Every year in the United States, roughly 250,000 children enter foster care. For these children, family separation is acutely traumatic and results in worse outcomes. They’re at higher risk of developing toxic stress, which increases the risk of disease and cognitive impairment well into adulthood. Compared with similarly situated children who are allowed to remain in less-than-ideal homes, children removed from their homes have threefold delinquency rates, twice the likelihood of learning disabilities and developmental delays, and lower earnings as adults.
For parents, the loss of custody of their child is often the painful culmination of bad circumstances and poor decisions. It is horrific cases in the media that shape perspectives on the foster system, but the vast majority of children who enter foster care do so for reasons other than physical or sexual abuse. Most child separations happen due to neglect, which is tightly connected to parental lack of income. In many cases, children are taken from loving parents because the parents are very poor.
Child separation is also challenging for the government. It is a drastic use of State power, and must be carefully justified and restricted. In addition, the foster care system is costly and faces rampant problems with child abuse and poor living conditions.
In some cases family separation is undoubtedly necessary. However, considering its detriments, the child welfare system’s focus should be on reunifying families. This opinion is far from controversial. Reunification is the most common goal for children in foster care, widely emphasized by state laws and child welfare systems.
Yet, in most states, there is a little-known practice that directly impedes reunification. Parents are charged when their children are placed in foster care. Monthly bills and high interest rates push extremely low-income families into further financial instability. This significantly delays reunification — or makes it impossible. Jill Berrick, Distinguished Professor of Social Welfare at UC Berkeley, is a key advocate for ending the practice of parent payments for foster care. I interviewed her about the fight to end this harmful practice, major victories, and challenges that she has faced.
This practice has an enormous impact on those affected, but few others are aware of it. Even Berrick, whose research focuses on the child welfare system, was unaware of this policy until it came up by chance while she was interviewing a parent. It was 2008, and Berrick was speaking with a mother who had recently reunited with her two boys and was making great efforts to provide a safe home for them.
“While I was interviewing her one day,” recounts Professor Berrick, “the letter carrier came and dropped off her mail. She picked up her mail in front of me and was going through her various bills, and when she came across one bill — it was from the state of California and it was a collection bill — and she just started to weep. She just showed me the bill, and it was for something near to $20,000.”
Berrick was bewildered. When asked why she was being billed by the state, the mother replied, “I have to pay for my kids’ time when they were in foster care.” The experience was eye-opening for Berrick. California’s extraordinary interest rate at 10% meant that “that these bills would haunt parents essentially for the rest of their lives because there was no way that this woman, who was very, very low income, was ever going to dig herself out of a $20,000 hole.” Almost all of the parents targeted by this policy are like this woman: very, very low income. A child support agency director in Minnesota found in her research that a stunning 80% of the families paying off foster care debts have incomes of less than $10,000 annually.
Occupied with other research, Professor Berrick filed away the concern as a topic of future study. Years later, she raised the issue to a graduate child welfare policy class. She vividly remembers when one student raised her hand and posed the question: “What are you doing about it, Jill?”
The question struck Berrick. Years later, she learned that the student who challenged her to act had become a practicing social worker and was tragically killed by a client. The heartbreaking loss prompted Professor Berrick to reflect — “This student asked me what I was doing to solve a problem for vulnerable people, and this student just gave her life because she was trying to serve vulnerable people. It’s time to do something about it.”
Berrick began researching the practice of charging parents for their children’s foster care. What she found was overwhelming. “The research evidence showed that this policy had really negative effects on family reunification. That [this policy] lengthened kids’ stays in foster care … by about six-and-a-half months. I learned that in one in five cases kids never went home. … I learned that the effects were four times worse for Black families. I learned that it was cost ineffective at a ratio of about 3 to 1.”
She also discovered tremendous inequity in the implementation of the policy. The fee amounts weren’t based on income and varied tremendously by worker, county, and state. A few states collect little to nothing while many collect millions of dollars every year from low-income parents.
In 2021, Professor Berrick published her research. Her main focus, however, was to raise awareness about the issue. “An article in an academic journal is never going to be read by anybody,” she told me. She started networking, trying to learn as much as possible from as many different people as possible. She reached out to a media contact at NPR, which led to an interview and a story on “All Things Considered”.
A national radio piece raised the profile of the issue, but the ultimate goal was to change public policy and end foster-care child support enforcement. In our interview, Professor Berrick described how she has gone about policy advocacy, providing a model for making change and useful insights into America’s political system.
“I decided to write a law that would fix it in California,” she told me matter-of-factly. Berrick networked more, calling child support directors, welfare officials, and every stakeholder she could, asking, “What would the law need to look like for it to work for you?”
She crafted a bill and reached out to the legislator for her district, who pointed her to Assembly Member Isaac Bryant, who is committed to reforming the foster care system. Over the spring of 2022, Bryant and Berrick worked together to build a coalition that sent letters and wrote op-eds, striving to elevate their visibility. By September, Assembly Bill 1686, which orders the California Department of Social Services to “presume that the payment of support by the parent is likely to pose a barrier to the proposed reunification,” was signed into law by Governor Newsom.
That summer, as the bill sailed through California Senate committees, Berrick also worked on a federal bill. Foster care child support collection varies across states, but it has its basis in a 1984 amendment to the Social Security Act. The amendment includes provisions for states to bill parents for children in care and gives states flexibility to define when collection is appropriate.
I asked Professor Berrick why this amendment was passed. I knew legislators at the time would not have known the policy would be so cost-ineffective, but I was still curious to understand the policy’s justification.
Professor Berrick took me back to the ‘moral majority’ agenda of the Reagan administration in the 1980s. At the time, there was a strong concern about the problem of ‘dead-beat dads’. “There was a worry that there were these very rapidly rising rates of single parenthood, where the concern was that dads were walking away and walking away from their responsibility to their kids, and that decline in reshaping the family was reshaping our society and our social fabric, and we needed to weave that fabric back together then,” said Professor Berrick.
The emphasis on personal responsibility for one’s children was one part of the explanation Professor Berrick gave me. The other was simply the massive size of the bill. “I think it’s only two sentences in this whole … enormous amendment to the Social Security Act,” said Berrick, “Do I think that most legislators even knew it was there? No.”
Berrick’s federal bill, which would have ended foster-care child support enforcement in all 50 states, was killed by Republicans in the Ways and Means committee. Fortunately, the Biden administration picked up the issue. In July 2022, the Administration for Children and Families released federal guidance that “encourages child welfare agencies to implement across-the-board policies” requiring foster care maintenance payments “only in very rare circumstances.”
The federal guidance was a major victory. In California, Professor Berrick sprang into action. She reached out to the California Department of Social Services and helped write new regulations that implemented the federal guidance and the state law. These regulations stipulate that fees can only be charged if the parent’s income is greater than 400% of the poverty line, effectively ending foster care fees in California.
Still, the battle in California was not over. “We’ve taken care of the practice moving forward,” said Professor Berrick, “but now we have 64,000 families in California — parents who owe 400 million dollars in child support collections for their kids’ foster care stay. We have to erase that debt.”
Due to advocacy from the huge coalition Berrick had helped assemble, the California Department of Child Support Services enacted regulations to forgive the debt. These regulations instructed counties to forgive all debt due to foster care arrears if the parents had an income of less than 400% of the poverty line under the reasoning that the debt should not have been there in the first place. By fall of 2023, California was done. The highest-collecting state no longer charged parents for children in foster care and had forgiven all debts.
With California checked off of the list, Professor Berrick turned her eyes to the 40 or so states still charging fees. Right now, the next focus is New York, a large state that charges parents aggressively. Berrick is using her same strategy: networking widely, soliciting letters of support from organizations, talking to state officials, writing op-eds, and getting news coverage.
Despite the federal guidance, ending foster care child support enforcement looks to be an intensive, state-by-state process. This is because federal guidance, no matter how well justified, is nothing more than a firm recommendation of how to interpret a law. Charging exorbitant fees and interest for parents because their children are in foster care is still legal. The practice is ingrained; in many states, data systems automatically refer parents to the child support agency when a child enters foster care. State legislatures need to be willing to pass bills that change this practice. They aren’t always willing to do that.
I asked Professor Berrick why House Republicans killed the proposed federal bill. Republicans were “concerned that it gave the wrong signal to parents,” she explained. “Parents are responsible for their kids in the United States … from birth to age 18. [Republicans] were concerned that if we didn’t make the parents whose kids were in foster care responsible, then we were sending a wrong signal.”
It shouldn’t be a partisan issue, Berrick insisted during our interview — it’s social welfare, not politics. She mentions Democrats and Republicans, she said, only to put the issue “in terms of your political review.”
“Democrats seem to be persuaded by concerns about family stability and reunification. They’re concerned about the equity concerns that black families are so profoundly affected so much more negatively than other families,” said Professor Berrick. However, Republicans are persuaded by messages focusing on “tax-payer cost benefit analysis. That what we’re doing is bad government. It’s expensive. We were spending more than we’re taking in. It’s a waste of taxpayer money.” She pointed to Montana, which passed a bill ending the practice in March 2023, to show that Republicans could be willing to support the issue.
Interested in how the bill made it through a Republican trifecta, Berrick reached out to the Montana assemblymember who sponsored it. Paraphrasing him, Berrick tells me he started off their conversation saying, “I’m the most conservative Republican you’ve ever met.”
A person he knew in child welfare informed him of the issue, and it struck him as unfair. Professor Berrick recalls him saying: “We separate kids from their parents because their home is unsafe … I want those parents to have to show me in every way possible that they’re doing everything they can to keep their kids safe … I don’t want them distracted by paying me, paying the government. Money doesn’t show me that you’re being a safe parent. It’s just paying me money.”
Professor Berrick agreed wholeheartedly. “When he said that I thought: this is such a bipartisan issue. We have to get beyond parental responsibility. The way for parents to show their responsibility to their kids is by showing everybody in the community that they’re safely caring for their kids. That’s what we want them to do.” If we “change the partisan narratives of this,” she said, “I think it can be a bipartisan win for everybody.”
Berrick may be hopeful, but there is truth to what she says; charging parents for their children’s stays in foster care is not perfectly split on partisan lines. Montana and North Dakota, ruby-red states, both recently fixed the issue. Florida, Indiana, Arizona, and Nevada had restricted support collections for foster care cases before the 2022 federal guidance. Meanwhile, California was the highest collector up until reform, collecting 31 times the amount as similarly populated Texas. Currently, New York State, Illinois, Oregon, Michigan, and New Jersey are among the highest collectors.
I wanted to connect Professor Berrick’s experience advocating for policy change with the widespread feeling that it is very difficult for people to cause political change in the modern United States. I asked her what changes would make our government more responsive and make it easier for people to get policies implemented.
“It would be so much easier if we weren’t in this polarized environment,” Berrick answered. She provided a shocking example: the same assemblymember who sponsored the Montana bill admitted to her, “This could have been an issue that one of my blue colleagues could have brought forward. And I would have killed it. I would have killed the bill just because it was introduced by somebody from the other side.”
Political polarization has “absolutely” been getting worse, said Professor Berrick, and its harm is especially apparent with less partisan issues such as this one. The public attitude towards the child welfare system is nuanced, balancing concerns like family privacy and child safety. “You move into the world of legislators and you have politicians who are trying to work on a scorecard and all of that balance goes out the window,” bemoaned Berrick. She remembers when there was “collegial, friendly bipartisanship around these complicated issues that more likely mirrored public understandings of complex public issues.”
Now, issues get reduced to a binary and politicians are unwilling to work across the aisle. The result is a less effective government. In the words of Professor Berrick, “You shouldn’t have to create a super-majority state to get things done.”
On that note, we ended our interview. I was left with a story of arduous, expansive, grassroots work that has culminated in the end of a crippling financial burden for families across the country. Years of research, op-eds, coalition-building, bill-writing, successes, and failures translated to more children in the homes of loving parents.
There’s another story here — one of unyielding partisanship that has made legislatures stagnant and every issue black-and-white. Causing change has become a steep uphill battle — even for a little-known topic that means the world for hundreds of thousands of children and their parents.
Featured Image Source: Carrie Steele-Pitts Home
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