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Cash Incentives for Adoptions Seen as Risk to Some Children
Wed Oct 29, 8:56 AM ET
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By LESLIE KAUFMAN The New York Times
In December 1995, Raymond and Vanessa Jackson, who had already adopted a young girl, formally adopted another child Bruce, a foster child then age 11. Over the next 12 months, the parents adopted two more boys from the state, and in 1997 they scooped up a fourth. Yet another girl was made legally theirs in 2000.
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And then, even as prosecutors say the four adopted boys in the family's New Jersey home were being starved on a diet of peanut butter and plaster wallboard, the Jacksons were being evaluated by state officials for the adoption of a seventh child, a 10-year-old girl.
The criminal inquiry into whether the Jacksons willfully harmed their four adopted boys will play out over the coming weeks, even months. But their case, even in its broad outlines, opens a window on a swiftly changing and some say increasingly risky corner of the adoption world.
States across the country, often in response to cash incentives offered by the federal government, have been under intense pressure in recent years to move children through their foster care systems and into permanent homes. Indeed, the number of annual adoptions nationally almost doubled from 1995 to 2001, and New Jersey adoptions more than doubled in an even shorter time, to 1,364 in 2002 from 621 in 1998.
But the effort to increase adoptions of the largely poor and minority children in the states' care has not been met with any surge of ideal families waiting to take them in. Instead, the already thin ranks of foster parents are being pushed to take up the slack, with states using federal money to subsidize the costs of formally adopting the children. The payments to parents willing to adopt can amount to hundreds of dollars a month per child. The Jacksons, with six adopted children and one foster child, received more than $30,000 in government payments last year.
The adoption of needy children is in many cases a good thing, and often the foster families they wind up with as adopted children are those they have lived with for years. But some state officials and child welfare experts say they worry that the current push is, in essence, transforming adoption into an extended form of foster care and a possible peril to children.
Once children are formally adopted, for instance, the state is no longer entitled to closely monitor their well-being. And having extended money to the foster parents willing to formally adopt a greater amount is paid to the families who adopt medically fragile or psychologically troubled children the risk exists that families take on more than they can handle, sometimes just for the additional money.
"Have we gone too far too fast?" asks Gary Stangler, executive director of Jim Casey Youth Opportunities Initiative, a private foundation in St. Louis focusing on getting children out of foster care. "I worry that with all the applause going to the increasing numbers of adoptions, that we are possibly putting these young people into families not equipped or prepared to handle them."
Experts are quick to caution that the case of the Jacksons of New Jersey may prove to be distinctly aberrant, and data concerning abuse or other problems experienced by children who have been adopted in recent years is still developing.
But it is clear that children in the state's care are now being adopted at a faster pace, an outcome many advocates for children have desired for years. The time it takes for a foster child to be adopted shrank by five months nationwide from 1998 to 2001.
But increasing the rate of adoptions may also reduce the time the state has to scrutinize the families and find the most suitable home, experts warn. Richard Wexler, the director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, says he was concerned that the new law "would create a huge incentive for quick and dirty slipshod placements."
Of course, even long-term reviews can miss serious problems. The Jacksons, for example, completed their many adoptions over a decade, and investigators are still checking to see how they could have missed signs that the boys were being starved.
Another concern is that because the federal government does not limit the number of children either foster families or adopting families can have, states will start cramming them wherever they can.
Multiple child adoptions are a challenge under the best of circumstances, but many states are also allowing families to adopt many children with specialized needs with sometimes disastrous consequences.
Edith and Brian Beebe of Houston, for example, were allowed to adopt six severely handicapped children. Despite many complaints of abuse and rat-infested conditions in their home, the state acted to remove the children only after the couple beat one to death in 2000. In an internal review the state agency found it had not violated any of its own procedures in approving the adoptions.
Since 1980, the federal government, which had long been subsidizing foster homes, began to also provide financial support to families even after they had adopted children. The aim was to eliminate any financial disincentive to formally adopting a child.
But extending financial support to adoptive parents was not enough, and so there were very good reasons for the late 1990's changes in adoption practices that are causing many of the concerns today. Foster care populations in the cities were bloated, in part as a result of the crack epidemic of the 1980's. Children were spending years in care, some bouncing from placement to placement and others waiting in willing homes that could not get the paperwork completed and cleared for an adoption.
As part of the broad social policy efforts conducted by former President Bill Clinton (news - web sites), the government stepped in to encourage change. Congress adopted legislation in 1997 offering states up to $6,000 for every adoption out of the foster care system they could accomplish in excess of the number they completed the year before.
"Thousands of children across the nation and in New York were spending years in foster care," said William C. Bell, commissioner of New York City's Administration for Children's Services. Numerous studies showed such stays in foster care crushed self-esteem and created children who had trouble forming bonds with adults and peers.
"The impulse behind the law was to do something better for children and to demand a better result from the system," said Mr. Bell.
But whatever the motivation, state child welfare officials handling adoptions are increasingly finding themselves face to face with a thorny reality: lots of new children ready for adoption and the same old, very limited pool of foster parents willing to take them in.
Doubtless many of those foster parents are qualified and caring. But as a group they certainly have their flaws, particularly in New Jersey, which has what its own officials admit is a scandalous history of poor screening and licensing of such foster homes.
Case records of children in foster care in 2001, released as a result of a lawsuit against the state's foster care system, found that in some parts of New Jersey as many as one in five children in foster care had been abused.
More chilling, the case files also showed that, among foster homes identified as good prospective adoptive homes, 7 percent had confirmed findings of abuse or neglect in New Jersey in 2001 12 times the rates the federal government has set as acceptable.
Regulators in Washington, many of whom say the 1997 federal changes were largely good, are nevertheless beginning to press for ways to detect potentially troubled adoptive homes.
"There ought to be some method for a state agency to determine how these kids are doing post-adoption," said Wade F. Horn, assistant secretary for children and families at the Health and Human Services (news - web sites) Department in Washington.
"Most kids in foster care are there because they have had something terrible happen in their background. That would suggest a lot of these kids are going to have issues, and we shouldn't be surprised that when these kids are adopted problems emerge."
