Want to reduce the number of kids entering foster care? Put the ones who are at risk in Head Start. That’s the advice of some advocates in Illinois, who say that children enrolled in early education are 93 percent less likely to go into foster care than those who are not. The research supporting this claim is shoddy at best, but the idea that expanding government safety-net programs like Head Start will reduce child maltreatment, which can lead to placement in foster care, has become ubiquitous. Sadly, the reason kids are in foster care is almost never a simple lack of material resources or other support. Using our limited child-welfare dollars on such blunt instruments targeted too broadly will only make it harder to help kids who are truly in danger.
The claim regarding Head Start comes from a 2017 study, published in Children and Youth Services Review, whose findings are hardly robust. First, the study includes children in “informal kinship care” — meaning kids who were living with relatives other than parents but who had never been legally removed from their homes — as being in foster care. Second, of the 1,995 kids in the study, only 29 percent of the sample had been enrolled in early childcare at all, and only 7 percent of those (about 40 kids) were enrolled exclusively in Head Start. Third, only 8 percent of children in the study entered foster care (including informal kin situations). It is very hard to model such a low-risk event with so few kids in the Head Start group.
Given the recent history of the Head Start program, though, it’s hardly surprising that advocates are straining to justify its existence. The federal program, which has enrolled around 40 million children and cost Americans tens of billions of dollars since its launch in 1965, has been struggling to find a purpose. In 2012, a longitudinal study found that any improvement in academic outcomes for kids enrolled in Head Start disappeared by third grade. And last year, a study from the Government Accountability Office found widespread fraud and child-safety violations at many Head Start locations.
How does the program claim to reduce the need for foster care? Proponents point to vague, wraparound services such as “job and housing resources and referrals” that they say help parents keep custody of their children.
If that’s all that’s required, it’s no wonder other groups also want to get in on the deal, claiming that they too can offer resources to families to prevent the need for foster care. Last year, for instance, a grant-making organization called New Allies gave $200,000 to libraries in Kentucky, ostensibly to help keep kids out of foster care. Libraries are places “people trust to get information, to get access to resources,” according to Britany Binkowski of New Allies. “They don’t carry the stigma, for example, of going to a child-welfare department and asking for resources in a way that might feel very vulnerable.” Regarding the library’s ability to help, the Kentucky Lantern notes that “preventable issues contribute to [child] removal . . . like a parent not being able to buy a car seat or access safe child care.”
To be clear, the notion that children are removed from their homes because parents can’t afford a car seat is not true. But this kind of myth is repeated by politicians and advocates across the political spectrum. Last year, House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith (R., Mo.) introduced a piece of child-welfare legislation by saying, “I think about the families separated in Missouri over the years, not because of abuse or neglect, but because they could not afford to pay a bill or [buy] new clothes for their kids.”
It is true that families involved in the child-welfare system are disproportionately poor, but it does not automatically follow that poverty is what is causing their children to be removed to foster care. Indeed, there are millions of families in this country who are poor but do not neglect their children. Of the almost 12 million children living below the poverty line in the United States, there were 546,000 substantiated claims of abuse or neglect in 2023, according to the Children’s Defense Fund and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Administration for Children and Families. In other words, 95 percent of kids living in poverty did not have a substantiated claim.
Children who are neglected often lack resources. But more often than not, that neglect is a result of parents who suffer from mental illness or addiction and are unwilling or unable to care for them. (Such parents are often also unable to hold down a job or keep stable housing.) Up to 90 percent of the families involved in the child-welfare system are suffering from substance-use disorders. A 2022 study of 295 case files in California, for instance, found that 99 percent of physical neglect investigations “included concerns related to substance use, domestic violence, mental illness, co-reported abuse or an additional neglect allegation (i.e., abandonment).”
The American public understands the picture well. A poll conducted by the Bipartisan Policy Center in 2023 found that, when asked about the primary cause of neglect, 10 percent of Americans said it was lack of financial resources and 3 percent said lack of access to affordable housing, but a whopping 69 percent said it was parents’ abuse of drugs or alcohol.
The issue of how to help families who are poor is not exactly simple, but we know the basic outline of a solution. It generally involves temporary financial assistance combined with the right incentives and training to get adults into the workforce. The question of how to help families who are abusing or neglecting their children and may be in danger of losing them to foster care is much more complex because solving mental illness and addiction is much more complex.
But now that various advocates have seen how “preventing foster care” can be used to elicit public and private support for their favorite programs, there will be no end to groups jumping on this bandwagon. A campaign by Prevent Child Abuse America last year presented a list of policies that would supposedly prevent abuse from occurring, including “affordable housing,” “access to healthcare,” “high-quality, affordable childcare,” “school breakfast and lunch programs,” and “paid family leave.”
Similarly, there has been a growing chorus of policymakers and activists who want to provide cash assistance to needy families. Whether child tax credits or guaranteed-income programs will lift families out of poverty or encourage more stable family formation is an open question. But in recent years, some supporters of these policies have added the prevention of child abuse and neglect to the list of benefits they ascribe to such programs despite little evidence that they do anything of the sort. Nevertheless, it seems that if you want to sell your favorite safety-net program, the way to elicit support is to claim that it will benefit victims of maltreatment.
It is not clear whether these programs will prevent poverty, but there is no credible evidence that they prevent child maltreatment. Spending billions of dollars to offer more cash, health care, free meals, early education, and extended library hours to every family living below the poverty line is unlikely to move the needle on preventing children from entering foster care, but it will take much-needed resources away from children who are truly victims of maltreatment. Distractions have consequences.
