Looking beyond Freund case on retaining families
Will parents with drug problems still keep kids?
Like hundreds of children in Illinois each year, Andrew “AJ” Freund was born with opioids in his system, a red flag that got him removed from his parents’ custody. The removal, though, was only temporary: He was back with his family 19 months later.
That decision is being second-guessed in the wake of 5-year-old AJ’s murder, a crime for which his parents stand accused. But child welfare officials say there is no simple guideline dictating when children should be taken from parents with drug problems — or when they should be returned.
“If you’ve got a mom with no support network and a long history of drug abuse, the safety of that child looks a lot different than someone with a house full of family members who can be supportive,” said Jassen Strokosch of the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services. “There is not a hard-and-fast rule at all.”
While the full account of DCFS involvement with AJ’s family has yet to be released, Strokosch said mandated reporters such as doctors or teachers generally inform the agency about children whose parents appear to have drug problems.
Sometimes it’s obvious, as when children are born in a state of withdrawal from opioids to which they were exposed in the womb. State statistics show that 470 Illinois babies were diagnosed with neonatal abstinence syndrome, as the condition is called, in 2016, the latest year available.
That works out to 3 out of every 1,000 live births. It’s not clear how many of them were placed into state care.
Strokosch said older children can also be removed because of a parent’s drug problem, but generally speaking, the agency tries to keep families together if it appears the child can be kept safe.
“The things that are really important for us is how long has the addiction problem been going on, … do (the parents) have a support network … and is the birth parent willing to seek treatment?” he said. “That bodes much better for the long-term outcome.”
DCFS did remove AJ’s younger brother from the family after AJ went missing. His mother, JoAnn Cunningham, is seven months pregnant with another child, who will also be removed from her care if she remains incarcerated.
Nonprofit groups usually provide the treatment and counseling meant to reunify or preserve families strained by drug use. One of those groups is Treatment Alternatives for Safe Communities, or TASC, which runs programs in Cook County and the East St. Louis area.
It serves more than 400 parents a year through its family recovery and reunification program. CEO Pam Rodriguez said it involves treatment, parenting classes, anger management classes, supervised visits with the child and follow-ups once the family is back together.
“These families reunify, and they reunify at a higher rate than the usual (child welfare) scenario,” she said. “In doing that, those families are found at no greater risk of subsequent maltreatment.”
She said parents with drug problems very rarely commit the kind of violence AJ suffered. The far greater issue is neglect, where a child is left alone overnight, given inadequate food or kept out of school.
“The majority of people who DCFS comes into contact with have a substance use disorder, and they don’t end up murdering their children,” she said.
Joseph Ryan, a social work professor at the University of Michigan who has researched Illinois child welfare policies, said most states now have a similar aim of keeping families together despite a parent’s history of drug use.
“To some extent, that makes sense,” he said. “It’s not like we have a great alternative in foster care. The general idea is to see if you can work with a family in the home and reduce the risk of harm to the child.”
But once a child is removed, Ryan said, it can be difficult to reunify a family even if the parents appear to be doing well. Judges, who make the final call about whether children should be removed from their parents or brought back, often are reluctant to allow people with histories of drug abuse to reclaim their kids, he said.
He expects that reluctance to grow even stronger in the wake of AJ’s murder.
“It’d be hard for this case not to play a role in (a judge’s) decision-making,” he said. “We might see children stay in care longer. Whether that’s a good or bad thing, we’ll have to see.”