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POLICY SOLUTIONS DESIGNED TO SUPPORT, NOT SEPARATE, FAMILIES

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  • Adoption and safe families act

    An ASFA Overhaul to Center Family Connections, Relief for Children of Incarcerated Parents, and our #stoptheclock Campaign

    An Adoption and Safe Families Act Overhaul to Center Family Connections

    While the Adoption and Safe Families Act was driven by a motivation to limit the time children spend in foster care, a goal that draws broad consensus, its focus on rigid, often unrealistic timelines for family reunification have caused extraordinary harm to children and families. While a growing body of social science research demonstrates the needs of children for lifelong connections to their families, ASFA harmfully presumes that if a family cannot reunify within 15 months, those bonds should be severed forever.

     

    Today, the United States stands alone in aggressively providing financial incentives to permanently separate children from their families through termination of parental rights. These incentives have led to terrible outcomes for tens of thousands of children, with particularly devastating consequences in Black and Native American communities, which have borne a disproportionate impact of ASFA’s multifaceted harms. Particularly disturbing is the large number of legal orphans, children who have been severed from their own families due to ASFA’s punishing timeclock, but never given a new permanent family. Because ASFA presumes that adoption is better for children than other, more flexible permanency, options, many children that achieve “permanency” through ASFA do so only by being completely severed from all of their birth family connections, including siblings, parents, grandparents, and other relatives.

     

    We believe ASFA should be repealed and our foster system reenvisioned. But short of a full repeal, there are steps that can bring ASFA and other federal laws up to date, improve children’s chances of achieving true permanency and help eliminate some of the biases that still permeate child welfare.

    Here are our recommendations for ASFA reform:

    • Raise the standard for separation of families to permit child removal only when necessary to protect children from imminent risk of serious harm.

    • Shift ASFA’s “default position” away from favoring termination and toward recognizing the importance of family attachment by removing arbitrary deadlines favoring termination. Instead, there should be plans for reviewing what outcome would best serve each individual child’s needs, without a presumption that adoption is the preferred outcome.

    • Stop favoring adoption over other permanency options by creating financial incentives for all forms of permanency, including reunification, guardianship, and adoption.

    • Ensure that meaningful family preservation and reunification efforts are a condition for federal funding by raising the standard from “reasonable efforts” to “active efforts,” and allowing families to sue to have the right to these efforts enforced.

    • Ensure a path to post-termination contact, by requiring that states provide contact between children and their birth families unless a court finds this is counter to the child’s best interests.

     

    TO LEARN MORE:

     

  • Children of Incarcerated Parents

    CURRENT CHILD WELFARE POLICY MAKES CHILDREN OF INCARCERATED PARENTS UNIQUELY VULNERABLE TO FOREVER LOSING THEIR FAMILIES 

     

    Federal law currently requires that the child welfare agency must, with few exceptions, petition to permanently sever the parent-child relationship once a child has been in foster care for 15 of the past 22 months. When this law was enacted in 1997, the United States was undergoing a rapid expansion in its use of incarceration, and the average length of prison sentences was also increasing. The combination of shortened foster care stays and lengthier and more frequent incarcerations has led to a dramatic and troubling increase in the number of children who lose their parents forever due to parental incarceration.  

     

    The best interests of children are not always served by the loss of all connection to their parent whenever the parent’s sentence exceeds fifteen months. Yet strict adherence to federal timelines can and does result in the permanent destruction of loving parent-child relationships despite the parent’s best efforts from jail.

     

    Several states have begun to recognize the law’s harsh impact on children of incarcerated parents and have amended their laws to ensure that termination of parental rights is pursued only when it is truly in the best interest of the child.  For example, New York’s Chapter 113 of 2010 offers an exception to the 15-month termination of parental rights filing requirement when the parent is incarcerated and makes efforts to maintain a meaningful parent-child relationship, so long as TPR is not otherwise in the child’s best interest. So do laws in Washington State and California. But most children of incarcerated parents in foster care in most states remain subject to rigid and harsh federal timelines that fail to allow for individualized consideration of their family circumstances.

     

    United Family Advocates recommends that federal law be amended to ensure that termination of parental rights is pursued for children of incarcerated parents only when it is truly in their best interest.

     

    TO LEARN MORE:

  • #stoptheclock Campaign

    THE COVID-19 CRISIS HAS CREATED INSURMOUNTABLE OBSTACLES FOR FAMILIES TRYING TO REUNIFY

    The Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA) requires, with few exceptions, that the state move to terminate parental rights to free a child for adoption once a child has been in foster care for 15 months. Termination of parental rights has been called the ‘civil death penalty’ for children and families: it permanently and irrevocably severs all legal ties children have with their parents and extended family, including siblings and grandparents.

    While many families in the child welfare system can safely reunify within 15 months, the national and state public health crises brought about by COVID-19 have created nearly insurmountable obstacles to maintaining family ties if parents don’t meet this deadline.

    Across the country, reunification services to children and families have been cut or dramatically reduced. Parent/child visits, drug treatment, mental health, and domestic violence services are limited or suspended altogether. Worse, at the same time that services are reduced, parents are facing new barriers created by the crippling economic impact of COVID-19, including job loss, eviction and utility shut-offs.

     

    H.R. 7976, SUSPEND THE TIMELINE NOT PARENTAL RIGHTS IN A PUBLIC HEALTH CRISIS ACT, WILL GIVE STATES AND FAMILIES A LIFELINE BY SUSPENDING THE TIMELINE IN TIMES OF PUBLIC HEALTH CRISIS INCLUDING COVID-19.

    Without legislative relief, application of the ASFA timeline during the pandemic will lead to the permanent and unnecessary destruction of families. We must afford parents a reasonable opportunity for reunification with their children, and their children the chance to have permanent, lifelong family ties. This is both a basic right and an issue of racial justice, given the disproportionate rates at which Black, brown and Native American children are separated from their families and placed in foster care.

     

    WHAT THE BILL DOES

    • Creates a “public health crisis” exception to the federally-mandated deadline for termination of parental rights, waiving the requirement that states file termination petitions at the 15-month mark.

    • Clarifies that the current public health crisis is a “compelling reason” to avoid terminating parental rights.

    • Clarifies how states can provide reunification support for families.

    TO LEARN MORE

  • News about the adoption and safe families act

    Chris Gottlieb and Andrew Brown, Washington Examiner, December 12, 2021

    "The COVID-19 pandemic taught us all valuable lessons. Those of us in the child welfare community were confronted with the reality of the many ways in which our system does harm to those it is intended to help. It also affirmed that the most important safety net, especially during times of social and economic hardship, is not government intervention but family ties and community support.

     

    It’s time to put these lessons into action through commonsense approaches to correcting the damaging course federal child welfare law has taken as it has prioritized family separation and speeding to adoption over preserving family bonds. The newly proposed 21st Century Children and Families Act takes some steps in the right direction."

    By Sara Tiano and John Kelly, The Imprint, November 4, 2021

    Rep. Karen Bass has introduced the 21st Century Children and Families Act, which she designed with the goal of improving "foster kids' options for stability in their lives." Kathleen Creamer comments that “this bill is an important first step in moving away from cookie-cutter timelines that have caused devastating harm to children and families for decades.”

    By Sylvia A. Harvey, May 2, 2021

    "A change in federal law is being eyed by advocates as the most powerful way to stop the clock. In August 2020, Rep. Gwen Moore of Wisconsin (D) introduced the Suspend the Timeline Not Parental Rights During a Public Health Crisis Act to do just that. The proposed legislation would lift the ASFA mandate during the pandemic and guarantee that states do not suffer federal funding cuts due to the policy change. It also specifies that a public health crisis is a compelling reason for agencies to not seek to terminate parental rights. "

    Allison Durkin, Destiny Lopez and Eleanor Roberts, April 27, 2021

    "When judges sentence parents to incarceration, they can unknowingly sentence children to family separation through termination of parental rights (“TPR”). After TPR, a parent has no right to care for, visit, or communicate with their child. TPR is the death penalty of family law: If the length of a parent’s sentence triggers TPR, children suffer permanent, legal separation from their families. "

    Richard Wexler, The Imprint, April 30, 2021

    "Had the authors of the Adoption and Safe Families Act really been interested in reducing time in foster care, they would have focused their incentives on reunification and on guardianship, which does not require termination of children’s rights to their parents and can be achieved more quickly. Guardianship also emphasizes what the Children’s Bureau calls “relational permanency” over paper permanency."

    Kathleen Creamer and Chri Gottlieb, The Imprint, February 9, 2021

    "We believe ASFA should be repealed and our foster system reenvisioned. But short of a full repeal, there are steps that can bring ASFA and other federal laws up to date, improve children’s chances of achieving true permanency and help eliminate some of the biases that still permeate child welfare."

    Martin Guggenheim, The Imprint, June 15, 2020

    "With certain exceptions that states too often ignore, ASFA requires that child welfare agencies seek to terminate the parental rights of children whenever they have been in foster for 15 of the most recent 22 months. Courts are instructed to terminate parental rights unless the parent can show that the conditions that led to the removal initially no longer exist. The law has been responsible for the massive destruction of black and brown families. More than 2 million children’s parents’ rights have been terminated by American courts since ASFA was enacted."

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