When the Family First Prevention Services Act was signed into law in 2018, it included a provision for expanding the number of foster homes in the U.S. The legislation even set aside $8 million for the secretary of health and human services to “make competitive grants to States, Indian tribes, or tribal consortia to support the recruitment and retention of high-quality foster families to increase their capacity to place more children in family settings.”
Leaving aside the fact that $8 million hardly signals much of a federal priority — that might be enough for one state to engage in this project — the real issue was one of measurement. Many states didn’t and still don’t have an accurate count of the number of foster homes they have. How would we know whether they have successfully expanded it?
Moreover, some homes are licensed but have effectively stopped taking children. Some may have let their licenses expire but would happily come back to foster again if someone asked them.
Seven years later, almost every state is still experiencing a shortage of foster homes. This has contributed to the problem of kids sleeping in offices, hotels and homeless shelters. More than half of foster parents quit within the first year. And many foster parents are frankly not up to the caliber we’d like — with some doing it more for the money than anything else. And to add to the problem, many states have all but given up recruitment, saying that they can solve the foster care shortage by using more relatives or just keeping kids out of foster care altogether. Neither solution has proven to be particularly effective at promoting child safety.
Now the second Trump administration is taking another stab at this problem. The Administration for Children and Families (ACF) has told states that instead of a lot of other metrics that seem to them less relevant and helpful, they should focus on “A Home for Every Child.” They want to make sure there is a foster-home-to-child ratio greater than 1:1 in every state.
We cannot underestimate the importance of having a number of options for every child needing foster care. Kids are not all the same and neither are foster homes. They are younger, older, boys, girls, sibling groups, kids who need more structure, kids who need less, kids who can get along well with other kids, and kids who need to be the only child in a home. There are foster parents who can handle medically fragile kids, parents who can deal with behavioral problems, parents who can take kids for a short-term emergency placement and parents who can take in kids for years and maybe even adopt them.
When we place a child into a foster home that is not a good fit — “putting a square peg into a round hole,” as former ACF Assistant Secretary Lynn Johnson once put it to me — we make it more likely that the child will have to be moved, that the child will be further traumatized and act out in his or her next home, and that the foster family will feel ineffective and will leave the system.
An agency needs to recruit enough foster families so that caseworkers have a choice of where to place a child. They also need to keep in touch with and support the families they already have. Tennessee recently launched a campaign before Thanksgiving, asking foster families who were already licensed to consider putting “an extra seat at the table” to welcome a child who has been forced to stay in a hotel or office or group setting into their home for a few days over the holidays. The program was a great success, and some families have even agreed to keep the children for longer.
The only problem with the new ACF strategy is that, as with trying to achieve any ratio, one can play with the numerator or the denominator. And while the agency is committed to recruiting more foster families, ACF has also suggested that states can reduce the number of kids coming into care. Whether through better mental health services or addiction treatment, they suggest that more families can be stabilized and be kept together.
But foster care numbers are close to record lows and there are plenty of reasons to think that states are pushing them lower and sacrificing child safety in the process. If the federal government provides them with an excuse to double down on their plans to reduce the number of kids in care, many states will jump at the chance.
Here’s hoping states will finally get the message that quality foster parents are a vital part of our child-welfare system. The benefits of putting more effort into recruiting them and supporting them will redound to the safety and well-being of our country’s most vulnerable children.