NC’s foster-care laws should put children first

A simple question lurks in the halls of the North Carolina’s General Assembly. Why is it so hard to get legislation passed in this state that furthers the interests of children in foster care? 

Child-centered legislation is moving forward in other parts of the country. Georgia requires family courts to consider written testimony by caregivers on behalf of the child. Missouri elevates the status of a foster family to “relative” if the child has resided in that home more than nine months, making it easier to adopt. Tennessee has a full-blown “Adoption Project.” Ten states now provide a lawyer, paid by federal monies, to represent the child’s best interests before a judge. Other states help children get into stable homes sooner. 

But not North Carolina. Why?

To be fair, both the NC House and the Senate passed a landmark bill (HB 918) four years ago that would have legally required the mother of a baby born on drugs to get serious rehabilitation from the get-go or face the termination of her parental rights sooner.  

For anyone vaguely familiar with the distressed round-the-clock cries of a newborn in a NICU withdrawing from heroin or cocaine, this legislation was a no-brainer. Over 90% of child deaths in the first year of life happen because an addicted parent rolled over on a baby and suffocated the child in his sleep. HB 918 passed both NC houses by sizeable majorities. At the behest of DSS, Roy Cooper vetoed the bill.

In the words of state Rep. Mike Clampitt, R-Swain, as he faced DSS workers in a closed hearing, “I’m backing this bill because DSS has done nothing to further permanency for foster care children for seven years.”

That was four years ago. 

There are over 12,000 children in care in North Carolina. The opioid epidemic rages on.  North Carolina needs 23% more families willing to foster children than it has volunteers. The word is out: There are many well-meaning DSS workers in NC, but the system is in a stalemate. 

Why is North Carolina so stuck? As someone who has researched and interviewed foster families for almost five years, let me list two leading reasons. 

Nearly everyone mentions the problem of “the clock.” Technically, a child must be released for adoption after two years in care. But an addicted parent can wait till the clock nearly runs out, attend some recovery meetings or fulfill a requirement or two in the case plan, and boom! The clock starts over. This is a major reason why children are trapped for years in the Hotel California of foster care, never able to unpack a suitcase and feel part of a family.

This broken clock is predicated on a false ideology protected by stubborn bias: reuniting a child with blood relatives must always, always be both the goal and outcome. 

But suppose that parent didn’t sign up to parent? Suppose the child has a parent seriously abusing drugs? 80% of children removed from their homes do. This is how a crying baby shows up in an emergency room with a femur that’s been broken for two weeks. Under stressful conditions, mental illness and substance abuse lead to horrors like cigarette burns on toddler’s legs and diaper rash left to rot. And much worse. 

Could we admit to ourselves what the statistics show: that most abuse and maltreatment of children occurs at the hands of a parent or paramour? A documentary called “Lives Cut Short,” by Natalie Schaeffer Riley, which also features UNC’s Emily Putnam-Hornstein, details why and how this happens. Sometimes the worst thing you can do if you care about the child is return him or her to blood relatives. 

A second reason for the stalemate is that there is a mammoth state apparatus sustained by keeping foster children in the care of the state. Child welfare agencies in North Carolina receive 22% of the state budget. Every time a child is shuffled along to the next foster care placement, or a parent is driven to recovery meetings, or a case is postponed in family court, yet again, budgets are justified and salaries paid. 

When I asked the head of a state agency that provides support services to mothers what would help DSS find a suitable relative sooner or free the child for adoption, she replied, “We need another layer of supervisors.” Yet another layer of supervisors. 

There are couples all over North Carolina who fostered children they were willing and able to adopt, but the state moved the child to (yet) another foster care placement. One attachment after another is broken. Are we surprised these children often end up depressed, unable to trust anyone, drifting through life without skills or close relationships? Yet parents willing to adopt are often caricatured as “child snatchers,” as though a child living as a ward of the state is normal, and adoption is suspect.

I asked a couple near the coast who had fostered 13 children in three years in how many instances did they believe the family member receiving the child could or would care for them well? The wife paused a minute. “I can think of one” she said, referring to a Marine father who came forward to claim his son. She and her husband no longer foster children in North Carolina. 

Try putting forward a bill that would shorten this interminable process for children and watch DSS workers pile into a Senate hearing room from the four corners of this state in opposition. Ask for a bi-partisan working group to craft solutions that give children a better chance of stable family and your voice will echo in an empty room. 

It’s time to come together in North Carolina and break this stalemate. Next year the legislature will meet in its longer, more-intense session. We are long past due for legislation that allows our state’s most vulnerable children to live with stable family, whether blood relatives or not.