The child welfare system identifies its primary goal as family reunification: the process of returning or uniting children in the foster care system with biological family members.
Although statistics illustrate that family reunification is successful 53 percent of the time, we believe that family reunification should not always be the primary goal. The Department of Children & Family Services prioritizes foster care youth placement with direct family members with little regard to the caregiver’s qualifications to attend to the child’s needs.
Children are often removed from the care of their biological family members multiple times, enabling environmental instability. As a result of this environmental instability, children in the child welfare system are often exposed to an excessive degree of physical and emotional high risk and long-term trauma. This concern is based on the premise that many of these children who have been removed from the care of biological family members have often been exposed to adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs.
Abuse, neglect and household dysfunction are the three main categories of ACE and can likely result in severe cognitive and developmental delays. In order to best accommodate for these circumstances, caregivers should be subjected to standardized, routine evaluations in efforts to determine the quality of care they can provide for the children, despite the status of a biological or non-biological relationship.
In addition, DCFS should require thorough evaluations of children to determine the level of influence of the potentially adverse childhood experiences.
Statistics reveal that 1 out of 184 children are in foster care and every 36 seconds a child is abused or neglected in the United States.
In continuation, infants and toddlers represent the largest age group placed in the foster care system. This population is also at highest risk for long-term developmental effects. During the first three years of a child’s life, the myelin sheath, which insulates neuron messages, is at a pivotal stage of development.
As a result, the neuro messages may be significantly affected, impaired or delayed. These early neurological messages are encoded in the child’s implicit memory and have the ability to affect learned long-term behaviors, emotion regulation and coping techniques.
Infants and toddlers learn emotion regulation through secure attachments with their primary caregiver. Speech and language development rely heavily on face-to-face interactions in which the mirroring neurons imitate the movement of the caregiver.
A consistent caregiver allows the child to form a secure attachment by fostering a nurturing environment. It is imperative that children, ages zero to three, with ACEs are placed in a home environment with foster parents that are able to expose them to the normal developmental processes they may have missed prior to the new placement.
Although some may argue for the importance of family reunification, citing the child’s early attachment to family members, without a proper evaluation, it is unknown whether the child will receive the necessary quality of care.
Children in an abusive home are at a higher risk for significant impairments to their typical neurological development; they require a heightened level of early intervention to combat these negative experiences.
Foster care parents must be available to meet the intense needs of severely affected children in order to prevent long term cognitive and developmental effects. Automatically assuming that the child is better off with biological family members devalues the need for necessary qualifications for combating the child’s exposure to early adverse experiences.
By requiring all potential caregivers to complete a standardized evaluation, we aim to abolish the current developmental risk posed by the process of reunification to infant and toddler foster children.
