When in doubt, save the children

KENNETT, MO. -- Those Missourians involved in child welfare cases, for the most part, make a real effort to avoid disastrous mistakes that can often lead to the deaths of their charges.

And so do their counterparts in other states, including New York, Tennessee and Florida, where the recent effects of misjudgments have produced funerals for young children who died after they were left in or returned to a dangerous home.

The files of these states provide sufficient evidence that politicians jumped to all the wrong conclusions and made everything much worse.

In all three states, the child deaths led to immediate assumptions that welfare systems must be trying too hard to keep families together, a conclusion often applied when similar cases occur in Missouri. The warning message from these conclusions is always the same: Take away scores, even hundreds of children needlessly and they will suffer terribly, but your job will be safe. But let one child be harmed in his or her home, and your career is over.

Amid this widespread foster-care panic, huge numbers of children have been torn from their homes. Putting child safety ahead of family preservation, the apologists declare: We're just erring on the side of the child. Probably no other phrase in the English language has done more harm to children.

When a child is needlessly thrown into foster care, he is cut loose from everyone loving and familiar in his brief lifetime. For a child, the experience is akin to kidnapping.

Older children feel they must have done something terrible and are being punished for it. The emotional trauma can last a lifetime.

And that assumes the foster home will be a good one. Most are. But the rate of abuse in foster care is far higher than is generally realized -- far higher than in the general population. The record of institutions is even worse. In several cases in Tennessee, the deaths of children were covered up in the name of keeping families together and were hidden from public view by transferring them to foster care. I don't understand why a child taken from a safe home only to be beaten can be classified as "erring on the side of the child."

As is often the case, recent foster-care panics have backfired, an occurrence not unknown in Missouri. Instead of reducing deaths among children who were "known to the system," such fatalities increased because the "experts" misdiagnosed the problem. Children weren't dying because of keeping families together. They were dying because ill-prepared, undertrained welfare-assistance workers were given enormous caseloads.

The caseworkers made bad decisions because they were forced to make snap judgments. The phony political solution -- take the child and run -- overwhelmed them even more. They left more children in danger in their homes, even as they took other children from homes that were safer or could have been made safe with the right kind of help.

This foster-care panic has been occurring in virtually every state in the nation since the advent of so-called "enlightened care for children" has been used to pacify a skeptical public. This means that children are forced to sleep on office floors because there is no other place for them. "Nomad children" will sleep in a different bed every night.

Children will assault one another as foster homes become overcrowded and standards are lowered for foster parents. And more children will be abused in their homes as overwhelmed workers don't have time for them.

States can learn from their mistakes. They can change course and embrace safe, proven programs to keep families together. This will produce a sharp drop in the foster care population, while fewer children are abused in their own homes. Contrast to the stereotype, most parents who lose their children to foster care are neither brutally abusive nor hopelessly addicted. Far more common are cases in which a family's poverty is confused with child "neglect." In other cases, parents are neither all victim nor all villain.

No state always gets child welfare right. Those in charge of the few success stories across the country have figured out what all the rest have yet to learn: We can't have child safety without family preservation.

Jefferson City needs to recognize that the best way to help children is to help his or her family.

Jack Stapleton is the editor of Missouri News & Editorial Service.