Americans love to love their children and their elders. Politicians still campaign by kissing babies and platitudes abound about how we care about the young and the old: Respect your elders; leave no child behind; the greatest generation; our children are our future; it takes a village. But when the rubber hits the road, it is the young and the old — the most vulnerable in our society — who find themselves on the wrong end of the budget ax.
One of the most recent examples is a proposed change in the law that will make it harder for grandparents who are acting as foster parents for their grandchildren to receive financial help. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, Rosales vs. Thompson, last year ruled that under federal law poor grandparents who were acting as foster parents to their grandchildren were entitled to foster-care payments.
But the administration’s budget proposes to change the law to limit the entitlement and reduce expenditures for those foster children. The Fiscal Year 2005 budget proposal treats this change as a fait accompli, decreasing by $119 million the money allocated for the Department of Health and Human Services’ (DHHS) Foster Care, Adoption Assistance and the Independent Living programs. If Congress goes along with the administration’s budget proposal now under consideration, the quality of life for many foster children and their grandparents will be altered dramatically.
Children in foster care are more likely than others to have special needs, but studies show that children placed with grandparents fare better than children placed in non-kin foster-care homes. Foster children who are raised by relatives, primarily grandparents, have fewer behavioral and academic difficulties than children raised by foster parents to whom they are not related. They enjoy better physical and mental health as well.
The number of children placed in foster care across the nation has skyrocketed, while the number of people willing to be foster parents has declined. Fortunately, many grandparents have stepped in to help out. Social-services agencies have been placing large numbers of children in the homes of their grandparents. Foster-care placements with grandparents have tripled in the last decade. Yet only 15 percent of grandparents who provide foster care receive federal payments to help provide basic necessities to their grandchildren, many of whom have been abused and neglected.
Foster-care payments are essential for poor grandparents to be able to provide food, shelter and other necessities to their grandchildren. And because many foster children have physical or mental disabilities, grandparents need foster-care payments in order to afford the numerous services these children require.
Before Rosales, the DHHS argued that federal law allowed regulations that made grandparents who take in a grandchild ineligible for foster-care payments, unless the parents of the child were eligible for public aid or the grandparents qualified for Aid for Dependent Children as of July 1996. The 9th Circuit Court found that the law could not reasonably be read this way. Now the administration proposes to change the statute to make sure that it does read that way.
AARP recognizes the need for fiscal restraint, but the budget should not be balanced on the backs of poor grandparents and abused and neglected children. The change in policy not only hurts those who are most vulnerable but is short-sighted. The impact would only intensify the poverty of the grandparents and increase the likelihood of children being neglected. If grandparents are forced to stop providing foster care for their grandchildren because of financial considerations, the children will be put back in the foster-care system and ultimately will be cared for by people not related to them, who will get even more costly foster-care payments.
While some people consider it the moral obligation of grandparents to take in their grandchildren, moral obligations do not put food on the table or shoes on the feet of these children. Needless to say, the emotional cost to children from shuffling them from home to home is incalculable.
AARP urges the conference committee now looking at the budget to recognize the service that grandparent caregivers provide the children in their homes. Let’s make our budget policies match our good feelings for children and grandparents. We urge Congress to reject the proposed budget item and any statute change that would deny their grandchildren foster-care benefits.
John Rother is the policy director of the AARP.
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