President Clinton signed into law last week a measure requiring states to do a better job of finding permanent homes for the nearly 500,000 children in foster care in this country. It’s a worthy goal, and the law represents a critical step toward putting the interests of those vulnerable children above all others.
The new law, supported by a bipartisan effort in Congress, significantly changes the interpretation of a 1980 law that called on states to make “reasonable efforts” to reunify families when children have been taken from parents. While reaffirming that concept in most circumstances, the new law says no such efforts are necessary when children face abandonment or repeated abuse by their biological parents.
It also will speed up the process of making children available for adoption by requiring states to begin terminating parental rights in certain cases, such as when a child has spent 15 of the most recent 22 months in foster care, has been assaulted by a parent or has been abandoned.
Making more children available for adoption is fine, but it works only if there are enough potential parents waiting to adopt them–which there are not. But the new law offers cash incentives to states for moving more children out of foster care and into permanent, adoptive homes.
That makes far more sense than the present system, which subsidizes states for each child in foster care but offers no rewards for adoption.
Foster care was intended to provide temporary, safe residences for children in crisis. Sadly, it has turned into a bureaucratic nightmare in which thousands of children move from foster home to foster home for years until they “age out” of a system that was never meant to raise them.
Every child deserves the permanence and security of a loving family. The federal government cannot provide that, the states cannot assure it. But this new law makes the priorities clear and gives kids a better chance for a home than they had before.
