What Is Justice for Children and Youth in Foster Care?
by Jennifer Rodriguez, YLC Executive Director
Even though I have been involved with child welfare for just about my entire life, as a child living in foster care, as a youth advocate, as a lawyer and the director of Youth Law Center– there is one experience that helped me truly understand what justice is for children and youth in foster care. Because honestly, my idea has evolved over time.
When I was a child living in facilities where I was not anything more than a resident with a level, and when restraints, arrests, 5150s, psych meds and quiet rooms made up the irregular rhythm of my daily life, justice to me meant fighting and trying to be free. Fighting adults who tried to violate my body, who tried to break my spirit, who couldn’t see my pain and loneliness, who labeled me as broken and damaged and unsuitable for a family. Justice meant getting freedom from places where I had to grow up knowing I mattered to no one and wishing I did not exist.
When I was a youth advocate, justice meant ensuring youth were at the table and being heard. Changing the statutes and regulations and practices to incorporate the often ridiculously sensible and basic rights youth identified as important: participation in decisions made about their life, establish a bill of rights for foster youth where the first mandate was that youth should be treated with RESPECT, that youth should be able to go to school and have places to live and basic resources once they left care.
When I became a lawyer, I was taught that justice for children was procedural. Ensuring fair notice, a chance to be heard, legal guarantees and safeguards against abuse, deprivation of liberty, discrimination, violation of confidentiality. According to my legal training, justice sat in the hands of courts and lawyers and guardian ad litems who monitored, litigated and enforced on behalf of forgotten children.
I will tell you the moment when I think I understood what justice for children REALLY means. When I had my first child almost 12 years ago. When I held that baby in my arms for the first time I finally understood what I never had. When you have grown up with the absence of being loved and adored and feeling you belong to someone, you can’t even imagine that exists. What I wanted for my child is what I could NEVER get from breaking free from a facility, requiring that people be respectful and consider the wishes of youth, an administrative action, a new statute or a settlement agreement with the state. These are all basic, but they are NOT justice.
Justice for children is in the minute to minute love and nurturing given to children. It is the fierce protectiveness of someone who believes you are worthy and also believes it is their job to ensure the world sees that too. Justice is the proud and hopeful eyes of someone who is dreaming a future for you, who never needs to be reminded that you are more than the sum of every behavior and mistake you’ve ever made. Justice for children is the daily love and careful attentiveness of someone who can see you as you deserve to be seen and love you as you deserve to be love. Justice for children is in loving parenting.
This type of parenting is revolutionary to children, especially those who have suffered trauma. Scientific research has definitively established what young people have been saying all along– the most important way we can assure children and youth an excellent life is to ensure they get excellent parenting.
Two important points: When I say it is revolutionary, I mean that in the most literal sense of the word. Study after study has shown that nurturing parenting literally transforms children’s biological and regulatory systems, normalizes cortisol in their bodies, increases their IQs, and changes the synapses in their brains. And not just for babies, for teens as well. Youth development research says the most important resiliency factor is a loving, caring adult. And not just for children who have experienced a little trauma– it’s just as significant an impact for children who have experienced severe trauma.
Yes, Parenting. The magic we all have been looking for in our systems and interventions to heal our youth and help them thrive has been right under our noses… in the birth families, foster families, kin families and adoptive families who quietly are transforming our children with their love, high expectations, patience, humor and hugs while the rest of us in the system try busily to work on “reform”.
Point two: We are all responsible for whether children get excellent parenting. Parenting is a verb, not a noun. Like all verbs, it is a skill that can be acquired. No one is born an excellent parent– people are taught, supported, and encouraged to offer excellent parenting to children. Our policies and practices either support excellent parenting at every moment we work with a child and family or they get in the way. They either prioritize it as the most important intervention for children or they pretend it doesn’t matter and a bed is adequate. And what we know is right now, our systems often act as if parenting is the least important thing to focus on for our children. Although we go home at night and know that our goodnight kisses and nicknames and shoulders to cry on are the fuel that our own children’s spirits run on, we do not treat a lack of parenting for children involved with child welfare with urgency.
Folks, we know better, we know it intellectually from the research, we know it anecdotally from youth who share their experiences, and most importantly we know it in our hearts. We KNOW we can and MUST do better to acknowledge every moment matters for children and to re-orient child welfare around excellent parenting.
So, what would this transformation look like? It would take re-looking at every aspect of our child welfare policy and practice to ask ourselves what can we do to make sure that in this moment we are doing everything possible to make sure this child gets the loving parenting they need.
It would mean we would be generous and expansive with family centered preventive services that build the strengths of families so they could provide loving parenting to their children. That we’d invest in working with families to identify what is helpful, and ensure every family received the things we already know work like home visiting, parent child interaction therapy, wraparound services without bureaucracy or delay. Whenever possible, we’d avoid subjecting children to the life-changing trauma of removal from their families and placement into foster care when there was a chance we could provide vital services that can strengthen their families’ parenting and provide a safety net when possible.
It would mean that for every baby who comes into contact with child welfare, whether in home or out of home placement, we’d ensure that they automatically received infant mental services, focused on supporting nurturing and effective parenting. We’d eliminate the ridiculous requirement that babies need a diagnosis, and simply make contact with child welfare enough. We’d acknowledge that these services are one of the most powerful tools we can offer to birth, foster, relative and adoptive families to support children’s healthy development. And, we’d acknowledge that the consequence of not supporting nurturing parenting as early as possible is we make it more likely that youth will show us the consequences as teens. Ironically, at this point we often promptly blame it on them! Or even worse, when these children grow up and become parents, as most of us do, and struggle to parent their children with no roadmap and in some of the same ways child welfare poorly modeled parenting to them, then we definitely blame them, and do the most devastating thing you can do to a child who has been waiting their entire life for a family…we destroy that dream and remove their children.
It would mean that for teenagers, we would see every minute that they are not parented, but supervised or monitored by rotating shift staff in congregate care, or simply occupying beds in the homes of families who are uncommitted or unsupported as an absolute urgent crisis requiring all hands on deck. As much as of an emergency as being without a home or in a war zone. There is not a minute that children can afford to not be parented.
The good news is…I know the work can be done. Youth Law Center’s Quality Parenting Initiative (QPI) has been partnering with committed and visionary child welfare agency leaders, families, youth, and staff in 9 states in 56 jurisdictions over the last 9 years to do exactly this. To begin the slow and difficult but incredibly important work of changing culture, policy and practice to re-orient child welfare around parenting as the most important intervention.
In QPI, we work to ensure that if children are removed, they will receive the excellent parenting to help them thrive. QPI sites across the country do the hard work of working with families, staff, courts and leaders to review their systems to identify policy and practice changes that can improve parenting.
Parenting is justice for our children and it is within our power and our responsibility to transform our systems so they receive it now.
