Sharing Family Values

For much of her young daughters' lives, Tina Louise Cruz says, she sold drugs or sex to keep a roof over their heads. Each evening after the family had gulped down a meal of greasy fast food, Cruz would shut the door on her children and get high on methamphetamines. Then a new baby tested positive for drugs, and the older Cruz girls soon joined their infant sister in California's child protective services. But instead of moving the children from one foster home to a another, authorities in Contra Costa County gave Cruz a different option: move in with a family herself.

After completing a course of court-ordered drug treatment, Cruz, 37, got her baby back and moved last September into the Antioch, Calif., home of Barbara Funderburk, a mentor paid to teach Cruz the basics of good parenting. Together Cruz and Funderburk, a mother of two, planned meals, made budgets and discussed how to hold down a job and raise a family. "This is a new thing for me, to not be high and have a baby," says Cruz, who graduated from the program early and has spent the past three weeks setting up a new life in San Jose, Calif. She has started work in a cafeteria, her first job in 15 years, and her two other daughters have moved from their aunt's place to join their mother and little sister. "I got another chance with my children," says Cruz. "I feel complete."

Keeping at-risk families together in a supervised setting--and providing an around-the-clock role model for problem parents--is a little-known alternative to traditional foster care. Called shared family care, the program is available in scattered counties in 10 states, including California, Wisconsin and Texas. It helps prevent families from being separated, reunites them after a separation or serves as a way station while parents decide whether they want to relinquish their parental rights. At a time when the failure of the classic child-welfare system is grabbing headlines across the country (a little girl missing for 15 months in Florida before officials even noticed; a young boy dead and his brothers starving in a New Jersey basement), some social workers are pushing shared family care as a possible solution. Results from the small studies that have been done are promising: children whose parents complete the program are only half as likely to re-enter the child-welfare system as those whose families reunite after foster care; the number of participant parents (mostly mothers) with a job doubles after they have lived with a mentor; and living conditions for these families once they're on their own are much improved.