A New Bid to Salvage Families

National Adoption Day got its start in Los Angeles seven years ago when Superior Court Judge Michael Nash, frustrated by the slow pace of adoptions from foster care, decided to open his courtroom on a Saturday to finalize dozens of pending adoptions at once. He created 130 new families that day. His local effort spawned a national campaign, and last Saturday thousands of former foster children across the country joined new families on the fifth annual National Adoption Day.

That’s a cause for celebration, but it’s also reflective of a deeper need: Of the 530,000 children in foster care in the United States, 129,000 are available for adoption because they cannot be reunited with their birth parents. Still, the number of adoptions from foster care is growing -- from 37,000 in 1998 to more than 53,000 last year -- in part because lawmakers and child welfare officials have streamlined the process, limited birth parents’ rights and offered financial subsidies. Now they ought to turn their attention to the other end of the overloaded foster care system. Too many kids are being unnecessarily funneled into foster homes. Changing that will require reorienting the child-protection process so that it aims to keep children safe within their own families.

Los Angeles foster care officials are now trying to do just that by helping troubled mothers and fathers to be better parents. As part of a pilot project in the Compton office of the county’s Department of Children and Family Services, a team of social workers and counselors visits parents accused of abuse or neglect to determine what it will take to keep children safe. They can usher a drug-using dad into treatment or find counseling for a depressed mother. They enlist relatives, ministers, neighbors and friends who can watch the kids, help with housekeeping, offer a ride to work -- whatever the struggling family needs. What’s required of parents is accountability.

Of course, this approach won’t work for every family. In the last four years, six children have allegedly been killed by their parents after they returned home from foster care, The Times reported last month. But 14 children died while in foster care during that same period. Research shows that if they can be kept safe, children fare best with their parents. When social workers can help repair families, they should.

Extending this team effort countywide requires flexibility from rigid federal rules. Los Angeles has been waiting for six months now for permission to shift more of its federal dollars from boarding children in foster homes to the kind of front-end social services that can keep families whole. Federal officials with lingering concerns ought to take a look at the promising approach being tried in Compton. Shoring up salvageable families is, after all, much easier than finding new ones.