A child with an open child protection investigation in Connecticut told her caseworker she felt unsafe. She asked to be placed in foster care but was told it was “not an option.” Within an hour, she died by suicide.

A 4-year-old died with ligature marks on her wrists and ankles. Her family had been reported to Connecticut’s Department of Children and Families 13 times before her death. A toddler was killed from a blow to the head. This was not his first physical assault: as an infant he had a broken arm and healing fractures that led to his removal. But he was then returned home to the adults who had abused him.

That some children require foster care is so obvious it should need no defense. And yet, here we are.

These cases in Connecticut are not just isolated failures to protect children. Nor should they be attributed solely to the very real problems of workforce training and retention. They are a product of something larger.

Over the past decade, foster care has been recast as an arm of a carceral system. One prominent advocate described it as an “apparatus designed to regulate and police families,” The New York Times ran an article entitled “Foster care as Punishment: The New Reality of ‘Jane Crow’.” On the political right, criticisms are equally extreme. The conservative America First Policy Institute argues that states are financially incentivized to remove children — that we have “created an industry dependent on family separation”. Vilifying foster care is one of the remaining areas of bipartisanship. 

Foster care is a serious intervention that should never be taken lightly. And by any measure, it is not. In 2024, approximately 7.7 million children were referred for abuse or neglect. Less than 2% entered foster care. If we follow children from birth through age 18, only 6% experience foster care. And — despite our higher prevalence of violence and social problems — the U.S. doesn’t place more children per capita than peer countries like Canada, England, or Australia. 

Far from being overzealous, U.S. caseworkers are heavily disincentivized from placing children in foster care. Due to court and evidentiary safeguards, removing a child requires substantially more time and effort than leaving them at home. For understaffed agencies, time is hard to come by. And, once placed, the agency becomes liable for what happens to that child — but legally owes nothing to that same child if abuse continues at home. 

Still, foster care critics across the ideological spectrum continue to mislead the public with two discredited claims: that children are torn from otherwise functional families because of poverty and that foster care itself causes poor outcomes. 

In his 2021 Foster Care Month proclamation, President Joe Biden asserted that “too many children are removed from loving homes because poverty is often conflated with neglect.” Ways and Means Chairman Jason Smith (R-MO) echoed last year, “too many families experiencing poverty are wrongly accused of ‘child neglect’ when what they really need is community support.” 

These claims are appealing in their simplicity, but demonstrably untrue. Children enter foster care because of maltreatment—often chronic, beginning in infancy — that produces harm that no placement, however stable, can fully undo. 

Children who have experienced foster care understand the necessity of their placement, even though the system is imperfect in many ways. In one study that asked youth directly, more than 80% reported that foster care had been helpful. In other large-scale studies, one half to two-thirds of youth reported that they were “lucky to have been placed in foster care.” And recent studies find that children placed in care — even if eventually reunified with their families — fare better than comparable children left at home. Crucially, they are also less likely to die or experience severe injury. 

There is no doubt that foster care sometimes falls short. But rhetoric from both ends of the political spectrum – calling non-relative placements ‘stranger care’, dismissing residential settings as unnecessary, and claiming children are removed because of poverty — is both inaccurate and counterproductive.

When the discourse positions foster care — and not the maltreatment that precedes it — as the problem to be eliminated, caseworkers are more reluctant to act and courts more hesitant to intervene. Foster parents are more difficult to recruit and essential funding is redirected. Ultimately, we will lose the capacity to protect children. 

These children in Connecticut were not failed by foster care. They were failed by adults who were too conflicted to use it. 

Sarah Font is a professor of social work in the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis. Emily Putnam-Hornstein is the John A. Tate Distinguished Professor for Children in Need at the School of Social Work at UNC Chapel Hill.