When Parents Are the Threat

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The baby girl named Chloe was born prematurely, and when routine tests showed that she had been exposed to cocaine, a staff member at Rochester Methodist Hospital in Olmsted County, Minn., contacted local child-protection officials. In the past, Chloe would simply have been moved into the foster-care system, and her mother Oksana, 34, who immigrated to the U.S. from Belarus nine years ago, would have had a tough time getting her out. But Minnesota is taking a new approach toward parents who are deemed to be a threat to their children. Social workers met with Oksana, who has asked that her last name not be used, and worked out a strategy to help her become a better mother so she could get her baby back. Under their plan, Oksana agreed to get off drugs, secure a safe place to live, make regular postnatal hospital visits and, most important, enlist the support of family and friends to monitor her progress and her treatment of Chloe. It could be called the it-takes-a-village approach to child welfare.

Because she has no relatives in this country, Oksana turned to those of Scott, Chloe's father. "We didn't have much of a relationship," says Scott's mother Deb, who doesn't want her last name used either. "I was very angry about the drug stuff. It affected a lot of people." But Deb, despite her misgivings about Scott and Oksana, had visited Chloe in the hospital and agreed to be a part of the effort to keep her granddaughter safe.

There never seems to be a shortage of horror stories about children neglected or abused by their parents. Earlier this year, within a span of just three weeks, Nixzmary Brown, 7, and Quachon Brown, 4 (the two were not related), died allegedly at the hands of their parents in New York City. In February a North Carolina woman was charged with murdering her 4-year-old adopted son; investigators say she routinely beat her kids with a plastic pipe. In most states, social workers called in to deal with abusive situations face the choice of leaving a child in a potentially dangerous home or placing him or her in a sometimes equally alienating foster-care system. But Minnesota officials believe most families can be kept together and the children kept safe if dysfunctional parents are given proper help.

In the case of Oksana, the help included a plan that called on Scott's relatives to test her randomly with a home kit if they thought she was using drugs. If Oksana tested positive, her in-laws agreed to take Chloe but only temporarily. None of Scott's family members were up to keeping her permanently, since many of them had either already raised or were raising youngsters of their own. So Oksana ran the risk of losing her daughter permanently to the state's foster-care system, if she was unable to stay clean for a long period of time.

Plans such as the one Oksana accepted still use the threat of removing a child from the home, but they also encourage troubled parents to enlist a support network--birth families, friends, in-laws, neighbors, nonprofit and government agencies--capable of interceding before a crisis develops. The results of this early-intervention approach, called Alternative Response, have been impressive. In Olmsted County, one of 20 counties that took part in a three-year pilot project, the recidivism rate for parents who went through the program tumbled from 16.1% in 2002 to just 5% in 2004.