Connecticut’s Department of Children and Families is trying to increase the number of foster children being placed with family members.
WSHU’s Ebong Udoma spoke with CT Mirror’s Laura Tillman to discuss her article, “Inside CT’s push to increase ‘kinship care’ placements for children,” as part of the collaborative podcast Long Story Short. Read Laura’s story here.
WSHU: Hello, Laura. You wanted to know why kinship placements are crucial in helping Connecticut's DCF achieve its mission to support children and families. What did you find? And let's start with your profile of Victoria Woody.
LT: Yeah, so Victoria Woody is a mom of a nine-year-old, and she got a call while she was at work one Thursday in March of 2024 and found out that DCF was asking her to take in her five nieces and nephews, her sister's kids, and that they actually wanted to bring them to her home that very day.
WSHU: All five of them at the same time.
LT: Yeah, including a set of nine-month-old twins.
WSHU: Wow.
LT: So it's quite an ask for her, and it's the kind of situation that's typical of what's called a kinship placement, where DCF is trying to put more of the kids that it places with either family members or what are called fictive kin, which can be like a teacher from school or a neighbor that the kid knows very well, someone who's kind of a very close connection in their life. So basically, this is a part of a national effort that's being made in many states, which acknowledges a growing body of research that says that kids who go with kin tend to have better outcomes in many areas. So I was interested in learning more about this. I had taken a class at Poynter, which is a journalism institute, on child welfare reporting and kinship care, and the move toward kinship care was kind of a big emphasis of that class as well.
WSHU: There's some pushback from people who have volunteered as foster parents. You talk to a few of them, who seem to be a bit skeptical that kinship care is always the way to go.
LT: I think there's always tension. People have, you know, a lot of different experiences with the foster care and child welfare system, and so depending on what they've seen in their particular situations, I think that it can raise, you know, red flags. And I don’t want to sort of overemphasize the skepticism. I think that, in general, the advocacy community, the research community, and the child welfare community will acknowledge that, in general, kinship care has better outcomes. But of course, like when you're talking about a child, you're talking about a unique situation, and so for every kid, even if the preponderance of data says kinship is better, there's always the chance that in a specific situation, you know, could there be problems with the kin that they're placed with. Could there be, I think one of the one of the trends that people remark upon is, is just the idea that, you know, kin are not always prepared to take in a kid where, like Victoria Woody, you know, she had a son, and she had a good job and she had sort of a stable lifestyle to be able to take this on. But sometimes DCF is asking an aunt or an uncle at this emergency moment to take in kin, and they might not have all the puzzle pieces together to be able to support a kid who maybe is going through a really traumatic experience of removal from their parents. So it's tricky.
WSHU: Let's talk a little bit more about Victoria, too. Because even though she was pretty well off in being able to take the kids in, she still needed quite a bit of help from DCF to be able to make it work, right?
LT: Yeah, of course. I mean, imagine taking in kids, one of whom had type 1 diabetes. You know, the toddler had trouble sleeping at night, and suddenly, you're taking all these kids into your home. You don't have the right furniture, you don't have the right bedding, you don't have the right formula, all these things that she needed, and DCF, as well as some family and friends, were able to help her with that.
WSHU: Now, Connecticut had set a goal of 70% back in 2019, getting at least up to 70% placement in kinship care. How has that worked out?
LT: You know, they're moving toward that goal. They've gone, I believe, 10% improvement since that time. So they were around, you know, nearly 40% when that goal was set. Now they're at nearly 50%. But there was no deadline set for that goal. And I think that the COVID pandemic also really complicated life and kind of any family's ability to take in a child at the last moment in this way, so they're working on it. I mean, one of the things that was kind of striking to me was when I went to advocates and others nationally to ask them about how Connecticut's doing in general, they were pretty impressed that Connecticut's at almost 50%. It's not an insignificant figure to have gotten to. So they're still working on that 70% number, but that's what would be kind of like an aspirational number for them to get to. So they have faced some challenges getting there.
WSHU: Now, neighboring Rhode Island has done much better. Could you please explain why that is the case?
LT: Yeah, I mean, Rhode Island has 73%. I didn't dig too deep into the why, but I do think that anyone who lives in Connecticut probably has a sense that Rhode Island is a bit of a different animal than Connecticut. It's our neighbor, but at the same time, it's a much smaller state. It's a, it's a, it's a state with just sort of a different economic makeup. So there's just different, I think different dynamics are likely happening there. And Connecticut also had a long way to go. So when Connecticut started out trying to improve its kinship numbers back in 2011, only 17% of kids were going with kin at that time. So it's been a real upward climb for Connecticut.
WSHU: What was your takeaway looking into this? Where does Connecticut stand? What does it look like for families in Connecticut?
LT: It was interesting for me, because I've been on this beat for about a year and a half, and I knew that there was a lot of history with DCF and with, you know, the 1f case that there had, you know, DCF had been under federal monitor up until 2022 so I think part of my takeaway was just like, DCF is, is overcoming, you know, many decades of of challenges, and they're trying to take this research and this kind of nationally accepted approach and apply it, but it's hard. I mean, families can always say yes for a lot of reasons, and the resources are there. But at the same time, the resources for foster families who are kin and not kin alike are not great in terms of the compensation for the maintenance payments and things like that. So it's just challenging, I think, for anybody to take on what Victoria Woody took on. But I think DCF is really kind of pushing hard on this effort and prioritizing it. Because, you know, kids who stay with kin, we didn't really talk about the outcomes, but that's another thing. It's like, they tend not to have to switch schools. They tend to stay in the same home. They're not moved from family to family. They tend to, you know, have fewer absences in school, less discipline. They tend to have fewer mental health issues. They maintain a connection to their culture when they're placed with family. So there are a lot of things that make kinship placements make a lot of sense, and I think DCF is really committed to that idea.
