institutions

A major new review of the effects of raising children in institutions — and the effects of getting those children into family-based care — concludes that institutionalization should be phased out.

The Imprint, a national news site focused on children, youth and families, just released an ambitious data and reporting project looking at where kids go when they’re removed from home. “Who Cares: A National Count of Foster Homes and Families” yielded significant findings about states’ struggles to recruit and retain foster homes, and their increased reliance on relatives and group homes.

Back when cases involving missing children – many of them runaways from foster care – were making headlines in Washington, D.C., Marie Cohen rushed to try to shift responsibility from a failing foster care system.

The great filmmaker Costa Gavras, known for making “political films” such as “Z” and “The Confession,” once said: “The issues in politics are not complex, even though politicians tell us so in order to convince us of the politicians’ importance … and to keep us from criticizing them.”

Nearly seven years ago, when the northeast was hit with a snowstorm quickly dubbed “snowpocalypse” and “snowmageddon,” The Daily Show used the occasion to make fun of people who assume that their own personal experience has more validity than actual science.

Connecticut, 1995: Emily Hernandez, a child-known-to-the-system, dies. Gov. John Rowland demands that caseworkers tear apart more families. There is a foster care panic, a huge increase in children torn from their families.

In May, I wrote about how 60 Minutes, the venerable CBS newsmagazine program, got suckered by Maryville, an even more venerable orphanage in Illinois – citing it as evidence that Newt Gingrich was on to something when he suggested institutionalizing poor people’s children.

Fifty-one years ago, President John F. Kennedy enacted the Community Mental Health Act of 1963 (CMHA). The law aimed to shift the focus of mental health treatment from large institutions to home and community-based services to better serve the needs of those diagnosed with mental illness.

Without due consideration for alumni feedback, politicians, judges, social workers and other policymakers have deemed kinship care a “best practice.” But what if this seemingly logical assumption is not a panacea at all, but, rather, another danger zone; further evidence of the necessity of listening to what alumni know from personal experience?