Rescuing Families, Saving Children

Los Angeles has lost another child -- 3-month-old Michael Kelvin Thompson, who was found dead Jan. 3 in a washing machine after his mother allegedly set fire to their South Los Angeles residence. According to reports in The Times and elsewhere, Michael’s mother not only had a history of setting fires but had served an eight-year prison term for child abuse. We’re left to wonder what went wrong and how the county could possibly have left Michael in the custody of this woman. Shouldn’t he have been removed from her care?

In retrospect, the answer is yes. But it’s crucial that we not draw too broad a conclusion from this. The current trend in child welfare -- and it’s a good one -- is to try to prevent child abuse not by removing children from their families at the first sign of trouble but by helping families solve their problems and by keeping them together whenever possible. Michael, his mother and his father were involved in this approach, according to news reports, and something obviously went terribly wrong. But that does not mean that it’s wrong to try to keep families together.

As someone who has worked in child welfare for four decades, I don’t want to be misunderstood. The Thompson tragedy deserves our outrage, a full investigation and a strong response. But I am concerned that such a high-profile child abuse case could lead to all-or-nothing policies that in the end will only damage our ability to protect our children.

After decades of trying to protect innocent children primarily by institutionalizing them (especially the youngest ones) and often failing to reunite them with family or to find permanent homes for them, the family approach, along with prevention and early intervention, has been a welcome change. Institutional care and foster care play vital roles, but county, state and federal agencies are in agreement that children belong in families whenever possible.

Evidence and experience show that some abusive mothers and fathers can change when they receive help with parenting, substance abuse or anger management. And in cases in which parents don’t have the resources to feed and protect their children, helping them meet those obligations is a better response than breaking the family apart.

Keep families intact is the strategy employed now in Los Angeles and throughout the country for several reasons, not least because of high-profile problem cases in the old foster care system and the steep costs of institutional care, along with little quantifiable evidence of its positive effect.

The very best approach to child welfare is case-by-case decision-making that draws on every possible solution -- identifying early warning signs and assisting families with specific problems. If a child is not safe, of course, other options must be available: quality temporary foster care; short-term institutional care that returns the child to the family as soon as safety is assured; possibly guardianship or adoption. A recent Times story included these statistics from the county Department of Children and Family Services: About 10,000 children in L.A. are removed from their parents’ custody each year. About half of them are returned. Of those, 3% must be removed again.

Families may need intensive support in the areas of day care, preschool, respite care, job training and parenting skills. In one case, Hollygrove, the treatment center that I head, was able to reunite three emotionally disturbed siblings, taking them out of separate foster homes, providing them with psychological treatment and helping their father succeed in caring for them. We’ve helped families succeed in the wake of drug and other kinds of abuse by Mom or Dad, as have many of our sister agencies.

And yet there will always be parents who can’t keep their children safe. And there will always be parents who abuse or neglect their children to the point where they must be removed from the home.

We should not allow the horror of Michael Kelvin Thompson’s death to swing the pendulum of child welfare services too far in any direction. We should not break up every troubled family; we should not keep every one intact.

Instead, we should use this tragedy to reinforce this home truth: Every vulnerable child deserves his or her own solution -- an individualized plan that will ensure that the child is safe and healthy and has a permanent family.