Foster Care Ruins Kids

May 1, 2008 permalink

On CNN's Larry King Live Dr Phil McGraw described the prospects in store for the hundreds of FLDS children now in foster care:

KING: Let's turn to the polygamy matter. If the allegations of abuse are true, do you see any problem with all of these children in foster care?

MCGRAW: I see huge problems with it, Larry. I think we're in a situation here that there is not necessarily a good option. Now, think about this: there are only a certain number of these children that were believed to be at risk. But, yet, all of the children were taken out and put into foster care.

Now, I've said this before, the statistics tell us that 73 percent of all children that go into foster care wind up on the street or in jail. So, that means that if you apply those numbers to these 416 children, 304 of them would be predicted to wind up on the street or in jail. Is that a good alternative? And I don't think it is. And I don't think that it makes sense to take all of the children out of this situation without doing a case-by-case study, to see which one of these children are at risk and which ones are not.

Now, clearly, the principles that seem to govern the FLDS would be imminent danger for these children. But somehow or another, you have to figure a way to train these people, create an open door policy, get monitoring, get access and try to get these children back with their biological mothers, but with protection, and monitoring.

Source: CNN transcripts