Financial Eligibility Criteria To Be A Foster Or Adoptive Parent

All states require prospective foster and adoptive parents to have sufficient income to meet their own needs and ensure the security and stability of the household independent of foster care maintenance or adoption subsidy payments. While caregivers are reimbursed for a child's basic needs, this money should not be thought of as a way to make extra income. Financial stability is not an end in itself, and income sufficiency is never the sole determinant of healthy family functioning. Indeed, many foster parents pay out-of-pocket for the needs of their foster children simply because the per diem rate is inadequate. Still, “for all practical purposes, lack of specificity renders a ‘sufficient income’ provision unenforceable, and invites questionable applicants to be foster and adoptive parents, motivated for the wrong reasons,” says Massachusetts attorney Karen K. Greenberg. While applicants do not need to be prosperous, the home approval process should require an objective in-depth evaluation of an applicant’s total financial history and prospects.

Videotaping Child Sexual Abuse Investigation Interviews

This article investigates the extent to which departments of human services should be mandated by statute to videotape child sexual abuse investigative interviews. While numerous states instruct that videotaping may be done, most do so only by regulation or administrative directive.

Comprehensive Protection Needed for Individuals with Profound Developmental Disabilities at Risk of Abuse and Neglect

Maltreatment of individuals who are profoundly developmentally disabled is a problem that occurs across many settings and is investigated by human service workers and others. The prevalence [the total number of people who have experienced maltreatment in a specified time period] and incidence [the ...

Psycho-legal Considerations of Placing Children in Foster Care

When a child is placed in a foster home it is the responsibility of the placing agency to evaluate the prospective home by considering its environmental, physical, emotional, medical, and educational benefits and hazards. Finding a compatible foster home is not just a question of finding the right foster parents. If there are other children in the home they are also crucial to the selection process.

Anonymous versus Identified Reporting of Child Maltreatment

The child abuse and neglect hotline rings. All other factors being equal, does it matter if the reporter is anonymous or identified? Effective child maltreatment investigation relies to a significant extent upon information supplied by anonymous reporters. Reliance on these reporters presents the child protection, law enforcement, and judicial systems with a challenge: giving proper weight to such reports while safeguarding everyone’s constitutional rights. During FFY 2012, child protective services agencies received 3.4 million referrals involving approximately 6.3 million children. Among the 46 states that reported both screened-in and ...

Revisiting the Presumption of Jointly Placing Siblings in Foster Care

Until fairly recently, it was assumed that when parents divorced and custody was being assigned, it was in the child’s best interest to be placed with the mother. It took time and some tragic and avoidable situations to inform policy makers that this blanket assumption should be rebuttable—if a presumption at all. We have now come to a similar crossroad involving the placement of children in foster care. There is a presumption in law and policy that it is in the best interest of children going into foster care that they be placed together with their siblings. We address the strength of this assumption and propose that, while children may ...

A National Responsible Father Registry: Providing Constitutional Protections for Children, Mothers and Fathers

The United States Supreme Court initially acknowledged the right to raise children in 1923 when it held that the liberty interest referred to in the Fourteenth Amendment was “not merely freedom from bodily restraint but also the right of the individual to … establish a home and bring up children ….” Despite this well recognized right, many parents chose to place their children for adoption for a myriad of reasons. Over the years, adoption in the United States has become more recognized, legally structured and more common. In fact, today every November is National Adoption Awareness Month. In many states, the Probate and Family ...

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