Angelica Hubbard’s six-year odyssey—from a Los Angeles emergency room, where she arrived eight weeks after birth with broken bones and brain damage, to the security and nurture of her adoptive family—reveals in stark detail how the foster-care system can harm as much as it helps.
“Over the past 20 years a whole state of limbo has come into existence where no judgment is made, where the child is neither fish nor fowl,” says Patrick Fagan, senior fellow in family and cultural issues at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. “He’s neither, as it were, the proper child of his parents who are raising him well, nor has he become the adoptive child of somebody else who is going to raise him well. Instead he’s the ward of the courts, and he’s bounced frequently from one foster home to another to another.”
In 1991, Los Angeles County placed Angelica through a private agency in the home of Doug and Kathy Hubbard, an American Baptist youth minister and his wife. The couple gingerly embraced Angelica for the first time in a hospital room, where tests revealed bone fractures and neurological damage. For the next five years, Angelica was at the mercy of a state system, which put the rights of her birth parents ahead of her needs.
Eventually, Angelica’s Hispanic birth parents satisfied state requirements and she returned to her original home at age two. But six months later, Angelica was back in a hospital, malnourished and with bruises and bite marks. From jail, her birth mother telephoned her case worker and pleaded for Angelica to be sent to the Hubbards. The agency rejected her appeal and placed the child with another Hispanic family. “To Angelica we were Mommy and Daddy, but their answer was, She’s already been placed; we can’t tell you any more,” Kathy Hubbard says.
Yet the Hubbards were determined and contacted the new foster family, offering free baby-sitting. Within four months, Angelica returned to them. And last year, they adopted Angelica, ending her bruising journey through the foster-care system.
KIDS’ NEEDS FIRST: New federal legislation has changed the way states are supposed to handle foster care and adoption so that what is best for children is to be uppermost in the minds of case workers.
The federal Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA), enacted in January, aims to double the number of adoptions by 2002. The new law speeds up the procedure to place foster children into adoptive families, giving states, placement agencies, and ministries strong incentives to put the needs of children first.
Although Angelica’s story has an upbeat ending, the same cannot be said for many of the other 500,000 foster children in America. Historically, the foster-care system has focused on keeping families together, even if children pay the price physically and emotionally.
Foster-care adoptions are up sharply where aggressive community outreach programs have been initiated. Churches are increasingly viewed as a prized asset in that effort. Christians have cared for orphans since the first century. But the contemporary breakdown of the nation’s foster-care system, burdened by bureaucracy, politics, and underfunding, has given church leaders fresh opportunities to care for foster children and to stimulate adoption in innovative ways.
“Foster parenting is more appealing when it’s the responsibility of a community rather than just the two parents,” says Ted Kulik, assistant director of the Institute for Children in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
While there is no conclusive research on what motivates people to care for a foster child, according to University of California at Berkeley researcher Richard Barth, it is very clear “that foster and adoptive parents have very high degrees of religiosity.”
Kulik points to Child Share of Glendale, California, as an example of a small but growing number of Christian organizations working within the system. They have an enviable track record for introducing stability into troubled young lives. Two out of three Child Share children stay with the same family until they are either reunited or adopted. The average foster child lives in four different homes.
Child Share links public and private agencies with foster and adoptive families. Some 250 congregations representing 20 denominations participate. Church members may serve with varying degrees of commitment, from baby-sitting and respite care to foster and adoptive parenting.
Nationwide, about 200,000 foster children are either presently or potentially available for adoption, though each year only about 20,000 are placed in permanent homes. Increasingly, private and public workers alike acknowledge that without community involvement the new federal law will not achieve its goal of dramatically increasing resolution of foster-care cases.
BLACK CHURCH INVOLVEMENT: Minority children make up 64 percent of the foster-care population and remain in care longer than any other group. African Americans have always adopted children of their own race at a higher rate than white families, according to Rita Simon of American University in Washington, D.C.
African-American churches and the state of Texas are successfully partnering in the recruitment of families for foster care and adoption. Project Hustle, a program to place hard-to-adopt children, develops teams from community groups who use their networks to find families and provide them with support.
“The use of the churches was critical because of the history of the relationship between the black church and the black community,” says Helen Grape, regional placement program director for the Texas Department of Protective and Regulatory Services in Fort Worth. The response from churches is greater than from other organizations.
“Businesses usually must offer an incentive, such as time off or insurance, to recruit people,” Grape says. “The ministers say, There is a need, so come and do it, and people will more than likely follow through.”
Each community group is assigned 20 to 25 children for whom they have the responsibility to help guide through the process to, ideally, a permanent, safe home.
It is a multidimensional process that Grape helps orchestrate. “You have to forget this sequential kind of planning,” Grape says. “It has to be concurrent; you have to work with the family at the same time that you identify options, support systems, judges, and court people who have to be ready to do what is necessary to free kids or get kids where they need to be.”
Cooperation is essential to make the new legislation effective, Grape says. “Now, more than at any other time, public and private agencies must work together to identify families, to train together, recruit together.”
A similar recruiting effort that started in Chicago has been in place since 1980. One Church, One Child is a special program designed to connect African-American families, churches, and needy kids. One Church, One Child identifies adoptive families and single parents for children in need of permanent homes and has now placed 90,000 children nationwide. The vision of One Church, One Child was to recruit at least one African-American family or single parent per church to adopt at least one child.
RACIAL TENSIONS: Transracial adoption remains a highly sensitive issue, exposing ongoing ethnic tensions within American culture. In 1972, the National Association of Black Social Workers condemned transracial adoption as “cultural genocide.” But laws enacted in 1994 and 1997 prohibit using race as a determining factor in adoption. Nevertheless, bias against transracial adoption remains.
“There is a very aggressive movement within the social services system that a black child in need of adoptive parents will not be permitted to be adopted by white couples,” Fagan says. “That is their putting a race-cultural issue ahead of the actual needs of a particular child.”
Critics claim that children lose their identity and become “spiritual and cultural orphans.” But a 20-year study of Midwest families by Simon challenges that notion. Most parents work hard—perhaps even too hard—she says, at teaching their children about their cultural heritage.
“The joke among these children was that not every dinner conversation has to be a discussion of black history or whether Jesse Jackson is going to run for public office,” says Simon. Children were more interested in discussing basketball or dating.
As the parents of three mixed-race children, James and Karen Stobaugh of Downingtown, Pennsylvania, have more of a personal stake than most in the debate. James Stobaugh says, “At times we’ve struggled with our society’s subtle and not-so-subtle racism.” The Stobaughs relocated after racists burned crosses at a nighttime rally on the edge of their property. A firm supporter of transracial adoption, Stobaugh says, “The U.S. is home to nearly 200 people groups. To think they can or should be kept separate is totally untenable. And the people who end up paying the price are innocent children.”
MORE HOMES NEEDED: Regardless of the number of foster children available for adoption, there are still not enough adults signed up to be foster or adoptive parents. A common belief is that the most needy children are not adopted from foster care because adoptive white parents are interested only in healthy newborns. That is a myth, according to Conna Craig, director of the Institute for Children. She points to the Children with aids Project in Phoenix, which has recruited more than 1,000 parents to adopt aids orphans and HIV-positive babies.
Craig concedes that the longer a child is in the system, the more the likelihood of adoption dwindles. But Craig emphasizes that the notion that nobody wants older children or children with emotional and physical problems is untrue. Research indicates that no child is unadoptable, says Craig. Her organization commissioned a study by the Polling Company, which found that 71 percent of adults would, if deciding to adopt, consider a child who had spent time in foster care.
Fagan says, “We have no major national efforts going on in adoption, and there are potentially up to 2 million who would be willing to adopt if asked.”
To increase adoptions, one public perception in need of change is the belief that the foster-care system is too intimidating. Don Simkovich, director of church relations for Child Share, says, “This system walks into your living room—attorney, birth parents, birth parents’ attorney, judge, social workers, social worker’s supervisor. It takes an adventurous spirit to work through the system.”
As foster parents, Richard and Lisa Pferdner of Chatsworth, California, have placed themselves in the crossfire between parents and the state. The casualty rate for foster parents is extremely high. Many drop out within a year when they witness the painful battle over children in the system. Most important to the Pferdners now is the support their faith and Christian community provides in their demanding role as foster parents to Taylor, who came to them one year ago at the age of six months.
Even though Taylor’s birth mother said from the beginning that she does not want to work toward reunification, Taylor remains in a holding pattern while the court gives a legitimate opportunity for blood relatives to seek custody.
Meanwhile, the Pferdners’ dual task is to work toward family reunification even as they hold themselves out as Taylor’s potential adoptive parents. Once a week they take Taylor to his birth mother, who the Pferdners say loves her son. But she has drug-related problems that make her an unreliable parent. Parental abuse of alcohol and other drugs is a factor in the placement of more than 75 percent of all children in care, according to the U.S. General Accounting Office. “It’s so easy to look at the dysfunctional parents and say, ‘I could give this person a better home,’ ” Richard Pferdner says.
Pferdner compares foster parenting to foreign missionary work. “Being a foster parent is on that level of intensity, being in the trenches in direct spiritual warfare, having your faith completely tested.”
Under the new federal law, foster parents are being given greater powers in determining the fate of foster children in their care. Foster parents must now be notified every time the court schedules a hearing and be given the opportunity to voice their opinion on the child’s status.
Child Share executive director Joanne Feldmeth believes that new legislation will take time to be applied at the local level. “It’s an enormous change, and because people aren’t ready, because social workers have been schooled in the old line of thought that family reunification was the only way to go, it’s going to take a long time for it to filter out.”
CUTTING THE COST OF WAITING: Foster care has the reputation for being the kiss of death for an at-risk child’s mental and emotional well-being.
Connecticut officials estimate that 75 percent of youths in the state’s criminal justice system have been in foster care at some point in their lives. Experts say that placement in three or more foster families is the highest risk factor for a child who ultimately ends up in prison.
Studies also show that former foster-care wards make up a substantial portion of the nation’s homeless. A 1991 national study found that 25 percent of foster-care wards had been homeless at some point.
Fagan says that too many foster children are needlessly delayed in being permanently placed into adoptive families. National statistics show that the number of foster children has increased by 65 percent over the past decade. Fagan calls delay of permanent placement “child abuse by the child protective services.”
Until the ASFA legislation, states had a disincentive to place children in adoptive homes, in part because budgets were based on the number of foster children under state care. This disincentive results in children bouncing in and out of multiple foster homes, triggering many educational and emotional problems.
The ASFA plan to make foster care temporary gives federal money to each state that places more children into adoption. It aims to double—to 54,000 annually within the next four years—the number of children adopted out of foster care and to reduce status hearings from a maximum of 18 months to 12 months.
NEW MINISTRY MODELS: As churches have partnered with families, agencies, and governments, new models of ministry are emerging.
There is a new willingness by churches and some of their never-married single members to open their homes to needy kids. Gale Parker, 39, of Canoga Park, California, quickly lost her nave optimism about ministry to troubled children when she became a single foster parent. “Before I became a foster parent, I was idealistic,” Parker says. “I thought, I’m going to take them in, they’re going to love me. It’s going to be great.“
She sees it as a calling and understands why some two-parent families in her church say they would not consider foster parenting until after their kids are grown. “You have to have your life and your family in order, because the demands are so great that it could tear your family apart,” she says. “You need to have your strength from the Lord—and to have the time.”
Another attempt to expand care for foster children is a small, but growing back-to-orphanage movement. Most American orphanages closed more than 30 years ago due to high costs and the perception that institutional life is psychologically damaging.
But today’s orphanages tend to be smaller and based on a homelike atmosphere. Advocates say they provide a sense of permanence, security, structure, and camaraderie that is superior to being bounced from family to family through the foster-care system. Many of the new orphanages, as with their predecessors, have been founded by Christians.
“If the church really responded, we would solve the problem in our county,” says JoAnne Morris, who, with her husband, runs Mission to Children at Risk, which places foster children in Santa Clara County, California, through a network of 700 churches.
Morris says she encounters many Christians who find the cost in dealing with the state and a troubled family too high.
“I see Christians saying, I’m going to go through a private agency, because I’m not interested in dealing with the kids that come with all that baggage.“
Some church leaders are reluctant to become involved because they are afraid of the negative impact on their congregation. “One church told us that they were sorry, but they didn’t want to expose their families to the kind of sin that these kids have come from,” Morris says. “When you bring these children into your church, they’re going to teach the other kids things that they’ve never heard of before.”
Yet, families such as the Pferdners are eager to learn and respond to the needs that Christians are uniquely poised to meet. “It takes tremendous grace to be a foster parent,” says Richard Pferdner. “I don’t understand how non-Christians can do it without the resources of the Lord.”
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