Stop Spreading Myths about Child Welfare
February 21, 2021
In the wake of last year’s racial protests, calls continue to reform or even abolish the child-welfare system (CWS). In his state of the state address last month, New York governor Andrew Cuomo said he planned to create a “more just and safe” child-welfare system. And David Hansell, the New York City commissioner for the Administration of Children’s Services, wrote in a January op-ed that he planned to reduce racial inequities in the system and decrease the number of kids in foster care. In an article for The Hill, Lenette Azzi-Lessing, a professor at Boston University School of Social Work, explained the rationale behind these new plans. She argued that too many kids are being taken from their parents and that they’re being taken for reasons that are either unserious or can be fixed in other ways. Moreover, she claims that we are unfairly targeting certain families and that foster care simply “traumatizes already vulnerable children.”
Embedded in these complaints are deep misunderstandings about the purpose of foster care, how it works, and the actual outcomes for children whom we remove. Here are four of the biggest myths about our child-welfare system:
