To Protect Vulnerable Children, We Have to See Their Parents

Reframing child welfare to include the adults in the system.

Praxis organizes around the major issues of our time, which we call Opportunities for Redemptive Imagination (ORIs). Within each, we see the possibility for alternative imagination—for Christians around the world to think differently and build accordingly.

The following framework on child well-being and foster care was authored in 2024 by Praxis Partner Andy Crouch and Venture Partner Charlee Tchividjian, in collaboration with members of Praxis’s Foster Care & Adoption ORI Project.

Our Reality: The Child Welfare System Today

Child welfare in the United States is simultaneously an achievement, a tragedy, and a travesty.

It is an achievement in that only in recent times have entire nations set up protective systems for children threatened with maltreatment. Countless dedicated people work within and alongside the child welfare system to provide an array of supporting services for families, children, and youth.

The system has uniquely established itself as a refuge of last resort for children whose parents, in the state’s judgment, cannot or will not care for them. All this is an essential expression of the pursuit of the common good, which places the protection of the vulnerable at the heart of political and social life.

It is a tragedy in that, inherently, it is largely a reactive system that often disrupts families as a first response instead of a last resort. Despite the Family First Preservation Services Act, the prevention-focused federal legislation passed in 2018, child welfare’s fractured mechanisms still gravitate toward interventions that predominantly treat the symptoms of family stress and separation.

Consequently, the number of children in foster care and those aging out has continued to increase, placing a cruel weight on an already overburdened system. Some individuals do find meaningful work and fulfillment through their role in the system—especially the adults who join it by choice, like foster families and caseworkers. But even they tend to leave their time in the system with wounds that need care.

And it is a travesty in that, in spite of many good intentions, too often it does further damage to those entrusted to its care, disempowers those it purports to serve, and perpetuates multigenerational cycles of human suffering. Like many systems in the modern nation-state, it operates bureaucratically, meaning that its mechanisms become impersonal, its officials’ incentives become misaligned, and its priorities become the avoidance of blame and the minimization of genuine responsibility.

Its failure points are most keenly felt by low-income communities and people of color. It is sadly all too common that the system can perpetuate rather than repair most of the harms it was set up to protect against. A 2011 study found that 70% of former foster-care youth in the US Midwest had been arrested at least once by age 26 (82% of males and a striking 59% of females). The “foster-care-to-prison pipeline,” though by no means inevitable, is the clearest example of the way a system designed to protect seems in practice to lead to further waves of institutionalization.

Perhaps counterintuitively, then, we see the US child welfare system as an extraordinary opportunity for redemptive action. The most broken places are the ones where redemption matters most, since redemption fundamentally means setting free those shackled by history and their current circumstances, through costly acts of sacrificial love.

And we believe, in contrast with how the system is commonly portrayed and understood, that at every single node of the system—communities, caseworkers, foster families, neighbors and kin, mothers and fathers, and the affected children—there are human beings with profound capacity for love. There is no better word for what they most need than redemption.

All redemption takes place in environments with a history of exploitation, which is more than and different from vulnerability. Vulnerability is an inescapable reality of every human life and community, part of the human condition. But exploitation takes advantage of and reinforces vulnerability rather than matching it with authority—the capacity to act meaningfully even in a broken and risky world. Exploitation, especially when entrenched over time, inscribes on persons and whole communities a sense of futility, passivity, and resignation.

The travesty, however, is that while the child welfare system exists to aid vulnerable children, the mechanisms currently in place for child and family well-being optimize for intervention in cases of abuse, or behaviors rooted in pathological detachment from the good of a child.

Abuse will never be entirely eliminated, and it is right for the state to intervene, and others to step in, to care for children who are victims of abuse. Right now, however, the majority of foster-care cases involve the broader category of neglect, an elastic determination that often includes cases where a family simply lacks the resources they would provide if they received the right kind of support.

These two categories, while having specific meaning in child-welfare contexts, illuminate a broader reality in the whole system. Abuse fundamentally communicates, “I see you, but I don’t love you.” Neglect simply, and devastatingly, communicates, “I don’t see you.” This is, in fact, rarely the case for parents who are struggling to provide for their children. But it is at the heart of what is broken in much of the foster-care system today.

The current risks of exploitation in foster care come from the ways that almost all the participants in the system find themselves unseen in crucial ways. Specifically:

Children

Children are, of course, brought into the system because of officially recognized neglect and abuse. They can be severed from their families of origin and repeatedly and unpredictably cut off from foster families and caseworkers they had begun to trust, with the trauma being repeated with each additional “placement.” Their deepest needs can be overlooked even by families and caseworkers entrusted with their care. They can easily learn helplessness early on in their experience within the system, matched later by self-destructive attempts to regain their own agency and sense of belonging and efficacy in the world.

Parents

Mothers and fathers whose children become entangled in the system are thrust into a hostile legal process, facing the overwhelming power of the state. They are weighed down with strenuous and nearly impossible expectations and timelines for reunification or case closure. This heightened surveillance can further elevate family distress, making it harder for parents to meet the system’s demands, ultimately hindering their ability to regain custody and restore their family.

Mothers are often burdened with an effective presumption of incapacity if not guilt, and are not routinely provided with the representation they would be entitled to in a criminal proceeding. They are threatened with the temporary or permanent loss of custody of their own children, one of the most painful experiences any mother can bear.

Fathers, though potentially overlooked if they are only intermittently present or entirely absent from their child’s and partner’s life, are also stigmatized and frequently excluded from decisions about the child’s and mother’s welfare. But they also should and can bear responsibility for the well-being of the child they fathered. They suffer moral, emotional, and spiritual injury when they cannot fulfill this role.

Kinship families

Relatives of the children can be the best option for a child in foster care, giving them the opportunity to live with adults they already know and trust. The vast majority of children have adults in their lives who could care for them, but methods of identifying these adults are not as effective as they could be, particularly in time-sensitive situations. Too often these potential caring households are literally unseen, denying them the opportunity to come alongside their own relatives at a time of crisis.

Foster families

In providing home environments for children who have to be removed from their families of origin and for whom kinship care cannot be found, foster families serve a crucial role from a mixture of motivations, which can include relying on their work as foster parents for financial support.

But the very high turnover rate of foster families suggests that they generally receive inadequate support for the difficult challenge of caring for traumatized children. Early idealism, sometimes increased by well-meaning campaigns by churches and other religious organizations that encourage a savior and hero mentality in those they recruit, quickly turns into frustration and flight. In some cases, they become a barrier rather than a bridge to the reunification of families, which should be the aspiration of everyone in the system.

Caseworkers

Caring professionals evaluate situations of potential neglect and abuse and make decisions about a child’s placement and trajectory through the system. But their caseloads are impossibly high, their financial compensation is notably low (even those who earn a master’s degree in social work, which is not required for many casework jobs, earn only about $46,000 per year), and the emotional demands of their work are exceptional.

Like foster families, they too exit the system at very high rates (in the year 2022, one in three caseworkers in Texas left their positions). Every such departure not only adds to the burden of the system to recruit and train replacements but leaves dozens or hundreds of children suddenly cut off from a person who offered them some level of personal continuity and connection.

Communities

Local nonprofits, agencies, churches, and volunteers are crucial yet flawed players in the child welfare system. They can lack meaningful impact measurements and deliver uncoordinated, duplicated services that fail to provide dignified support. Their focus on narrow client criteria skews results, and their siloed, slow-to-partner initiatives reflect a deeper problem. Culturally competent service providers are scarce. The nobility trap of volunteerism leads to well-intentioned but ultimately ineffective efforts, perpetuating the system’s failures rather than addressing the real needs of vulnerable families.

Redemptive action in the child welfare system, then, requires addressing the needs of all these participants, all of them vulnerable in different ways. And it especially requires not trading off or neglecting the needs of one group, since all are needed to see families’ and children’s lives restored to wholeness.

A Redemptive Framework

The child welfare system exists to protect children, but true protection requires expanding our vision. Paradoxically, it is critical that we not limit our redemptive imagination to the child’s trajectory and story but consider the entire family’s well-being, ensuring that support systems empower rather than constrain the potential for healing and growth. Failure to do so not only leaves the other neglected parties in the system unrestored—it actually perpetuates systemic brokenness.

After all, the most powerful possible intervention to benefit every single participant in the system would be one that prevents the need to invoke the system in the first place. If prevention were possible even in a meaningful fraction of cases, caseloads would be reduced, budgets would be relieved, and primary and secondary trauma would be diminished.

Prevention in this context can mean identifying a wider circle of neighbors and kin who already have relationships with the child and parents. We should be especially alert to the unique ability of churches and other religious communities to meet emotional, spiritual, and material needs in an integrated and relationally rich way.

There has also been encouraging early progress in deploying technology to facilitate “care-sharing” programs that mobilize local community members to meet families’ needs. The bridges built through these programs can pave the way for even more relational and transformational interventions, such as host homes for parents who choose to place their child temporarily with a trusted family, parent advocates who provide support during a season of crisis, and sustainable housing solutions.

Above all, however, prevention means restoring a safe, stable, and nurturing household for the child—an environment that both Christian ethics and much rigorous research confirm is by far the best environment for children’s flourishing. And when such families are in distress—and in some sense they always are if there is risk of abuse and neglect—this means that the most redemptive thing that could happen for the child is to have redemption happen in the life of the child’s mother and father.

Out of a well-intentioned concern for children’s well-being, many actors inside the child welfare system as well as outside charities, including Christian charities and churches, have paid limited attention to the possibility of restoration for mothers and fathers. This has sometimes been a liability of the otherwise admirable Christian commitment to adoption, which has been accelerated in recent years through intentional campaigns to awaken Christians to this fundamental responsibility of care.

Because of the inherent vulnerability (not just exploitation) of human life, there will always be “orphans”—the biblical word for children who need a loving family to take them in permanently as their own children—just as God has indeed adopted each of us. And it would be foolish not to plan for situations where, in spite of all the best efforts, children are effectively orphaned even while their parents are living, because those parents cannot or will not rise to the challenge of continuing to care for them.

But focusing only on adoption can lead to ignoring the possibility, if the child’s parents are still alive, that restoration and healing could happen such that God’s “Plan A” could be regained. In the worst case—and this is not theoretical—parents eager to adopt a child can aid and abet state systems that want a quick fix to a deep problem by legally removing a child from their biological parents’ custody.

Such a step may seem like a definitive solution to the adoptive family and the court that authorizes the adoption, but what if it would have been possible for the mother, father, or both to be restored to their God-given role in their child’s life, thus avoiding multiple generations of trauma? Adoption is a beautiful, compassionate, and necessary response to the reality of orphaned children—but it is not a sufficient redemptive response when there is any hope that a whole family, not just the child, could be restored to flourishing together.

Acknowledging the many complex contributors to the breakdown of child and family well-being, the bottom line is that the most redemptive thing for children will almost always be the most redemptive thing for the adults in their lives—above all their mother and father, but also the families and caseworkers who care for them for a time.

Any redemption that can happen for adults will be redemptive for a child.

And this in turn generates our core thesis: in pursuit of truly caring for children at risk, many urgent redemptive opportunities in foster care revolve around new levels of care and support for adults, not only for children themselves.

Opportunities for Redemptive Imagination

We begin with caseworkers, who bear far more of a physical, spiritual, and emotional burden than is often recognized. The redemptive opportunities here start with the conditions of their employment, which are ultimately set by state officials guided and limited by legislation, and could be greatly improved by direct advocacy to elected officials. This will undoubtedly include better training, educational opportunities, employee care and appreciation, and competitive wages and benefits. But we see the greatest opportunity, as is almost always the case, not so much in rule-making as in relationship-building.

There are also massive redemptive opportunities to serve foster families. There have been significant advances, many of them led by Christians, in recruiting families to see providing foster care as a calling they could embrace. Because there will always be children who have to spend time in the system for their own protection, any investment in identifying healthy, capable families who can play this role is valuable. Equipping foster families with better insights and relationship-building practices for working with birth parents during temporary separations is crucial for creating positive outcomes. Recruiting needs to be matched more evenly by retaining, and it is in the retention and sustainability of foster families that we see the greatest opportunities. In one study, almost 75% of foster homes stopped taking children within 2 years of opening. Training in trauma-informed care, prayer and emotional support, and sharing the many burdens of this kind of temporary parenting are all areas where new efforts and new ventures could greatly reduce turnover and greatly increase health and effectiveness.

There is every reason to increase momentum in mobilizing kinship families, including implementing technology to help caseworkers identify kin and connect them with children in need. Research coordinated by the New America Foundation suggests that when systems adopt more effective kin-finding practices—including dedicated kin-finding responsibility, expanding the legal definition of kin, or maintaining a shared list of kin they can achieve initial kinship placement rates in excess of 80%. However, the work begins before a point of crisis: knowing a child’s relatives and their contact information is one element of being seen and known within a larger community of support. Kinship families need training and emotional support, along with straightforward paths to receiving financial support when necessary.

The next redemptive opportunity is in the area of the support and restoration of parents. There are effective interventions that help fathers who have become estranged from their partners and children reclaim their God-given calling to active love. This kind of work urgently needs scaling with particular attention to the needs of strategic subgroups, such as those currently incarcerated, those returning to the community from incarceration, and those who came of age without any father active in their lives. There is also a role, whose importance has been demonstrated by the research of Raj Chetty’s team at Harvard, for mobilizing fathers to be more active in their communities, because the simple presence of men who are actively fathering has beneficial outcomes in the lives of all the children in their neighborhood.

We believe, likewise, that there is far more that can be done to support mothers who find themselves at risk of losing their children to the foster care system. Mother-centric, dignifying support is crucial, including access to vital services such as affordable daycare and employment opportunities conducive to single-parent households. We can create non-judgmental spaces where mothers can find true belonging and relational advocacy. These environments should foster deep connections, allowing mothers to not only receive support but also contribute meaningfully to others who share similar experiences. We can offer learning opportunities that unlock their innate abilities to raise their children in environments of love, safety, and connection.

There also may be an opportunity to create a legally recognized role for volunteer or privately paid “court-appointed special advocates” for mothers and fathers who face legal proceedings related to their parental role. The CASA movement has played a critical role in providing children with their own advocate as their case moves through family court and related systems, and it is indeed important that children benefit from an advocate who can single-mindedly speak on behalf of their interests. But countless mothers and fathers who are caught up in the system also deserve advocacy—someone who believes in them and can help the system, including the courts, plot a path toward their restoration as legal parents.

Communities—local nonprofits, faith-based organizations, schools, and civic groups—hold extraordinary redemptive potential in uniting these diverse entities to provide coordinated, holistic support to families. Rather than duplicating efforts or focusing narrowly on specific client criteria, communities have untapped potential to work together to create a more seamless safety net for families at risk. This requires a shift from charity-driven, transactional interventions to long-term, relational investments that honor the dignity and potential of every family member. Equipping communities to mobilize their unique strengths—whether in providing stable housing, emotional support, or advocacy—can transform local ecosystems into places of true belonging, where fewer children and families are unseen or unsupported.

Finally, we return to the heart of these opportunities: caring for children. While ideally foster care would be needed only for a short period of time, even the briefest exposure to it becomes part of a person’s whole story, which requires attention to their needs as they grow into adulthood. In 2021, more than 19,000 youth aged out of foster care with­out reunit­ing with their par­ents or hav­ing a permanent home. In younger children, permanence might be defined as a stable home and family; in youth who are exiting foster care, we believe it is crucial to build a network of reliable connections they can count on throughout their adult lives.

While there is no simple substitute for a healthy family of origin, over and over those without conventional families have nonetheless grown into adults of wisdom and courage, having been sustained by kin, by neighbors who take on the role and responsibilities of kin, by foster families, and by compassionate caseworkers, agencies, and churches. Indeed, such networks of care are the essential ingredient for prevention, not only intervention, as more of us choose to be family for the most vulnerable around us.

The Redemptive Horizon

If we build the capacity to intervene redemptively in all these areas, we believe we can see dramatic changes for the better in the US foster care system. Indeed, we might eventually see that system shrink dramatically to focus on its most important function, providing a safe haven for children immediately at risk of abuse, while other pathways emerge to support parents in recovering their capacity to love and care for their children well. We might see caseworkers who can sustain the energy needed to come alongside the children in their care without burnout. We might see richer networks of kinship and community care that ensure that no one is neglected and that all are seen.

The greatest tragedy and travesty of our current system also offers the greatest hope: the majority of the parents caught up in it deeply long to be able to love and care for their child even when they are currently failing to do so. These families, often the most marginalized, possess an inherent dignity, agency, and capability that must be recognized and empowered, not overlooked or dismissed. They deserve redemption—another chance, another and better life. And if they find it, their children will, too.