Shining a Light on Hidden Foster Care

Sometimes success looks like somebody else’s news article. Such was the case last week when Lauren Peace and Teghan Simonton of the Tampa Bay Times released their investigative report, “Hillsborough’s Foster Agency Celebrates Keeping Families Intact. It Separated Hundreds Off the Books.”

If you’ve been following us for any length of time, you know a lot of the work of the Parental Rights Foundation happens in coalitions, and a lot of it happens behind the scenes. Part of that work was drafting a model bill with the Coalition to End Hidden Foster Care to preserve families’ rights when they’re facing the kind of separation Peace and Simonton wrote about.

See, while Hillsborough, Florida, celebrates having fewer children in foster care, it turns out they’ve only lowered those numbers by sending children to live with relatives instead. The parents had no more say in it than if the children were taken to foster care, although it happens under a guise of “consent.” Parents sign the paper, but only because they’re threatened with losing their children to foster care if they don’t.

And who wouldn’t choose to send their children to live with grandma or an uncle if the only other option is a stranger?

But this form of “Hidden Foster Care” robs families of crucial legal safeguards. They don’t ever get their day in court. The caregivers don’t get supports that regular foster families do. And often there is no exit strategy, no path by which the kids eventually come home.

All of these problems are highlighted in the Times article.

They’re problems our model bill seeks to address. And they’re problems we’ve been highlighting for years, both in this email newsletter and on our EPPiC Broadcast podcast, which launches its thirteenth season on Tuesday (September 8).

In fact, three of the experts quoted in the Times article have been guests on our podcast already:

• Listen to Andrew Brown’s episode on Child Welfare Reform bills in Texas
• Listen to Josh Gupta-Kagan’s Child Welfare analogy from Star Wars
• Listen to Shanta Trivedi’s talk on the hidden harms of family separation

That these experts have been on our podcast and are also featured in the Times article is no accident. No, I don’t mean that the Times writers came to our podcast site looking for experts to quote. (I suppose they could have, but I have no evidence that they did.)

But these experts, like your Parental Rights Foundation, have been working tirelessly for years to call attention to the problems of Hidden Foster Care. Just like us (and in concert with us, as it were), they have been working to change the narrative. Now, this article in The Tampa Times is the latest proof that our efforts are working.

See, so much of our work in the field of child welfare reform is about shaping the narrative. 

When I started here, “everyone knew” that if CPS came knocking on your door, you must have done something wrong. There was shame in just being investigated. But over the last decade and a half, more and more people are waking up to the reality: five of every six CPS investigations nationwide are ultimately closed as unfounded or unsubstantiated. Five times out of six, the family that was investigated had done nothing wrong.

That’s what changing the narrative looks like: it’s taking us from “everybody knows you must’ve done something wrong” to “everybody knows innocent families get investigated, too.”

Only, with hidden foster care, it’s a little different. With hidden foster care, it takes a change of narrative for there to be any narrative at all. The practice is, after all, hidden. It’s off the books. And it’s off the public radar.

It is a major win that a paper the size of The Tampa Times is talking about it at all.

And that’s just the kind of change we’re looking for every time we invite Andrew, or Josh, or Shanta back on our podcast. Every time we talk about the problems of hidden foster care, it’s with the hope that an investigative reporter might hear something worth looking into and find it happening in their own backyard.

I can’t claim that’s what happened in this case. But I can promise you we will continue to do our part, both to call attention to the problem on our podcast, and to offer solutions through the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and in your state legislature.

Thank you for standing with us to protect children by empowering parents, and by bringing hidden foster care into the light of day.