The following editorial originally appeared in The Seattle Times:
The experience of foster care can be deeply damaging to children. But so is leaving them with neglectful parents navigating addiction or struggling to maintain stable housing. Striking the balance that best promotes child safety is a fraught and complicated undertaking. Current outcomes show Washington is a long way from cracking the code.
Every year, Patrick Dowd, the state’s ombuds for families and children, reviews deaths and near-fatalities among kids who were on the radar of Child Protective Services. These “critical incidents” surged 38 percent between 2022 and 2023, leaving 49 children dead last year and another 53 victimized by severe maltreatment.
This dismal trend is due partly to legislators passing a law that made it harder to remove kids from drug-addicted parents at the precise moment that opioids were flooding Washington. They adjusted that this year, so it’s too early to evaluate those results.
More broadly, the alarming numbers show that what may look like an obvious answer to preventing child maltreatment — i.e., getting more families connected to services — is a lot harder than it sounds.
True, a significant portion of critical incidents jeopardizing kids can be blamed on access to fentanyl. Children accidentally overdosing on their parents’ drugs accounted for 67 of the fatalities and near-deaths Dowd investigated in 2023 — well over half.
But nearly one-third occurred because parents were co-sleeping with their infants — due to homelessness or lack of space for a separate bed — and accidentally suffocated them. In one case, a homeless parent was sleeping with their child in a car. Several other children died in places where families were living without heat, power or running water.
By law, lack of housing alone is not sufficient justification for taking children from their parents. But the reality sketched in Dowd’s report complicates the picture around improving child welfare, which has focused largely on curbing the need for it by getting more parents into drug treatment.
His findings show that keeping children safe straddles many interconnected areas of public policy, particularly housing. Lawmakers should continue to support programs that tackle this intersection, such as a pilot project to subsidize rent for families at risk of losing their kids, which Washington made permanent in 2023.
That effort required cooperation between various county-level housing agencies and the Department of Children, Youth and Families. It took years. But dozens of families are now participating, with many fewer kids growing up in foster care.
Child maltreatment is not a challenge to be shouldered by one entity alone, nor any single official, but something that must bring people together across state government to create greater safety for Washington’s kids.
