The stories are horrifying. Children arrested for overturning a Monopoly game or smearing cake frosting on one other. A 10-year-old forced to the ground and handcuffed after she allegedly threw rocks at a van.
Where would children be treated so inhumanely? In the very places supposedly created to protect them: first-stop “shelters” for children taken from parents who allegedly mistreated them.
These stories and many more are told in “Fostering Failure,” a recent San Francisco Chronicle investigation into such facilities.
Exposes of abuses at institutions for children are nothing new, so why is it so hard to close poorly run institutions and find better alternatives for kids?
A large part of the answer boils down to misguided philanthropy. It seems that everything philanthropy claims to believe about accountability, performance, and evidence goes out the window when someone proposes to build a “shelter” for “abused” children.
A Magnet for Donors
The San Francisco Chronicle investigative series was notable because one of the stories looked closely at the “wealthy and well-connected donors” who create foundations to support local shelters and use their influence with lawmakers.
That story begins not in a jail cell, where children sometimes wind up after a shelter has them arrested, but at a La Jolla hilltop estate ... [where] philanthropists and dignitaries gathered to fete the 20th anniversary of San Diego County’s shelter for foster children. The fundraiser, featuring a sunset cocktail reception, dinner of ale-braised short ribs, and entertainment by Grammy Award-winner Kenny Loggins, netted $750,000 and demonstrated the deep-pocketed affection for the local institution.
That shelter and many others have powerful foundations protecting them from being shut down. In Orange County, the Chronicle reported, a representative of the Orangewood Foundation, which raises money for the Orangewood Children’s Home — the county’s shelter — said the foundation would oppose legislation to close shelters unless its was exempted.
In some cases, the foundations were created expressly to build the shelters. Even the shelter singled out by the Chronicle as the worst, the Mary Graham Children’s Center in San Joaquin County, has its very own foundation.
As Carole Shauffer, senior director for strategic initiatives at California’s Youth Law Center, told the newspaper, “The private philanthropic groups that support these shelters have been a huge force in maintaining them and developing new shelters, even beyond the time when research told us shelters were not the way to go. It’s the system putting the needs of prominent community members and those of the bureaucracy over the needs of the children — and legislators who give in to that are basically doing the same.”
The power of shelter supporters can be seen well beyond California:
- Donors to Child Crisis Arizona, which proudly proclaims that its programs include “the only licensed emergency shelter for children from birth to 10 in Maricopa County,” are a who’s who of Arizona philanthropy, including two United Way chapters, 14 corporations, and 25 foundations.
- The agency in San Antonio that provides a shelter and other services and calls itself simply the Children’s Shelter boasts a similarly stellar array of philanthropists.
- California has no monopoly on star power. In Meridian, Miss., the local shelter — and general-purpose orphanage — was founded by actress Sela Ward, who, in a remarkable act of self-delusion, declares her institution is “not an institution, not an orphanage, but a home.”
And it’s not just shelters. A wealthy couple in Sarasota, Fla., who modestly describe themselves as “visionaries, philanthropists, and champions for children for 30-plus years,” decided they wanted to build an orphanage. They formed a foundation, joined with another couple to donate $3 million, and got a second foundation to chip in $1 million more. Now the orphanage is “catapulting towards reality,” according to a gushy story in the local paper.
As described on the website of their All Star Children’s Foundation, the proposal has almost no specifics, not even information on how the orphanage will be staffed or how long it’s expected that children will stay. Instead, it’s filled with the trendiest buzzwords in child welfare, like “neuroplasticity” and “trauma-informed.”
In fact, this scheme is as uninformed about trauma as one can get. People who are really “trauma-informed” know that one of the most severe traumas a child can endure is separation from her or his parents. They know about the large body of research showing that institutionalization, including so-called residential treatment, is the worst form of such separation.
You don’t cure trauma by inflicting more trauma.
Shelters Are Seductive
Still, it is the actual shelters that are the biggest problem. Donors and others find shelters a particularly seductive form of youth institution because, in theory, children will stay for only a short time and supposedly will see their long-term prospects improve as a result. The people who run shelters tell us the children are “stabilized” and “assessed” by “trained professionals” for a few days to a month or more so that caseworkers can find just the right foster home for them.
But experts in child behavior know that the worst place to accurately assess what’s really going on with a traumatized child is in the most stressful, artificial environment imaginable — an institution. That is true even when the “assessment” period doesn’t include handcuffing 10-year-olds.
An in-depth study from Connecticut found that children who spent time in shelters tended to have worse outcomes than those who were placed directly in foster homes.
It’s hard to see how it could be otherwise. Take off the rose-colored glasses and it’s clear that shelters are dumping grounds for overloaded child-welfare systems. Sometimes they’re very pretty dumping grounds staffed by well-meaning people. But that doesn’t change the fact that, instead of a being in a home, children are cared for by employees who dispense indiscriminate pseudo “love,” usually in shifts, to whoever comes in the door. Instead of stability, children often get the equivalent of a change in foster parents every eight hours.
“What happens when you place a lot of hurting, angry children together in a facility?” Leland Collins, former director of social services in San Luis Obispo County, asks in the San Francisco Chronicle’s investigation. “The big ones tend to take out their hurt on the smaller ones. The smaller ones run, and I don’t blame them because you would, too.”
That’s why Mr. Collins made what he termed “a very unpopular call” and closed his county’s shelter in 2003.
Better Ways to Spend
Backers of institutionalizing children sometimes acknowledge that shelters are a bad option but assert that a shortage of foster parents leaves no alternative. That’s not true, either. Most counties in California, and much of the nation, do just fine without shelters, sending children they believe must be removed from their parents directly to foster homes. Class-action settlements in Alabama and New Jersey have drastically restricted the use of institutions, and outcomes for children improved. (A member of my organization’s volunteer Board of Directors was co-counsel for plaintiffs in the Alabama lawsuit.)
America does not have too few foster parents. America has too many foster children.
Contrary to the common stereotype, most parents who lose their children to foster care are neither brutally abusive nor hopelessly addicted. Far more common are cases in which family poverty is confused with neglect.
In other cases, there really are problems in the home, but they could be solved without resorting to tearing the family apart. Two large studies of more than 15,000 such cases found that children left in their own homes fared better in later life than comparably ill-treated children placed in foster care.
If philanthropists turned their support to proven programs to keep these children safely in their own homes, there would be plenty of room in good, safe foster homes for children who really need them — and no need to park any child in an institution.
Kids Aren’t Teddy Bears
Why, then, are shelters and similar institutions the solution of choice to so many who see themselves as philanthropists?
Because they are exercises in adult self-indulgence and self-delusion. Donors can get a plaque on the wall for giving money or furniture. And both donors and volunteers can turn real children into human teddy bears who exist for the donors’ and volunteers’ gratification and convenience. After getting their “baby fix” — as one Oklahoma City woman characterized her lunch-hour shelter volunteering in an Oklahoman article — they simply hand the human teddy bears back to the staff.
Such attitudes require persistent misreading of interactions with institutionalized children.
The former director of a notorious shelter in Nevada told a local television station that he loved how babies and toddlers “grab my leg.” He added: “They call me Mr. Lou. They tell me they love me.”
But when a young child goes to the extreme of grabbing the legs of anyone who shows attention and tells that person “I love you,” it’s a sign of deteriorating mental health. (This shelter also has a celebrity benefactor, former tennis star Andre Agassi, and his foundation.)
Someone in San Diego, apparently an adult shelter volunteer, even wrote to the local newspaper attacking a former foster youth for daring to sue in an effort to close that county’s shelter. Unlike the letter writer, the youth had actually endured living at the shelter.
Ms. Shauffer, of the Youth Law Center, told the San Francisco Chronicle that when donors visit shelters, “the young children run over to them, they hug them, they want to be read to and played with, and that must gratify their egos.” But, she added, “I don’t think they think through what the child’s experience is. Would it be great for your child to be living with no parent whatsoever?”
There is yet another indication that shelters exist largely for the benefit of adults, not children: Though it’s most difficult to find foster families for older kids, many shelters are reserved for young children. Older foster youths are not so cute and huggable, so adults aren’t interested in “sheltering” them.
Good philanthropists put the needs of those they purport to help first. Good philanthropists don’t use their money to support turning children into teddy bears.
Richard Wexler is executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform.