In providing care, focus must stay on the child

Over the past 10 years, Connecticut’s Department of Children and Families has worked to reduce the number of kids in congregate care, from 30 percent of children in our care a decade ago to just 6 percent this July. My predecessor’s dogged pursuit of change set the stage for this administration’s continued success in this key practice area.

Jurisdictions need to be relentless in defending the value of family against external and even internal pressures to institutionalize kids. Start with bringing services to children — through kinship placements or therapeutic foster care — instead of taking kids out of their community to have therapeutic needs met.

As a 29-year-veteran of child protective services and the commissioner of the Connecticut State Department of Children and Families, I oversee the wellbeing of 3,733 children in care. I’ve seen firsthand what overreliance on institutional placements does to children — a severe disservice.

Too many children in foster care are sent to live in institutional placements rather than with relatives or foster families. Of the hundreds of thousands of youth in foster care across the country each year, more than 43,000, or 10 percent, are in group care or institutional placements.

The irony is that often, children are placed in congregate settings because they need mental health and rehabilitative care. A newly released report from Think of Us and the Annie E. Casey Foundation found that institutional placements are often “traumatic” and “punitive” — the opposite of rehabilitative.

With the right strategies, jurisdictions can bring about sustainable change in the child welfare system. Here are seven lessons we’ve learned along our journey:

1. Make it about the child.

Keep children and youth the center of all discussions. One small but effective strategy is bringing a picture of the child to case review meetings to remind everyone in the room why we are all here. Child-centered means specialized programming for youth who have experienced sexualized trauma, or very young children for whom group care is especially unable to meet their needs for connection and attachment.

2. Dispel the myths.

“This child won’t make it in a family.” This excuse for institutional placements is used far too often. If a child is being placed in congregate care, the failure is the system’s, not the child’s.

3. Know your data.

Every field office director should know its child welfare statistics, and jurisdictional leadership set an administrative firewall of accountability when numbers get above a preset threshold.

4. Support kinship placements.

There is an “equal and opposite” reciprocal relationship between decreased congregate care and increased kinship placements. This could mean building up your fatherhood practice or improving communication between foster parents and biological parents.

5. Collaborate with your service array of therapeutic providers.

When our child welfare system overrelied on group care, we asked our providers to tailor their services to kids in these settings. Now that we are focusing on family-based care, we ask our providers to shift with us. Use them not just to bring services solely to the child, but also the child’s family.

6. Have a plan for repurposing group care facilities.

We have begun repurposing residential spaces into warm, welcoming parent centers; instead of biological parents having a visit in a conference room in Child Protective Services offices, they can visit in a more home-like setting.

7. Improve specialty and equity competencies for foster families.

Foster families should be purposefully supported to meet the needs of children of all races, sexual orientations, and economic backgrounds. The child welfare system can lead a strengthbased framing to stop pathologizing families of color and honor their rich history of resilience in child rearing.

The goal for children who need therapeutic care should be to support them through timely permanency in foster care or kinship placements, not institutional settings.