In February of 2023, Phoenix Castro was born in San Jose, Calif., suffering from neonatal opioid withdrawal after being exposed to fentanyl and methamphetamine in her mother’s womb.
Her mother was sent to jail and then ended up at a drug treatment facility. But her father, who had multiple drug arrests, was allowed to take the newborn to his San Jose apartment, even though a social worker had warned that the baby would be at “very high” risk if she was sent home, where the county’s child protection agency had already removed the couple’s two older children because of neglect.
Three months later, Phoenix was dead from an overdose of fentanyl and methamphetamine.
The ensuing uproar, chronicled in detail by The Mercury News, focused on new efforts by the county to keep at-risk families together. In the past, children often would be removed from unsafe homes and placed into foster care, and newborns like Phoenix in all likelihood would not have been sent home.
Those policy changes led to a “significant” drop in removals of children from troubled homes in the San Jose area, according to the state’s social services agency. They reflected a larger shift in child welfare thinking nationwide that has upended the foster care system. Reducing the number of children placed in foster care has been hailed as an achievement. But leaving children in families with histories of abuse and neglect to avoid the trauma of removing them has had tragic results.
We need to ask whether avoiding foster care, seemingly at all costs — especially for children in families mired in violence, addiction or mental illness — is too often compromising their safety and welfare.
The use of foster care has been in decline even as more children are dying from abuse and neglect in their homes. In recent years, the number of children in foster care fell by nearly 16 percent while the fatality rate from abuse and neglect rose by almost 18 percent. Many factors were and are at work, among them: a lack of resources, caseworker inexperience and the high bars for removing children from their homes that have been erected by child welfare agencies, policymakers and judges.
What is clear from a sampling of states that release fatality reports in a timely fashion is that we are seeing deaths of children in cases in which they had been allowed to remain in homes with records of violence, drug use and neglect.
In Minnesota, a child advocacy group’s study of 88 child fatalities in the state from 2014 to 2022 found that “many of these deaths were preventable” and were the result of a “child welfare philosophy which gave such high priority to the interests of parents and other adults in households, as well as to the goals of family preservation and reunification, that child safety and well-being were regularly compromised.”
The prioritization of family preservation has been advanced by states and the federal government and by the nation’s largest foundation focused on reducing the need for foster care, Casey Family Programs.
Three ideas seem to have guided the effort: the child welfare system is plagued by systemic racial bias, adults should not be punished for drug addiction, and a majority of children in the system are simply in need of financial support and social services.
This effort was bolstered in 2018, with the passage by Congress of the Family First Prevention Services Act, which enables states to use federal funds “to provide enhanced support to children and families and prevent foster care placements through the provision of mental health and substance abuse prevention and treatment services” and other programs.
The push certainly has been well-intentioned. There was a sense that child welfare authorities had overreacted to concerns about a crack baby epidemic in the 1980s. Mothers were arrested and babies and children were taken away. The number of children in foster care more than doubled between 1985 and 2000. There was also deep concern — concern that persists — that Black children in particular were bearing the brunt of being removed from their homes and sent to foster care, which can cause its own upheaval for children.
In some states, the reductions in the number of children in foster care were drastic. But there are limits to how much those numbers can be reduced without putting children in grave danger.
In Santa Clara County, Calif., where Phoenix Castro died, an inquiry the previous year by the California Department of Social Services into the county’s child protection agency found “multiple” instances of “children placed into protective custody by law enforcement,” only to have the county agency “immediately” place “the children back in the care of the unsafe parent.” (In what appears to be an about-face by the county, The Mercury News reported that in the last two months of 2023, the number of children removed from their homes was triple the two-month average for the previous months of that year.)
In an email to Santa Clara County’s Department of Family and Children’s Services staff in 2021, explaining the new emphasis on keeping families together, the director at the time described the move as part of the county’s strong commitment “to racial justice and to healing the historical wounds underlying disproportionate representation of children of color in the child welfare system.”
As much as racial disparities in foster care are deeply troubling — Black children are twice as likely as white children to spend time in foster care — Black children also suffer fatalities from abuse and neglect at three times the rate of white children. Which means that policies intended to reduce disproportionality by reducing foster care may actually be resulting in more deaths of Black children.
Foster care is not a panacea. The trauma children suffer from suddenly being removed from their home and their siblings, to be placed in a strange home with a caregiver they don’t know, is well documented. But the alternative, allowing a child to remain in a dangerous home, should never be an alternative.
Naomi Schaefer Riley is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of “No Way to Treat a Child.”
