Recently in Child Welfare News Category

Now just imagine if this child were in foster care (a topic I have written about frequently on this blog).

At 18 months, Kyle Warren started taking a daily antipsychotic drug on the orders of a pediatrician trying to quell the boy’s severe temper tantrums.

Thus began a troubled toddler’s journey from one doctor to another, from one diagnosis to another, involving even more drugs. Autism, bipolar disorder, hyperactivity, insomnia, oppositional defiant disorder. The boy’s daily pill regimen multiplied: the antipsychotic Risperdal, the antidepressant Prozac, two sleeping medicines and one for attention-deficit disorder. All by the time he was 3.

He was sedated, drooling and overweight from the side effects of the antipsychotic medicine. Although his mother, Brandy Warren, had been at her “wit’s end” when she resorted to the drug treatment, she began to worry about Kyle’s altered personality. “All I had was a medicated little boy,” Ms. Warren said. “I didn’t have my son. It’s like, you’d look into his eyes and you would just see just blankness.”

More than 500,000 children and adolescents in America are now taking antipsychotic drugs, according to a September 2009 report by the Food and Drug Administration. Their use is growing not only among older teenagers, when schizophrenia is believed to emerge, but also among tens of thousands of preschoolers.

A Columbia University study recently found a doubling of the rate of prescribing antipsychotic drugs for privately insured 2- to 5-year-olds from 2000 to 2007. Only 40 percent of them had received a proper mental health assessment, violating practice standards from the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

Read the entire story here on the New York Times website.

Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania is a coal-mining town along the Susquehanna River, in the Wyoming Valley. A town of about 40,000 people, it is the county seat for Luzerne, in the northeast part of the state.

It is also the epicenter of one of the most scandalous stories about the justice system in the country, involving allegations of bribery and kickbacks to judges from the operation of private juvenile detention facilities. Its implications for juvenile justice will likely set the tone for reforms for the next several years.

In October 2009, the U.S. Children’s Bureau named University of Michigan Law School the National Quality Improvement Center on the Representation of Children in the Child Welfare System (QIC-ChildRep).

The QIC-ChildRep, is a five-year, $5 million dollar project to gather, develop and communicate knowledge on child representation, promote consensus on the role of the child’s legal representative, and provide one of the first empirically-based analyses of how legal representation for the child might best be delivered.

The Center, which is run by the legendary child advocate Don Duquette, has a great website and promises to answer the following questions:

• What should be the duties and responsibilities of the child’s representative in civil child protection proceedings?
• Who should represent the child in such proceedings? A lawyer? A CASA? A social worker? A team?
• What does the child representative do that makes a difference in a child’s life?
• How can effective representation for the child be accomplished? That is, what organizational structure best delivers legal services for a child?
• By what criteria is effective child representation to be measured?
• How should the child's representative accommodate the child's wishes in setting the goals of the advocacy?

This is a serious initiative which is long overdue and which will significantly advance the representation of children in the child welfare system. I look forward to the results.

Appellate decisions regarding foster care are rare and decisions that focus on foster children are rarer still. So when two decisions appear in the space of about a week they deserve some commentary. One is from the Maryland Court of Appeals, Maryland's highest court, and addresses an issue of great interest: under what circumstances and to what extent does a foster child's attachment to foster parents impact the rights of the biological parents when such parents are confronting the termination of their parental rights? The other case, from the New York Appellate Division, also addresses an issue of interest: can foster children sue foster parents for negligent supervision?

A lesson that can be learned from both cases is that the laws that affect foster care in general and foster children in particular are far from uniform. Each case provides insight into these important issues and suggests how the law may evolve.

The first law review article on the topic of wrongful death of children in foster care has just been published. It is co-authored by Daniel Pollack, Professor at the School of Social Work at Yeshiva University in New York City and a frequent expert witness in child welfare lawsuits, and Gary Popham, Jr., an attorney in Arizona. For a PDF of the article please contact Professor Pollack.

For more articles on ChildLaw by Professor Pollack click here.

This just in from blogger Jeff Katz of the Huffington Post:

The simple fact is that it is virtually impossible to adopt a foster child across state lines in the United States.

In the most recent year for which we have data, states reported that only 71 children in the entire country were adopted from foster care across state lines by non-relatives.

Why is interstate adoption so rare? The primary reason is that we do not have a national adoption system. Instead, we have 50 different child welfare systems, each with its own process for adoption eligibility, recruitment, approval, and training.

Even worse, our current system has created profound disincentives for states to facilitate and support adoptions across state lines.

It is a national scandal that 25,000 children age out of foster care each year while willing adoptive parents are ignored because they are in the wrong state or even the wrong county. It shouldn't be harder for a New Jersey family to adopt a child from Manhattan than Moscow. We must change the incentives in our adoption system so that everyone wins when a hurt child finds a forever family.

Check out the complete post here.

Look who's back! Was it adoption for love? Child trafficking via surrogacy? Or something else? The bizarre case of birdman Stephen Melinger is back in the news, this time in a New York Times article on the perils and pitfalls of surrogacy. Do check out this story in the Times, but just remember from Melinger to womb outsourcing, snowflake adoptions and sperm donor introductions for lesbians, this blog gave you the scoop first.

Powerful mood-altering drugs were prescribed to hundreds of Illinois foster children without the required consent of state child welfare officials, a Chicago Tribune analysis of government data has found.

And increasing numbers of young wards were diagnosed with bipolar disorder and given a class of anti-psychotic medicines that some physicians consider risky for youths because they can cause such side effects as metabolic abnormalities and pronounced weight gain.

Psychiatrist Michael Naylor, MD, who reviews psychotropic medicine regimens for DCFS, said that he worries that "marketing efforts" by pharmaceutical companies are driving increasing diagnoses of bipolar disorder leading to more prescriptions for antipsychotic medicines, and that some "physicians are skirting the consent laws."

A separate report by the University of Illinois at Chicago's department of psychiatry finds that an Illinois psychiatric hospital used medications as chemical restraints on kids. Streamwood Behavioral Health Center, "one of Illinois' largest psychiatric hospitals, dosed foster children with dangerous combinations of mood-altering" medications, "sometimes using the medicines as 'chemical restraints' to control youth who needed counseling."

The report also found that the center, "which has treated roughly 475 Department of Children and Family Services wards since 2007, is 'so understaffed as to be counter-therapeutic,'" and that "hospital staff resorted to extraordinarily high rates of emergency psychiatric medications, physical restraints, and seclusion."

On December 14, 2009, at 9:00 a.m. E.T., the Urban Institute and the Center for the Study of Social Policy will host an audio Webcast on the impact of the Adoption and Safe Families Act on the safety, permanence, and well-being of abused and neglected children.

The nearly 2-hour session will be moderated by Susan Notkin, New York Director, Center for the Study of Social Policy. Panelists include:

• Olivia Golden, Fellow, Urban Institute
• John Mattingly, Commissioner, New York City's Administration for Children's Services
• Carmen Nazario, Assistant Secretary for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
• Jeanette Vega, writer, "Rise" magazine
• Nancy Young, Director, National Center on Substance Abuse and Child Welfare

To obtain further information and register for this Webcast, visit www.urban.org/events/Safe-Families-Act.cfm. Information about attending the session in Washington, DC, is also available on that page.

The sold out crowd at the ninth annual Helping Children Soar benefit enjoyed a beautiful evening on the Kennedy Center's Roof Terrace Restaurant among fellow CLC supporters, advocates and leaders in the legal community. The Honorable Eric H. Holder, Jr. received the 2009 Distinguished Child Advocate award. Mr. Holder was recognized for his long time support of CLC and dedication to the District of Columiba's children. Here are two great photos from this amazing event.




For more pictures from this fabulous event visit CLC's 2009 Benefit Photo Gallery

A 1970s-era Texas law that allows parents to show "harmful material" to their children has come under fire after a prosecutor said he couldn't file charges against a man accused of forcing his eight- and nine-year-old daughters to watch hardcore online pornography.

The law apparently was meant to protect the privacy of parents who wanted to teach children about sex education, but it states clearly that parents can't be prosecuted for showing "harmful material" to their children.

Randall County District Attorney James Farren has asked for an opinion from Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott about a law Farren says makes no sense and needs to be changed.

Farren says the argument that government has no right to tell parents how to raise their children doesn't fly here. "The government should and does respect the right of parents to raise their children, but that doesn't mean a parent can do anything they want to their child. Obviously, the government can step in when parents are acting in a way that is sufficiently detrimental to the mental health and the physical health of children. I understand that this is a conservative community. I'm conservative. I don't like big government. I don't want government too intrusive, and I certainly don't want government intruding into the family more than necessary. . . . but I don't think very many people would believe that it's appropriate to show true pornographic material to their children simply because they're the parent and they choose to do that - just because they're twisted enough, they want to watch it, that they then want to subject their children to it."

More on this story here.

When I created the Children's Law Center in 1996, my biggest dream (and worst nightmare) was that we'd have enough money to keep the doors open for a month. Well I guess I must have been dreaming in color because now we have VIDEOS! See why CLC is the nation's leading grassroots child advocacy organization. I couldn't be prouder!