Philosophy

Every child and youth has the right to a permanent, loving family. When a child or youth becomes involved in child welfare, the system must act quickly—and carefully—to ensure that the child or youth has a permanent family who can care for them.

First and foremost, that permanent family should be their current family. The child welfare system must provide diligent efforts to keep children and youth at home safely and/or with extended family or fictive kin. Diligent efforts include purposeful, supportive, and culturally responsive engagement of the child’s parents/caregivers to help them access and benefit from services plus dedicated efforts to address and eliminate barriers affecting the caregivers’ ability to engage successfully with services. Such efforts should include searching for and connecting with relatives who can support the family in reunification and potentially be a resource if reunification is not possible. (See Families Rising’s statements on Kinship Care and Permanency Planning/Continuity of Relationships.) Diligent efforts should be considered the minimum acceptable standard, and agencies are encouraged to do more to ensure that services are provided and that families are able to access and benefit from them.

To encourage reunification, the system must have adequate funding to and require timely provision of client-centered, culturally responsive, accessible, affordable, and targeted services to the child’s or youth’s parents/caregivers—including the noncustodial parent, if any—and the child or youth, when necessary to resolve the issues that caused the child or youth to enter care. (Please note below the exceptions where services are not required.) In addition, there must be policies and procedures in place to ensure that relational and legal permanency are being pursued from the moment a child or youth enters care and throughout their time in care.

No child or youth should linger in foster care due to a lack of services to their family or due to their placement setting, or because the system has not adequately pursued all permanency options or has failed to do concurrent planning.

Families Rising strongly supports the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) and nothing in this position statement should be seen as a call to modify or eliminate any requirements under ICWA. ICWA contains protections for Indian children involved in state child custody proceedings. Families Rising also strongly supports the Act respecting First Nations, Inuit, and Métis children, youth and families.

Policy and Practice Recommendations

  • All child welfare systems should have adequate funding to ensure that services can be provided in a timely manner to families when a child or youth enters care. Such services should be designed to address the issues that caused the child or youth to enter care, should be culturally responsive and accessible, client-centered, and targeted to the reasons for entry, and may include substance abuse treatment, mental health treatment and support, parenting skill building, and efforts to address economic challenges that led to charges of neglect. Service plans should be developed in partnership with the parent/caregiver and/or extended family, the child or youth when appropriate, and the child’s tribe or band when the child is Indian or Indigenous, and should address only those specific issues that brought them into care.Agencies must diligently work to engage parents/caregivers in services even when they are initially reluctant, including making supportive, culturally responsive efforts to interest parents/caregivers in participating in services. Agencies must also work to address all barriers that are preventing families from accessing services.

    Policies should require that services are provided to the family as soon as children enter care and continue to be provided as long as the family is engaged with services or can be engaged in services until the child achieves permanency.

  • Policies should ensure that services are provided regardless of the caregiver’s geographic location, age, race/ethnic background, religion, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity, income, and other factors that might hinder reunification.
  • Agencies must search for, notify, connecting with, and support relatives who can support the family in reunification and potentially be a resource if reunification is not possible. (See Families Rising’s statements on Kinship Care and Permanency Planning/Continuity of Relationships)
  • Family conferences should be regularly held with the parents/caregivers, extended family, child or youth (if age/developmentally appropriate), child’s tribe or First Nation when the child is Indian or Indigenous, and other supporters to explore how to support reunification and, when necessary, consider other permanency options.
  • Permanency hearings should be held at least every six months to ensure that the child or youth has a permanent case plan goal and that diligent efforts are being taken to achieve reunification, placement with kin, adoption (including tribal customary adoption[1]), or guardianship. The review should include if and how child/parent visits are going and what services are being provided and if progress is being made toward reunification. During hearings, the court should confirm that plans seriously consider and staff are pursuing multiple concurrent options, so that if the goal changes (such as from reunification to another permanency option) there is an alternative plan already in place. Courts should also review that the agency is continuing to conduct kinship searches and engage and support relatives both to support the child or youth and parents and as possible placement and permanency options.
  • The court should be responsible for assessing if services are being provided to the parent and if the services are client-centered, culturally responsive, and sufficient, and if the parent’s/caregiver’s service plan truly reflects the reason the child or youth entered care. When necessary, the court should order additional services or other efforts to overcome barriers and support reunification. Both the child or youth and parent/caregiver should have the opportunity to be participate in the hearings, with support, and both the child or youth and parent/caregiver should have the right to qualified counsel at no charge to protect their interests in all hearings or legal processes.
  • Policies should require at least diligent efforts for reunification (as defined above) except in the following situations:
    • The parent/caregiver subjected the child or youth to aggravated circumstances as defined by state law. The definition of aggravated circumstances may include, but is not limited to, abandonment, torture, chronic abuse, and sexual abuse.
    • The parent/caregiver committed murder of another child or youth.
    • The parent/caregiver committed voluntary manslaughter of another child or youth.
    • The parent/caregiver aided or abetted, attempted, conspired, or solicited to commit such a murder or voluntary manslaughter.
    • The parent/caregiver subjected the child or youth to human trafficking.

In such cases, the child welfare agency should undertake efforts to terminate parental rights, unless such termination is determined not to be in the child’s or youth’s best interests. Previous termination of parental rights should not be sufficient reason for an agency to avoid pursuing diligent efforts to reunify.

  • For all children in foster care for 15 of the last 22 months[2], the child welfare agency must make concerted efforts to ensure that permanency is achieved including undertaking a formal, individualized assessment of whether termination of parental rights is in the child’s or youth’s best interest. This assessment must include:
    • the importance of timely permanency in a child’s or youth’s life;
    • whether client-centered, culturally responsive, targeted services were provided to achieve reunification and diligent efforts were made to effectively engage the parent/caregiver in such services;
    • if services were not provided, whether services can and should still be provided to engage the parent/caregiver and achieve reunification;
    • whether the parent/caregiver is engaged in services to resolve the issues that resulted in the child entering care, and wants to be engaged in services but is facing barriers that the agency can but has failed to resolve;
    • what the child or youth would like their permanency plan to be and whether they have been authentically engaged in discussions about permanency options;
    • whether not terminating parental rights will be a barrier to achieving permanency;
    • whether the child is living with relatives or fictive kin; and
    • whether termination of parental rights is in the child’s or youth’s best interests and if guardianship or tribal customary adoption would be a preferred permanency option, including when the child’s or youth’s tribe/First Nation does not use termination of parental rights.

The agency should undertake efforts to terminate parental rights if sufficient individualized, culturally responsive services were provided, and barriers diligently addressed, to resolve the reasons for entry, but the parent is not engaged with services and the court has determined that adoption is in the child’s or youth’s best interests. If services have not been provided, the agency must immediately come up with a plan to employ diligent efforts to engage and provide services to the parent/caregiver that will enable reunification.

  • Rather than delaying termination of parental rights’ decisions until a permanent family is identified to prevent the creation of legal orphans, laws should allow judges to make a binding decision for termination of parental rights and to stay that order until an adoptive family is secured. In any cases in which termination of parental rights is delayed but reunification has not been achieved, policies must require ongoing diligent efforts to achieve an alternative permanent plan for the child.
  • When a decision is made to pursue termination of parental rights, the agency should hold a family conference with the parents/caregivers, their lawyers and other supporters, caregivers, child’s tribe or band when appropriate, extended family members when appropriate, and key members of the team to discuss what is happening with the parents and discuss the possibility of voluntary surrender and visitation after adoption, as well as permanency options within the extended family and fictive kin. When termination of parental rights is necessary, the agency should arrange for provision of compassionate support to the parent to address issues of grief and loss.
  • Each jurisdiction must conduct a detailed data analysis of the jurisdiction’s termination of parental rights cases to determine if:
    • termination of parental rights decisions or availability of effective services differ based on the parent’s race or ethnic background;
    • additional or different services, efforts to overcome barriers, or changes in policies and practices could have prevented termination of parental rights; or
    • a parent’s/caregiver’s service plan changed over time in ways that were not related to the child’s or youth’s entry into care and prevented reunification.

The review should include an action plan to address findings related to discrimination, service or engagement gaps, or policy and practice challenges.

  • Every jurisdiction should offer a legally recognized path to permanency with their birth parents—such as reinstatement of parental rights or adoption by birth parents—for children and teens in foster care who do not have an identified permanency resource. This path should be available for parents who are found to be able to safely care for their children and youth after termination of parental rights. Such permanency options should be considered as a matter of course and pursued whenever it is in the child’s or youth’s best interests. The agency must provide culturally responsive, accessible, and ongoing supports and services to support the transition and preserve the newly re-formed family.

[1] Tribal customary adoption may not include termination of parental rights. (All references to adoption include such adoptions.)

[2] Please note that this timeline is taken from the US’s Adoption and Safe Families Act but we are proposing consideration of termination of parental rights, rather than automatic movement toward termination. In Canada, timelines currently vary by jurisdiction.

Last Updated: April 14, 2024