Growing up as an adopted Black child in an Iowa Norwegian American community, Rebecca Jones Gaston experienced many of the challenges for children in foster care: isolation, otherness and wondering about family of origin. Her life and career choices paved the path to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, where she was confirmed as Commissioner of the Administration on Children, Youth and Families in December 2022.

Jones Gaston takes over as decades of debate and controversy have yielded an urgent public demand: reform America’s fractured, embattled foster care system. Critics say it traumatizes too many children and youth, with a greater toll on poor Black and brown families. Jones Gaston told Future of the American Child Cleveland fellows about her plan to guide the system through its reinvention, with a focus on healing vulnerable families. [Transcript | Video]

6 takeaways:

➀ The child welfare system was not designed to keep families together. 

The unfortunate reality is that the system was created to separate children from dangerous situations, Jones Gaston said. Historic evidence shows that Black and brown families—and poor families overall—were most likely to have their children removed. “So, it is a system that was built on this premise of deserving and non-deserving. It’s hard to imagine a system that’s got all of these infrastructures and policies and regulations and statutes that drive it to do what it does. It’s really hard to think about anything other than dismantling it entirely and creating something different.”

But Jones Gaston says reform must be balanced. “I think this is actually where the folks supporting the abolition of child welfare really are, is to acknowledge its role in kind of policing families and figuring out what is it that we actually need to put in place in support of families and children and communities,” she said.

➁ First, acknowledge the harm.

During her tenure directing Oregon’s Child Welfare/Child Protective Services division, Jones Gaston said one of her proudest accomplishments was rebuilding a relationship with that state’s nine federally recognized Native American tribes. “There is certainly a significant and serious impact that child welfare has had on tribal communities across the country and internationally,” she said, not only in removing children from their birth families but in severing their cultural connections. The practice has created serious generational harm, and Jones Gaston embraced the opportunity to address it head-on. “Being able to sit at a table and acknowledge the role the system has played in that is really important to have some honest partnership.”

➂ Solutions come from the communities, not conference rooms.

Jones Gaston said the Oregon team also started having monthly meetings and ad hoc conversations with the communities they were serving, to get input and guidance. “In Oregon, we created the vision for transformation. And that was done by listening to people and actually saying, ‘What is it that we want for kids and families in Oregon?’ And then, let’s set our goal to that and then what’s the pathway to get there?”

➃ Numbers and percentages don’t tell the whole story.

There’s no denying that Black and brown children enter the foster care system at higher rates than white children—though there are more white children in the system overall. That may lead to some serious misconceptions, Jones Gaston said.

“There’s actually been quite a bit of research that’s been done to show that abuse and neglect actually isn’t more likely to happen by racial or ethnic groups. It is that they’re more likely to be reported, more likely to then be screened into further involvement with the child welfare system.” This over-reporting creates a snowball effect for those kids, Jones Gaston said. “So frankly, the disproportionality that child welfare experiences starts in the community with people making a decision about whether or not they need to call a child welfare hotline and report concerns about a child.”

➄ The role of the mandatory reporter is needed—but it’s complicated. 

Often, the indicators of child neglect stem from poverty and scarcity. For example, a child could be removed from a family because a parent doesn’t have stable housing or food. “Then, there’s all sorts of bias baked into the decisions that we make because I fully believe that everyone comes to this work with some desire to help and have an impact on children,” Jones Gaston said. “We want children to be okay. And oftentimes, our lens of people being okay is our own lens,” which could translate into a spacious yard where kids can play, or running water, or clean clothes every day. “Those things may be important, but they aren’t necessarily the measure of whether or not a parent is parenting well,” she said.

➅ A foster care overhaul just makes plain common sense.

America has spent billions of dollars separating children from their families, ostensibly to make it safe for them to return. After decades of study, evidence seems to indicate that it might cost less to make it easier for them to stay, through the highly-touted kinship care model.

“Part of what we are working through now is there was legislation that was passed, Family First, about five years ago. That was a start to being able to use some of those federal dollars that were only accessible if you used foster care,” Jones Gaston said. In other words, the funds used to train and equip foster parents might be equally effective when used to stabilize birth families.

It’s an important conversation, as well as an urgently needed front-end strategy, Jones Gaston said, because lots of organizations and businesses were created to support foster care infrastructure. “It can be a scary and daunting notion that your business model is being proposed to go away. So, it’s thinking about what can you do differently? And, there’s plenty to do differently.”