California now has about 18,000 fewer children in foster care than five years ago, with major declines in LA County and new reforms to protect families.
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Today, approximately 18,000 fewer California children are in foster care than five years ago — an astonishing 32% drop. In some places, the declines are even steeper: Los Angeles County, for example, has halved its foster care population.
A common trope in child welfare is that foster care reductions come at the expense of child safety. But this is a false choice, not borne out by the evidence. California has made important progress toward correcting its over-reliance on foster care and can continue doing so without endangering children.
California has been utilizing foster care at rates well above other highly-populated states like New York and Texas. And, notably, foster care hits Black families hardest, with one in seven Black children in California expected to enter foster care during childhood — more than three times the rate for white children.
But led by the vision and advocacy of system-impacted people, the state has made a real dent in foster care. We have started formally reckoning with mandated reporting practices that subject families to unnecessary stress and surveillance. A 2022 state law clarified that child neglect excludes conditions of poverty.
In Sacramento County, community-based programs now provide “cultural brokers” in Black communities that help families navigate the system.
Foster care is supposed to be a last resort, when every alternative has been exhausted and children cannot safely live with their parents. Yet, too often, we have rushed to take children as a first resort, traumatizing children and families in the process.
This impulse to remove first and ask questions later is especially strong after we hear about children like Gabriel Fernandez, an 8-year-old Palmdale boy who was tortured and abused to death by his mother and her boyfriend in 2013. Gabriel’s murder received extensive press coverage and was the subject of a 2020 Netflix documentary.
Heartbreaking cases like Fernandez’s rightly stoke outrage as well as determination to prevent these tragedies. Such cases prompt “foster care panics,” making child welfare caseworkers more likely to remove children.
It might seem logical that more foster care can keep children from experiencing the horrors that Fernandez did, but new evidence shows that that intuition is misguided: When my colleagues and I analyzed over a decade of data from all 50 states, we found that, on average, child deaths due to abuse or neglect did not decrease when states placed more children in foster care — nor did deaths increase when fewer children entered foster care.
This makes sense given that foster care is a fairly broad-brush intervention. Instead, the World Health Organization, American Academy of Pediatrics and American Public Health Association advocate for public health and anti-poverty approaches to prevent child maltreatment fatalities. This includes primary prevention (such as education and concrete resources to reduce caregiver stress) in addition to more targeted in-home treatment services for substance use, mental illness and other challenges.
It would be naïve to think that recent policy and practice shifts can prevent all child maltreatment fatalities, especially given federal cuts to safety net programs linked to reduced child maltreatment. Any such deaths are unacceptable. When they happen, though, we can take a broader view, understanding that “child protection” goes beyond foster care.
Sacramento is a prime example of how efforts to reduce foster care can go hand-in-hand with efforts to reduce child maltreatment mortality. The county has invested in programs that support families in preventing foster care as well as in campaigns to reduce Black child mortality by focusing on issues such as sleep-related deaths.
We are on the right track in shifting away from traumatic, unnecessary family separations. We should recognize our progress and continue pursuing more effective ways to protect children.
Kelley Fong, Ph.D., is assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine and a faculty affiliate at the UCI Center for Population, Inequality and Policy. She is the author of “Investigating Families: Motherhood in the Shadow of Child Protective Services.”
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