our children safe happens when we raise families, and not just individuals, above the poverty line.