Children may be better off in troubled families than foster care
There has always been a raging debate among child advocates on when children should be removed from their homes for their own well-being. Now the Casey Center for Children and Families alerted me to a story in Tuesday's USA Today by Wendy Koch that reports on an interesting new study out of MIT's Sloan School of Management. It says even troubled homes are better, statistically speaking, than foster care for children whose cases are "on the margin." This does not about extreme cases.
The study should be of special interest to families and child advocates In this region, we've seen the terrible dilemma first hand. Recently in the news was the horrific case of Savina Gonzales, who was removed from her mother and placed with a very conscientious foster home and then returned to her natural mother. The mother, Darlene Sanchez, was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to eight years to life for starving the child to death.
And then we have cases of mistreatment of children by foster parents, as well, such as foster parents Simmarie and Marco Carrillo, who were sent to prison for their crimes.
Here is a summary of the story:
Children whose families are investigated for abuse or neglect are likely to do better in life if they stay with their families than if they go into foster care, according to a pioneering study. The findings intensify a vigorous debate in child welfare: whether children are better served with their families or away from them. Kids who stayed with their families were less likely to become juvenile delinquents or teen mothers and more likely to hold jobs as young adults, the study by Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Joseph Doyle found. "The size of the effects surprised me, because all the children come from tough families," Doyle says of his National Science Foundation-funded research. The largest foster care study of its kind focused on the outcomes for some 15,000 kids, documented from 1990 to 2002 in a comprehensive Illinois state database. To avoid results attributable to family background, Doyle screened out extreme cases of abuse or neglect and studied kids whose cases could have gone either way. Other studies show that the 500,000 children in U.S. foster care are more likely than other kids to drop out of school, commit crimes, abuse drugs and become teen parents. University of Chicago research has shown that this holds true even when foster kids are compared with other disadvantaged youth. Doyle's work, however, provides "the first viable, empirical evidence" of the benefits of keeping kids with their families, says Gary Stangler, executive director of the Jim Casey Youth Opportunities Initiative, a foundation for foster teens.Here is the story:
If you want more information on this topic, check in on this Web site: National Coalition for Child Protection Reform.