OPINION: Baby bonds and universal basic income better approaches than foster care

The Aug. 25 Sunday Journal editorial “Funds for baby bonds could be better spent on boosting foster care” says “Bold, new approaches are desperately needed” to deal with a “shortage” of licensed family foster homes and prevent children from being warehoused in group homes, institutions and state offices.

That’s true. But there’s nothing bold or new about the Journal’s proposed solutions: more money and goodies for middle-class foster parents and the ever-popular “public awareness campaign.”

The only thing that’s bold or new, but not in a good way, is the Journal’s proposed funding mechanism: Ditching a program to help children at birth – a program especially helpful to children whose poverty makes them most likely to land in foster care in the first place.

Yes, the Journal says, scrap “baby bonds” for impoverished newborns, money that will grow right along with them and help lift them out of poverty as adults. Instead, give it to middle-class strangers and bureaucrats.

We have to do this, the Journal says, because there is an urgent need for more foster parents. But New Mexico wouldn’t need more foster parents if it embraced a truly bold, new approach and stopped taking so many children needlessly in the first place.

Most cases seen by Children, Youth & Families Department caseworkers are nothing like the horror stories. In New Mexico, 72% of cases in which children are thrown into foster care do not involve even an allegation of physical or sexual abuse.

Sixty-five percent did not involve even an allegation of drug or alcohol abuse.

Far more common are cases in which family poverty is confused with neglect. In 19% of cases, for example, CYFD admits to taking children because of housing issues.

A child may be taken from a family that can’t afford childcare or housing and turned over to strangers who already are paid anywhere from $620 to $1,800 per month tax-free, plus health insurance and other perks, to care for that same child.

Study after study tells us that providing even a fraction of that money to birth parents vastly reduces the need for foster care. That would eliminate the shortage of foster homes.

Yet the Journal says take baby bonds away from impoverished children to give even more to foster parents. Would you want to have as a foster parent someone callous enough to say, in effect, “Give me more at children’s expense?” Most foster parents aren’t in it for the money. I suspect they’d immediately say no to getting more money that way.

Foster care placement is always traumatic. The Journal correctly notes that children do less badly in family foster homes than in group homes or institutions. But study after study finds that in typical cases, not the horror stories, children do better still when they are not taken away at all.

The harm of foster care placement isn’t just emotional. Multiple studies find alarming rates of abuse, not just in group homes but in family foster homes as well. And all the time money and effort wasted on needless investigations and foster care is stolen from finding the relatively few children in real danger.

Fortunately, the New Mexico Children’s Code Reform Task Force has some truly bold new ideas, including narrowing definitions to make it harder to confuse poverty with neglect, and piloting universal basic income for families at risk of losing their children to foster care because of poverty.

That approach places children’s need above adult greed – just as any good foster parent would.

Richard Wexler is executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform.