When Parents Are the Threat

By Ta-Nehisi Paul Coates/ Rochester

The baby girl named Chloe was born prematurely, and when routine tests showed that she had been exposed to cocaine, a staff member at Rochester Methodist Hospital in Olmsted County, Minn., contacted local child-protection officials. In the past, Chloe would simply have been moved into the foster-care system, and her mother Oksana, 34, who immigrated to the U.S. from Belarus nine years ago, would have had a tough time getting her out. But Minnesota is taking a new approach toward parents who are deemed to be a threat to their children. Social workers met with Oksana, who has asked that her last name not be used, and worked out a strategy to help her become a better mother so she could get her baby back. Under their plan, Oksana agreed to get off drugs, secure a safe place to live, make regular postnatal hospital visits and, most important, enlist the support of family and friends to monitor her progress and her treatment of Chloe. It could be called the it-takes-a-village approach to child welfare.

Because she has no relatives in this country, Oksana turned to those of Scott, Chloe's father. "We didn't have much of a relationship," says Scott's mother Deb, who doesn't want her last name used either. "I was very angry about the drug stuff. It affected a lot of people." But Deb, despite her misgivings about Scott and Oksana, had visited Chloe in the hospital and agreed to be a part of the effort to keep her granddaughter safe.

There never seems to be a shortage of horror stories about children neglected or abused by their parents. Earlier this year, within a span of just three weeks, Nixzmary Brown, 7, and Quachon Brown, 4 (the two were not related), died allegedly at the hands of their parents in New York City. In February a North Carolina woman was charged with murdering her 4-year-old adopted son; investigators say she routinely beat her kids with a plastic pipe. In most states, social workers called in to deal with abusive situations face the choice of leaving a child in a potentially dangerous home or placing him or her in a sometimes equally alienating foster-care system. But Minnesota officials believe most families can be kept together and the children kept safe if dysfunctional parents are given proper help.

In the case of Oksana, the help included a plan that called on Scott's relatives to test her randomly with a home kit if they thought she was using drugs. If Oksana tested positive, her in-laws agreed to take Chloe but only temporarily. None of Scott's family members were up to keeping her permanently, since many of them had either already raised or were raising youngsters of their own. So Oksana ran the risk of losing her daughter permanently to the state's foster-care system, if she was unable to stay clean for a long period of time.

Plans such as the one Oksana accepted still use the threat of removing a child from the home, but they also encourage troubled parents to enlist a support network--birth families, friends, in-laws, neighbors, nonprofit and government agencies--capable of interceding before a crisis develops. The results of this early-intervention approach, called Alternative Response, have been impressive. In Olmsted County, one of 20 counties that took part in a three-year pilot project, the recidivism rate for parents who went through the program tumbled from 16.1% in 2002 to just 5% in 2004.

Pleased with a program that appeared to save both children and money (the state saved roughly $200 a family per year), Minnesota took Alternative Response statewide in 2004. Several other states, including Missouri and Virginia, have embarked on similar projects.

In Minnesota, where all social services are administered at the county level, there has been intracounty debate over whether some cases are too unstable for Alternative Response. Sue Easterbrooks, program director for early intervention at St. David's Child Development and Family Services in Minneapolis, complains that county officials sometimes refer to Alternative Response cases that need sturdier support than relatives and neighbors can provide. "Some of these families are not low risk--they are high risk," says Easterbrooks.

Cases like Karla and John Baker's are the most controversial. Police raided their home in February 2005, suspecting that the couple was running a meth lab. The Bakers, who turned out to be users rather than dealers, were charged with endangering the welfare of their son Justin, 12. After the Bakers were able to plea-bargain their way out of jail time, Cindy Finch, an Olmsted County social worker, offered an ultimatum: come up with a life plan or lose Justin permanently.

Finch convened a family meeting that included Justin's parents, his maternal grandparents, a maternal aunt and Karla and John's 22-year-old daughter. The session gave Justin a chance to express his feelings. "I finally got to talk about it," Justin says of his parents' drug use. "I just told them I knew what they did, but I felt safe with them." Even so, Finch had him make a list of family and friends he would call if his parents ever made him feel unsafe. Meanwhile, all the relatives agreed to visit the family twice a week to make sure they were holding together. Most controversial, however, was Finch's proposal that if Karla and John should decide to use drugs, they do so when Justin was not home but at a relative's, to protect him and avoid losing custody. "We don't encourage parents' using," says Christie Bausman, another county social worker, "but we know that they might. If they're going to use, we ask them, 'How can you use when your children aren't around and in a way that won't damage them?'"

John Baker says he and Karla won't need those support options because they have been drug free since the arrest. But he says he appreciates the attitude behind them. "They treated us like we were still people," he says. "They didn't point fingers at us. They said, 'We're not going to tell you you can't use. But if you choose to use, we want you to have these plans for Justin.'" This laissez-faire approach may make parents feel more comfortable, but it troubles critics like Marcia Robinson Lowry, executive director of Children's Rights. "Drug use has consequences beyond the five minutes when you're using," says Lowry.

A few months after Chloe's birth, Oksana met with members of Scott's family. She owned up to her past drug use, insisted that she had quit cold turkey and asked for their support. For their part, Oksana and Scott began to establish a caring relationship with their daughter while she lived in a foster home. Oksana visited Chloe regularly, starting with a few hours at her social worker's office and gradually increasing the time until Chloe was spending two nights a week with her parents. "We spent a lot of time cuddling," says Oksana. In February Oksana and Scott regained custody of Chloe, now a 10-month-old toddler. And Chloe's foster parents babysit every two weeks, thus affording Oksana and Scott a much needed break and an additional degree of support.