Child’s Status in Foster Care Limbo Highlights Rising National Dilemma

NEWARK, Del. — Three-year-old Dustin would cower in his bedroom closet on days he was scheduled to visit his mother.

“Why are you making me go?” he’d ask his foster mom. “Please don’t make me go. Why are you sending me away?”

Once, when he was to visit his father, the brown-haired boy with sparkling brown eyes crawled under the dining room table. Social workers had to move furniture to grab the screaming child and carry him out the door.

Dustin is one of nearly 500,000 children in America’s foster care system, the highest number in 20 years. These babies, toddlers and young people no longer live with their natural parents because of abuse, neglect, abandonment or death.

Tens of thousands, like Dustin, live in limbo, staying with foster care families while social workers try--sometimes for years--to reunite them with their biological families. Some are reunited after parents receive counseling or treatment for substance abuse; others--so-called Humpty-Dumpty families--aren’t easily patched together again.

This is Dustin’s dilemma, and one that Congress and the Clinton administration are wrestling with too.

Dustin’s parents split up two months after he was born near Newark, Del., on Sept. 11, 1993.

His mother had just lost custody of her first son because of her 20-year addiction to drugs and alcohol. So the diapered infant went with his father, who bounced, suitcase in hand, from one friend’s home to another.

Two months later, his father landed in jail.

And so, on a snowy day early in 1994, Delaware’s Division of Family Services dropped 4-month-old Dustin, dressed in a light blue sleeper, safely into the arms of foster parents Bryon and Linda Brainard.

Three years later, he’s still there, but his future remains uncertain.

“Legally, Dustin belongs to a family that does not exist. Emotionally, he belongs to a family that legally he cannot belong to,” says Janice Mink of the child advocacy group Hear My Voice, who testified about the child’s case before Congress recently.

Most foster care children eventually return to their homes, but about one in five does not, and these children wait too long--typically three years or longer--to be placed in permanent homes.

Now, President Clinton and members of Congress from both parties seem determined to enact reforms. Clinton’s goal is to double by the year 2002 the number of children adopted or placed in other permanent homes each year.

One barrier is a fuzzy federal law that requires states to make a “reasonable effort” to reunite foster children with their biological parents.

What is “reasonable” varies from caseworker to caseworker and judge to judge, says Olivia Golden of the Department of Health and Human Services.

Clinton’s proposal and bills pending in Congress attempt to clarify the law by emphasizing that child safety, not bloodlines, should be paramount in finding permanent homes for youngsters.

Legislation passed by the House recently would offer financial bonuses to states that move more of these children into permanent homes and speed up this decision-making process so they don’t spend years in the foster care system.

In Dustin’s case, he thinks his real mom is the woman who kisses his scrapes and quiets him when he has nightmares.

During the last three years, though, the state has tried repeatedly to reunite Dustin with his birth parents--something his maternal aunt, Catherine Hamill, has spent thousands of dollars fighting.

Hamill, who is caring for her sister’s first son, now 7, believes her sister’s addictions prevent her from being a responsible parent.

The state still sought reunification, Hamill says, after pharmacy records and testimony indicated that her sister had obtained enough drugs to take more than 2,000 pills in six months--while she was pregnant with her third son. That child lives with his father, who is not Dustin’s dad.

Dustin “has had the incredible luck to land with people who care about him and the state keeps getting in the way,” Hamill says. The Brainards declined to be interviewed.

Kathi Way, director of the Delaware Division of Family Services, declined to discuss details of Dustin’s case. But she said that if caseworkers believe people are making progress toward becoming responsible parents, the state feels an obligation to work with them.

The prospects of reunifying Dustin with his mother, however, dimmed in December when she began a one-year prison sentence for violating probation on a drug offense.

Now, Dustin’s father, who was released from prison in July, wants custody. The boy spends three days a week with his foster family and four days with his father, who could not be reached for comment.

Dustin’s behavior changed for the worse early this year after he began unsupervised visits with his father, according to Hamill and Mink’s testimony before Congress.

The child started using sexual language, is no longer toilet-trained and exposes himself in public, Hamill said. He has regressed to baby talk and started sucking his thumb.

Way would say only that state workers evaluated Dustin’s behavior and have given their findings to the family court, which is to hear the father’s custody case May 15.

“Isn’t there something wrong when we’re still talking about this when the baby has been with the same people since he was 4 months old?” Hamill asks.

Dustin used to be content with a night light; now he won’t go to bed unless the overhead light is on. Then he crawls deep under the covers and pulls his Sesame Street comforter completely over his head.