Since Nebraska passed an open-age safe-haven law in February, 30 children have been abandoned by their parents at hospitals throughout the state. Because of a tragic loophole in the law, some of those abandoned children are old enough to drive, and in at least one case, old enough to vote. They come from more than one state. This parade of “abandonments” underscores the critical need to rebuild our country’s dysfunctional child welfare system. The legislature will meet in emergency session to fix this alleged problem in the law, but the work they should do is much larger.
Safe-haven laws were initially intended to protect unwanted newborns by offering parents a legal, no-questions-asked way to safely give up their children. This is plainly a good idea. Nebraska was the last state in the nation to pass legislation of this kind, but its use of the word “child” without specifying an age limit opened a loophole of hope for desperate parents. Interpreting “child” to mean “minor,” which in Nebraska refers to anyone under age 19, Nebraska parents, and some from as far as Detroit and Atlanta, have used the loophole to abandon children they did not no how to successfully parent. It’s likely that many of these parents feared they would fail to fulfill their basic parental obligations, logic that is clearly related to the lack of available services that can prevent that failure. A range of other reasons — including financial stresses because of job losses, social pressures, parent/child relationship problems, divorce — can prompt parents to make such a desperate choice.
The Nebraska safe-haven law offers the opportunity to reconsider the responses to the large group of families who need the most help. The development of child welfare services has extended the government’s role in extreme cases, although the general expectation remains that families ultimately provide emotional and financial support for children. Only when there is already abject failure does the state take significant responsibility by placing children into foster care. Responsible but unsuccessful parents have little recourse.
Children’s services and policies need to change. Working French and Swedish families do not wring their hands over child care or health costs because those services are provided by the government. Belgian families routinely send their adolescent children to state-supported boarding or residential programs that help them weather the strain of puberty, normalizing difficult transitions that require American parents to use high-cost — and sometimes high-risk — private residential treatment programs. Or, as recently occurred in Nebraska, to exploit its vague safe-haven law.
No strong partnership exists between government and parents in the United States. The unintended side effects of Nebraska’s safe-haven law demonstrate that it is time to reconsider the government’s role in assisting families. Efforts in some states to expand the services offered to families outside formal court-dominated child welfare programs are not supported by the federal government, so states have typically been willing to invest in this form of parental assistance.
It is time for this nation to reconsider options for desperate families whose children who are at risk of harm. Although some traditionalists might believe that this approach undermines the responsibility of parents to care for their children, I believe it can better help them to fulfill those responsibilities in times of need. It’s time to move beyond the polarized “family or state” paradigm and explore more options that will assist these families. Nebraska has unwittingly taken a bold step toward determining what it would take to have the state guarantee additional options for parents who see themselves as unable to protect and guide their children.
Whether a child is 16 hours, 16 months, or 16 years old, the public gains when parents have options for remaining in charge or, as the case may be, to relinquish their care voluntarily. We can maximize the ability of the parent and the child to succeed — perhaps separately at first, but very possibly together again at better times. The challenge is figuring out how to help those parents muster family and community resources to resume care for their children.
Richard P. Barth, Ph.D., MSW, dean of the University of Maryland School of Social Work, is nationally known for his work on foster care, adoption and other child welfare issues. He can be reached at 410-706-7794, or via e-mail at [email protected].
