I have served on the Arizona Foster Review Board for 21 years. A few years ago we had a case in which a mother and her 3-year old daughter, Kiley, moved to Arizona from Ohio after the mother’s divorce from Kiley’s father. Although he knew the location of the mother and his daughter, the father made no effort to keep in contact with them. The mother remarried but when Kiley as 4 1/2, she was removed from the mother and step-father and placed in foster care due to domestic violence and other issues. The mother’s parental rights were terminated and Kiley was placed with a foster-adopt family to which she quickly became bonded. Almost three years later, when Kiley was 7, the DCS case worker located Kiley’s father in Ohio in an effort to place Kiley with him. Kiley did not remember her father; she thought that her step-father was her ‘real’ father. When asked in an interview about his daughter’s activities and likes and dislikes, Kiley’s biological father knew nothing about her. He also refused to acknowledge that Kiley had suffered any trauma from the violent environment from which she was removed. Kiley, on the other hand, named her foster mother, “Mommy Cindy” and her foster father, brothers, and sister when asked who was in her family. The psychologist who was contacted to perform a bonding assessment described the only in-person visit between Kiley and her biological father as having “gone poorly.” Conversely, when he observed Kiley with her foster mother, he reported that “their interaction was seamless.” The psychologist concluded that the “prognosis that the father will be able to demonstrate minimally adequate parenting is poor” and that there was a “potential traumatic emotional cost” of moving Kiley to her father in Ohio based on Kiley’s “lack of attachment and relationship with her father.” An additional concern was that the father also had 6 other children with four women and a drug arrest background. Despite the psychologist’s recommendations, the case plan of adoption, Kiley’s 3 years with her future adoptive family, and fierce objections from the foster parents as well as sadness and despair from Kiley, herself, she was moved to her father in Ohio.
This story is not uncommon. Sometimes, years after a child is placed in a foster/adopt home with adoption processes well underway, a relative is found or “pops up” and the child is moved from what may have been the only loving home the child has ever known, to be placed with “family” who do not know her at all, handing the child another traumatic event on top of the one that brought the child into foster care in the first place.
Another recent case involved a substance exposed newborn placed in a foster-adopt home shortly after birth. The foster mother drove from the family’s rural home over 150 miles to Phoenix Children’s Hospital weekly to attend to the child’s drug-exposure-caused withdrawal symptoms, eating difficulties, and developmental disabilities for 15 months (a time span that surely encompasses the period during which the child formed an attachment to the foster mother) until a great aunt and uncle from another state appeared and was awarded custody of the child by the judge. The great aunt and uncle did not know the baby or the baby’s many problems. I testified as an expert witness in that case that moving the child away would be traumatic for the child on many levels. I was beyond shocked at the court’s decision to move the child.
Fortunately, Arizona lawmakers addressed these problems in August of 2018 through modifications to Arizona Revised Statutes, Title 8 - changes that would have changed the outcome in both of these scenarios.
For Kiley, modifications to ARS 5-514.03(A) addressing kinship care would have given her a better chance of remaining with the family that she loved by replacing “the program shall promote the placement of the child with the child’s relative for kinship foster care” with “the placement of the child who is in the custody of the department shall be determined by the best interests of the child (emphasis added.) Kiley’s best interest would have been to remain with her potential adoptive home which had been providing a loving home for almost 3 years.
For the infant in the second scenario, kin who appear 15 months after a foster adopt placement would not be considered for placement because of this added time limit: “The department shall use due diligence in an initial search to identify and notify adult relatives of the child or person with significant relationship with the child within 30 days after the child is taken into temporary custody.” (Emphasis added.)
An added time limit to find a permanent home for infants in care would also have prevented the child’s move to a great aunt and uncle she did not know:
ARS 8-503(A)(10): (The department) shall “maintain a goal that infants who are taken into custody by the department be placed in a prospective permanent placement within one year after the filing of a dependency petition.
Also, ARS 8-514(B)3 gives some foster parents equality with kin: “A foster parent or kinship caregiver with whom a child under three years of age has resided for nine months or more is presumed to be a person who has a significant relationship with the child.”
The infant had been with the potential adoptive home that provided extraordinary care for serious effects of drug exposure for over 15 months giving the foster parents equality with kin. She was exactly where she should have stayed.