“…program that focuses on moving children from foster care into permanent homes with grandparents or other relatives.

States struggling to fill a void left by parents lost to drug addiction, AIDS and incarceration are increasingly using such programs to deal with the rising costs of foster care. Thirty-eight states have such programs, more than half of them initiated in the last five years.

Now, Congress is considering legislation to finance the programs, correcting what some advocates call a perverse system that provides much more support for children in foster care than it does to get them out of the child welfare system.

…More than 2.5 million children are being raised by grandparents or other relatives. The number has risen more than 86 percent since 1990, up from 1.3 million, according to census data analyzed by the Children’s Defense Fund.”

(Source:  Ian Urbina, “Trying to Keep Child Care in the Family,” The New York Times, July 23, 2006; http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/23/us/23guardian.html.)

 “Grandparents and other relatives have always played a vital role in childrearing,” said Rutledge Q. Hutson, a lawyer at the Center for Law and Social Policy, a nonprofit public policy research organization in Washington. “But we’ve never before seen so many grandparents single-handedly raising children, and the nation’s foster care system is simply not able to handle so many of them.”

(Source:  Ian Urbina, “Trying to Keep Child Care in the Family,” The New York Times, July 23, 2006; http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/23/us/23guardian.html.)

Very few of the children of mothers imprisoned for drug offenses have experienced life in an intact family.  The imprisoned mothers are likewise usually strangers to healthy family life.  The intergenerational family chaos that typically surrounds mothers incarcerated for drug abuse receives much-needed attention in a study recently published in The American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse by a team of scholars at the Social Research Center in Baltimore.

Parsing data for 167 Baltimore mothers incarcerated for drug offenses, the researchers find few with marital ties:  more than two-thirds (69%) were single, and almost one-fifth (17%) were either separated, divorced, or widowed.  Less than one-eighth (14%) were “either married or involved in a long-term relationship.”

But the family disarray in which these drug-abusing mothers have lived began at least a generation earlier.  The researchers highlight “two generations of family influences having a bearing on [the] development and subsequent adjustment” of these drug-abusing women.  That is, not only have these women failed to form stable families, they themselves were “victims of adverse circumstances in their lives related to a breakdown in the integrity of their families of origin and a consequent degradation of the parental guidance and emotional support they received during their early development.”  The researchers stress that almost two-thirds (62%) of these drug-abusing mothers were born to “natural parents [who] had either separated or had never lived together.”

More than two-fifths (41%) of the these women grew up with their mother as “the sole supporter” of the family, and more than a quarter (26%) had “no father figure [at all] in their lives.”  And sadly but predictably, the women in this study have not been able to escape the malign influence of growing up in such fractured homes; consequently, “the family circumstances now faced by their children are remarkably similar.”  “As were their mothers,” the researchers remark, “the children are also exceptionally vulnerable to negative influences outside the home, the protection from such risk ordinarily provided by the family having been compromised.”

Americans have all too much reason to fear that for the children of these drug-abusing mothers, two generations of family chaos will soon become three generations of such chaos.  Certainly, it is hard to be optimistic about the future family prospects of children raised by mothers who know more about prison officials than about husbands or married parents. 

(Source:  Thomas E. Hanlon et al., “Incarcerated Drug-Abusing Mothers: Their Characteristics and Vulnerability,” The American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse 1 [2005]: 59-77.)