End Time Politics by Keri L. Ladner

Author:Keri L. Ladner [Ladner, Keri L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: REL078000 Religion / Fundamentalism, REL015000 Religion / Christianity / History, HIS036000 History / United States / General
Publisher: Fortress Press

Reaganomics and the 1980 Child Welfare Act

Family values meant something entirely different to populations that liberal policies supporting families had intended to serve. Carter convened the White House Conference on Families on June 6, 1980. Less than two weeks later, on June 17, he signed into law the 1980 Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act, which had the intent of strengthening the country’s foster-care system. Throughout the 1970s, “foster-care drift” had become so severe that many state governments had no records of where many of their foster children were. The 1980 Child Welfare Act aimed to improve outcomes for foster children by preventing family separation in the first place; a judge had to determine that “reasonable efforts” had been made to keep the family intact before a child could be removed and placed into state custody. When removal did occur, children’s services had to focus on “permanency planning,” meaning that within a certain amount of time, children had to either return to their families of origin or become eligible for adoption into a stable and nurturing home.

“Economic and social trends are fueling a collapse in children’s services,”32 read the foreword to a 1989 government report on the implementation of the 1980 Child Welfare Act. “Federal oversight and funding are weak to nonexistent. There are too few resources in these service systems to meet the increasingly complex needs of children.” The report did not mention Reaganomics specifically, but all 229 pages might as well have served as an indictment of the new economic policies that had crippled America’s social services and marked the end of New Deal liberalism. Even though preventive services that aimed to keep children with their families were remarkably successful and cost-effective—family preservation efforts in Virginia during the 1980s prevented 93 percent of participating families from experiencing foster care, at a cost of $1,214 per child versus foster-care expenses of $11,173 per child—they were curtailed by a lack of funding for the most basic services, such as housing and nutrition assistance. The report summarized, “Our findings are alarming.”

Earlier in the decade, there were signs that the Child Welfare Act was helping children and families. The number of children in foster care dropped, from approximately 302,000 in 1980 to 262,000 in 1982. Yet during that time, increases in poverty, homelessness, and teenage pregnancies, alongside an exploding drug epidemic and AIDS crisis, were leading to increased reports of child abuse and neglect. During 1981, while the number of children in foster care was declining, there were 1.2 million reports of child abuse and neglect; that number increased to 2.2 million in 1988. Further, more children were dying of abuse and neglect by the end of the decade, with over 1,100 reported fatalities between 1986 and 1988.

There had never been a legal definition of what “reasonable efforts” constituted, even though the 1980 Act required that they be implemented before a child could be removed and placed into foster care. Ostensibly, the framers of the Act intended services such as subsidized housing

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