Partnering with a thousand Community Centers wifi from lowincome families to get the tools that they need to be ready for anything. Comcast along with these Television Company support cspan as a Public Service. Hello and good afternoon, welcome to the American Enterprise institute this afternoon for our book event i am ryan streeter im happy to welcome you today and the director of domestic policies at aei and pleased to do this introduction for this book event Naomi Schaefer no way to treat a child, having the pleasure of being naomis colleague ive been able to benefit from the book being written over time and naomi along the way. If you ever spent time in State Government like i have, you realize how absolutely critical these issues are an intersection between government dysfunction, family dysfunction and trouble in our communities comes in full force and the Child Protective Services. , if you dont know naomi onto naomi shes a senior fellow where she specializes in Child Protective ServicesFoster Care Services in the role of nongovernment actors like faithbased Organization Role she is the author of six books you may have seen theme and read some of them they include not banning sea salt and start banning snapchat and so faith do us part how interfaith marriages transforming, naomi is a former columnist and a frequent to the papers that you read. We are joined today by emily who is a journalist and a contributor at the atlantic she was previously a longtimebu contributor and is dear prudence at the columnist for a decade you see her were Committee Publications that the New York Times, hofer magazine, esquire, Los Angeles Times andha more, ws were going to do today as a discussion about the book im going tong welcome naomi and emh to the stage and emily will lead the discussion with naomi and we will leave time for questions on the backend. Please join me in welcoming Naomi Schaefer and emily. Thank you so much. Thank you naomi and thank you for this terrific book on report and subject. How did you come to write this book, it is been two years investigating the people who are some of the most neglected and hidden in our society, abused children children who end up in the child protective system foster care were to go over a lot of specifics, what are the headlines from your research. I came into this research a . Couple of different ways, probably the most immediate i wrote abouts American Indians those who are not familiar have the worst child outcomes in the country. Very high rates of child abuse and neglect in a very dysfunctional foster care system. Writing about that big into wonder what the rest of the children in the system work treated like. I spent some time as a columnist in the New York Post where you see headlines about child totalitys and families known to be a administration for Childrens Services, these were not happy behind closed doors they were people who were regularly reported by the neighbors, by teachers, by doctors children showing signs of abuse in severe neglect. I wonder what was it why werent these children being rescued and what can we do to ensure that this did not keep happening, i remember asking that question in the context of conservative about 20 years ago i remember asking people what is the broken policy for Child Welfare, i did not get a lot of satisfactory answers. Typically the answer i got had to do the breakdown of the macon family which is a totally true and totally insufficient answer in my opinion, there are 440,000 kids in foster care right now saying that is the breakdown of the family and thats what you get, that did not help us move along with this problem, those are the things that are pushing me into this research, we know we are not going to abolish the police no matter what happens, there is a movement and the Child Welfare community to abolish family policing, that is the new description that is being put on this whole system with the idea that removing any child from a family is abusive ilin the wrong way to go. Is this getting traction, is this something that policymakers in the public need to be aware of is is being played out in the real world . If you asked me a couple of years ago i wouldve said there are a few people out there that think abolishing foster care is the way to go in the way to solve the problems of the families, i have to say in the last two years this movement has grown up alongside the fund or abolish the Police Movement unlike the abolish and defend the Police Movement where i think youve seen quite a backlash from communities that have said this is going to be a problem for s my family and my household and my kids who are not be protected from crime. You have not seen a parallel backlash against the abolish family policing in foster care movement. A lot of what goes on is not easily seen by most people. I think there is a long list of things that people in that Movement Want to see they have a manifesto of the up and movement they want to abolish mandated reporting by teachers and doctors, they want to abolish drug testing of newborns for pregnant mothers, they want to abolish foster care, they want to stop people from having police intervene in Domestic Violence cases because many times that is whereth we first learn of a child being where a boyfriend is beating his girlfriend and their Young Children in the home there is a long list of policy proposals that are a part of this andma theyre making their way from academia into the world. Throughout the book you blowup the myth that abused and neglected children exist primarily because the poverty, that is the cause. The New York Times sunday magazine has passed i dont know if you saw it had a cover story about a young girl growing up in new york with a large family of siblings who are mostly homeless through her childhood and what happens when trying to escape poverty means separating from a family of 13. You say poverty is not the central problem. What are the actual problems and how does the poverty stop us from addressing the real problems is. What is driving the Child Welfare crisis is the drug crisis. Last year we saw 93000 people in america die of drug overdoses this is an enormous problem we have not gotten herrm head arou. When you think about all of those adults affected by drugs think about all of the children those lives adults touch. When you look at the numbers triply you see typically drug abuse or alcohol abuse or Mental Illness which is often cooccurring with Substance Abuse account for 40 or 45 of the cases that are in the Child Welfare system if you talk to experts about what is going on they would estimate its closer to 80 . I would have a hard time thinking about foster family that i interviewed whom themselves could think of a case that did not involve Substance Abuse on some level. I think people dont understand because lets legalize drugs drugs are totally harmless. I dont think people stop to think how Substance Abuse affects parenting and childbearing and it particularly affects children who are too young to care for themselves in any way children from to three are obviously in particular danger because they cannot go to another adult for help when there. Is suffering from Substance Abuse or Mental Illness gets to see them or the electricity turned on workload them or properly supervise them. There is a stage i referred to in the book, with one of my favorite stages of parenting was the mobile but totally irrational stage where your child is basically about to run out the front door or swallow legos or touch a hot stove or jump into the bathtub. As a totally sober. Its extremely difficult to monitor that behavior, once you added Substance Abuse, alcohol abuse, Mental Illness it becomes almost impossible and those children are truly in danger. A major theme of your book how backwards the entire system is. Instead of placing the welfare of the child front and center you say we are paying way more attention to things like racial ideology not putting children in homes where their race is different from the Foster Parents. You say abusive or addictive parents are seen as victims who must be protected. You describe because reunification or keeping children with their biological families is the ultimate goal. Decisions are deferred, an entire childhood could be further away and no one has paid attention to the effects on the psychological emotional growth of the children. As you say in the book we dont say to abuse women youve got to work it out with this guy, were get into everything that we can to help you work it out but that is essentially what we are saying on behalf of the children, how do we change this. I think its very hard to change it, the thing about adults theyre very good at expressing their feelings and much better expressing them then children which makes us feel sorry for adults and frankly we should have sympathy and b empay for adults in the system, they often have been through the ringer and have experienced poverty and many have experienced the foster care system and we should not be turning our backs on these adults or in any way stopping them from getting every possible service and measure that is available to help them deal with whatever problems are leading to them mistreating the children. I am not suggesting that we even not see them as victims. In many cases they are victims of something. The question is, this is the hardest question we have to ask ourselves in Child Welfare. How long does a child have to wait. Especially if that parent when you have a young child a child 23 where we know so much about the importance of the Brain Development and the need for secure attachment in order to have proper social, emotional, intellectual development the idea that we would wait years for a parent to clean up their act never knowing if that will work out in order to finally decide that maybe the child does not belong without parent were furthering away their childhood. And we are essentially dooming that child once that child has been treated this way and shuffled from one foster home to another and back and forth from biological to foster homeos is failed to form the secure attachment they get to 11 or 12 for the aged out of foster care and then we say what are we going to do about the aging out problem, this is a hard problem to address, what were we thinking when this child was between the ages of and five. I think in order to change a system one thing that we need to think seriously about is the timeline. We have actual federal guidelines for what a timeline is, an appropriate timeline for child in foster care the adoption based families act which passed the midnineties with bipartisan support says if a child has been in foster care for 15 out of the last 22 months, estate is supposed to start proceedings for the termination of parental rights and that law is ignored left and right. The average amount of time that a child is in foster care according to 2019 statistics was 20 months in new york it is 30 months. Talk about not paying attention to the timeline, how do you get to an average of 30 months it is an incredible ignorance or willful desire to ignore the wall that you see in family court. To get to the second part which i think is really important to think about is a racial element that is going on. One of the biggest accusations that you hear about foster care and the Child Welfare system that isra structurally racist. In order to fix this problem. In order to fix the fact that we are disproportionately, according to folks targeting black families and separating black children from their black parents we should be limiting the amount, we should be catching on checking arched spreadsheets to make sure it comes out even in the end. These accusations take no account of the fact that black children are mistreated frankly at a much higher rate than white children in this country they are three times as likely to die from maltreatment as white children in this country that is a harsh statistic. Its really hard to fund it. Ic you can say youre being racist by accusing these black parents of mistreating you, these are children who are dying, i had this really interestingin conversation with somebody who can. If we had a lead Abatement Program, he said i imagine we have a lead Abatement Program in st. Louis and we said if you have led in your home, come tell us and we will offer you the Public Service where we will fix the problem. And you had all of these families come to you and you looked at your clipboard and says does anybody have a clip board anymore, there are to be black families on this list people would say thats crazy because obviously have black families living in neighborhoods disproportionately evading homes that havent had blood abatements of course you want to deal with all of those black families you would not turn some away but thats what were doing with Child Protective Services, we have too many black families on this list that were investigating into median foster care and we need to make our numbers, a little bit more even so lets fiddle with this a little bit have a little bit less surveillance of black families and make sure we take away fewer children who are black into foster care, not understanding this is the service we are providing to protect children. You talk about this law that passed in the 90s to be up termination of parental rights. Arent you describing the pendulum back and forth that was an era where it wasnt the emerging consensus with to act more swiftly and remove children early, even though the law is still on the books is there any system in which that is the goal to sever the parental rights and get the children adopted. I think that is the problem, a lot of Child Welfare policy is determined by the culture of the agency and the culture of courts. I think this is a problem. If we have legislation on the books we either need to have a debate whether the legislation should be there in repealed or we need to follow it. Instead you have everybody deciding for themselves how they feel about it maybe we should give the parents another chance, maybe they didnt fully take, the child has only been returned three or four times and maybe the parent seems, this is a federal law, i dont think we treat most of the balls this way. When we do it suggest that we dont have a lot of respect for the law. Also suggest the judges get to make up things as they go alongt and frankly that is a complaint that people on all sides of the foster care system have. Foster parents, biological parents, lawyers have this sense when they walk into family court its not real court that we dont have real laws and there is a retaliation that goes along with caseworkers that judges are deciding or based on their gut feeling then what the law says. I prefer if we want to have a debate about the appropriate timeline we should have that debate but making of the law as you go along is not a good idea. You see the dramatic cases on either end and not really representative of whats going on. You mentioned the dead child, the child has t been in the system, everyone should have seen what was coming and did not. On the other hand the other case that gets headlined the middle class child who is a nine or 10yearold walking home from the park and someone calls the police and the middle class. How Child Protective Services come in and take the kid away. Can you talk about or give some examples about what were talking about what are the lives like of the kids that ended up in the system who are typical. A typical case there is a couple that i interviewed, they got married when gay marriage was first legalized, they wanted to adopt and then they decided they would adopt out of foster care system. They did their training and they got this call one evening we have a one and a 2yearold who needs a foster home. It was probably like half an houret, maybe a couple of hours they got the call when the caseworker showed up, they ran to walmart and they both called their mothers and asked what they should buy in they get home in the caseworker is there, the kids have cigarette burns on them there is evidence of sexual abuse, the mother was probably not the person responsible, it was probably the men who were in their home and the guy who was in her home at the time was not the father of either of the two children. By the way this is not atypical, the people who are disproportionately dangerous to small children unfortunately ini these cases are nonrelative mail, that is a typical situation that you find in foster care. They took these boys into their home, what are the boys ended up in reunified with his father and the father really met well he felt like he was unable to fully care for the child, he was a truck driver and he was so happy about the way the couple had taken care of his son that he coparent with them now. He is the boy most of the time but they regularly have the boy visit them and hes become part of the family. The other child is probably more typical in the sense that he spent years going in and out of foster care, hes been reunified with his mother and his mother had serious addiction problems, she would not show up for visits on months on end she would tell the judge she was getting c