Let’s Seek New Ways to Help Needy Children

To the Editor:

I was surprised to see The Chronicle devote more than 2,700 words to a story about Marcia Lowry and her organization, Children’s Rights, (“The Head of a New York Charity Crusades for Children, State by State,” March 22) without sparing even one of those words for the many in child welfare who feel Ms. Lowry may no longer be a force for progress in the field.

I don’t doubt Ms. Lowry’s sincerity or her dedication. But “best practice” in child welfare has passed Ms. Lowry by. The organization’s settlements effectively reinforce the dominant approach in American child welfare for 150 years, an approach that can be boiled down to “take the child and run.”

No matter what the family problem, the solution was to tear the family apart and throw the children into foster care.

There are times when that really is the only option. But Children’s Rights confuses well-publicized horror-story exceptions with the norm. So Children’s Rights settlements typically offer tepid tokenism about keeping families together, and a ferocious push for taking children from birth parents forever in an effort to transplant them into middle-class adoptive homes.

At best, Children’s Rights settlements typically generate publicity that leads to small improvements. But it’s no coincidence that the two big success stories in child-welfare litigation, Alabama and Illinois, involve suits brought by other organizations, which emphasized safe, proven approaches to keeping families together.

High-profile child-abuse tragedies have stampeded the public into supporting unprecedented infringements on civil liberties. Homes can be searched and children strip-searched, effectively without a warrant. Birth parents usually have no effective counsel and children can be held in foster care indefinitely based on a standard usually no higher than preponderance of the evidence. And from its inception in the 1850s, the system has been permeated with racial and class bias. Dealing with these issues is the “liberal agenda” Ms. Lowry derides.

But confronting these problems is the only way to really help children, because foster care is, inherently, such a harmful experience. One recent study found that only one in five foster-care alumni does well as a young adult — and even if everything wrong with foster care were magically fixed, those rotten outcomes would improve by only 22.2 percent. Yet Ms. Lowry persists in trying to tinker with foster care, when the only real way to fix foster care is to have less of it.

Children’s Rights already is the 800-pound gorilla of child-welfare litigation. It would be a shame if, as it grows, its one-size-fits-all approach crowded out better solutions.

Richard Wexler
Executive Director
National Coalition for Child Protection Reform
Alexandria, Va.