Minnesota needs to re-evaluate approach to child welfare

Richard Wexler
National Coalition for Child Protection Reform

Thank you St. Cloud Times and reporter Nora Hertel for writing about the families that had to flee Minnesota to avoid having their children needlessly taken from them and consigned to the chaos of foster care.

But we’re never going to solve the problem as long as prominent voices in the field, such as Rob Edwards of the Minnesota chapter of the National Association of Social Workers, wrongly frame the issue as “balanc(ing) the needs of children and parents.”

The problem with Minnesota’s take-the-child-and-run approach to child welfare is not that it hurts parents, though of course it does; the problem is that it hurts children.

One need only listen to the audiotape of crying children at the detention center on the Mexican border to understand the enormous trauma inflicted on children when they are torn from everyone they know and love. 

Of course, when child protective services workers do it, the motivation is different – they truly want to protect children. But that doesn’t lessen the trauma. Children needlessly placed in foster care shed the same sorts of tears for the same sorts of reasons.

The typical cases that dominate the caseloads of child welfare workers are nothing like the horror stories. Far more common are cases in which family poverty is confused with “neglect.” The problem is compounded by the sort of racial bias cited by the Minneapolis NAACP. 

Other cases fall between the extremes. So it’s no wonder two massive studies involving more than 15,000 typical cases found that children left in their own homes typically fared better, even than comparably-maltreated children placed in foster care. A University of Minnesota study, using different methodology, reached the same conclusion.

That harm occurs even when the foster home is a good one. The majority are. But multiple studies have found abuse in one-quarter to one-third of foster homes. The rate of abuse in group homes and institutions is even worse.

But even that isn’t the worst of it. The more that workers are overwhelmed with false allegations, trivial cases and children who don’t need to be in foster care, the less time they have to find children in real danger. 

The take-the-child-and-run approach to child welfare makes all children less safe. Minnesota embraces that failed approach with fervor, unmatched almost anywhere else in America.

In 2016, the most recent year for which comparative data are available, Minnesota took away children at the sixth-highest rate in the country, even when rates of child poverty are factored in. Minnesota took away children at more than triple the rate of states that are, relatively speaking, models for keeping children safe. 

No, this is not because of opioids or any other drug plague. Minnesota has been an outlier since at least 1999 and probably far longer. And when the problem really is drug abuse, drug treatment for the parent almost always is a better option than foster care for the child. That’s a lesson we should have learned when researchers studied two groups of infants born during the last “drug plague,” crack cocaine. They found that infants born with cocaine in their systems typically developed better when left with birth mothers able to care for them than they did when placed in foster care. 

Minnesota needs to follow the lead of states that have made children safer by embracing safe, proven alternatives to foster care. Step one: understand that keeping children safely in their own homes is the best way to meet the needs of children.

This is the opinion of Richard Wexler, executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform.