The financial incentives are wrong. The consequences for children are wrong. The purpose of my testimony is to demonstrate to you that the foster care caseload can also be reduced by paying attention to those children who do not need to go through the front door of entry into the foster care system at all. Adoption is one means of achieving these goals. A simple change of custody is another means of achieving these goals which has been too often overlooked because of the skewed economic incentives present in the current foster care system.
Mother has custody and father pays child support.
State places child in foster care because of mother's neglect. Father is fit and seeks custody but is resisted by state foster care bureaucracy. The proposed change is in keeping with the public understanding that family preservation is desirable but has been too narrowly focused on subsidies to the one person who may be the most dysfunctional individual in the child's entire family. Current practice among caseworkers is to consider only the parent from whose home the child was taken and to provide neither notice nor opportunity to be heard for the noncustodial parent. In most cases, the caseworker does not even make inquiry to determine the identity of the noncustodial parent.