THE PUBLIC MIND: MONA CHAREN DID NOT DO HER HOMEWORK

To the Editor:

I found last Tuesday's column by Mona Charen concerning the Children's Defense Fund to be poorly researched and illogically written. To employ one of Ms. Charen's own examples, let us look more closely at the family preservation programs which the Children's Defense Fund endorses. While Ms. Charen's main point is that the Children's Defense Fund has an agenda of spending as much of the taxpayers' money as possible, family preservation saves us a great deal of tax money and, no less important, successfully keeps families together whenever possible.

Not every family can be assigned to a family preservation team, for unfortunately some children are so severely mistreated or in such immediate danger that they must be removed from the home. However, most parents sincerely want to be good parents and are willing to try very hard to learn how to care for their children properly, especially if the alternative is to lose the children. Children, far from being the victims of family preservation as Ms. Charen implies, benefit because, if the intervention is successful, they are able to remain with their own parents.

As anyone who has worked with such children knows, even a severely abused child suffers at being separated from his or her parents. Most children love and depend on their parents intensely, even if the parents are woefully inadequate or abusive. Ms. Charen's contention that "the truth is that the CDF has taken a position that is completely on the side of parents their rights, their needs and not of children" merely shows her ignorance concerning the emotional problems inevitable for any child who must be placed in foster care or other child-care institution.

Ms. Charen is similarly confused as to the cost of many of the projects endorsed by the Children's Defense Fund. Missouri's version of family preservation, Families First, costs taxpayers about $3,500 for five weeks of intensive work with the parents and child. When a single child is removed from the home and placed in foster care in Missouri, the costs is $9,000 to $10,000 per year if the case is simple. If psychological evaluation seems necessary prior to placement, the child may be hospitalized in a psychiatric unit for an indefinite period of time at costs that far exceed simple foster care placement. Whatever the child's original problems, once he or she is removed from the home, the trauma of removal and separation becomes an additional emotional scar requiring further treatment, often at state expense. By contrast, 80 percent of Cape Girardeau County families which have gone through the Families First program are together and functional one year after the program ends. As the Children's Defense Fund recognizes, family preservation is a bargain for the taxpayer.

Space does not permit rebuttal of Ms. Charen's other points. I will add only that I first became aware of the Children's Defense Fund in 1986, when I joined the staff of Family Learning Center, a program in Cape for families with pre-school children who have a variety of problems. Many of the children I dealt with had been abused, and many were in foster care. As a classroom teacher and later director of the program, I found the Children's Defense Fund to be consistently in support of realistic, cost-effective legislation and programs that would benefit such children. Children's Defense Fund seeks ways to intervene early with effective solutions, so that the problems do not grow worst or more difficult to remediate as the child grows up. Thus, Children's Defense Fund works not only for children but also for taxpayers, so that we do not pay again and again over the lifetime of each child. Ms. Charen did not do her homework.

Ida L. Domazlicky

Cape Girardeau