Curbing foster care saves children’s lives | Op-Ed

How many times have you heard it? A child “known to the system” dies, and someone says: “See? Because you’re not taking away as many children, and throwing them into foster care, it’s causing children to die!”

We’ve known all along it’s not true. And now, thanks to new research, we know something else: Washington state’s limited efforts to stop tearing apart so many families have saved children’s lives – anywhere from six to 22 per year. At the same time, by increasing the proportion of foster children placed with relatives instead of strangers, the state has saved another 10 to 30 children’s lives per year.

Some of these gains are due to the Keeping Families Together Act, and the new study should once and for all end the smear campaign against that law. But the decline in needless removal predates that law. That’s why independent researchers from the Seattle-area group Pale Blue have been able to measure long-term trends. Their research builds on other studies and data.

Here’s how we know curbing needless removal from families does not jeopardize child safety:

• Though the only acceptable goal for child abuse fatalities is zero, such fatalities have occurred in Washington and every other state for decades.
• As KUOW pointed out earlier this year: The year the most children on (Child Protective Services) radar died in Washington was 2012, long before the Keeping Families Together Act. At that time, case workers took nearly twice the number of kids from their families as they do today.

You can’t draw definitive conclusions from any one state. You would need a massive nationwide study examining millions of records and tens of thousands of deaths.

Fortunately, there is such a study. It found that reducing entries into foster care did nothing to increase child abuse deaths, and taking more children did nothing to reduce such deaths.

That doesn’t demonstrate that taking fewer children saves lives. But this does: A vast scholarly literature from around the world compares outcomes for children left in their own homes to comparably-maltreated children placed in foster care in typical cases – cases that are vastly more common than the horror stories; cases that often involve confusing poverty with neglect. The studies show that the foster children typically fared worse on an enormous range of outcomes – including premature death.

There are a variety of reasons for this. In some cases, it’s the high rate of abuse in foster care. But also, there is the enormous stress of removal.

So it’s no wonder that, for example, a Swedish study comparing foster children to comparably maltreated children left in their own homes found that the foster children were four times more likely to die by age 20 – and the most common cause of death was suicide.

There are now enough data to calculate how many lives are saved, and how much serious illness and disability are averted by reducing needless foster care, as Washington has done. And since kinship foster care is, by far, the least harmful form of foster care, it’s possible to calculate the lives saved and disability averted by increasing the proportion of foster children placed with relatives – as Washington also has done.

So the next time you hear someone dismiss the enormous trauma to a child of being torn from everyone they know and love by saying it’s “much more preferable and safer than being dead,” consider that some of those children will die prematurely because they were needlessly taken. That’s true even when children are left at home with the mediocre or worse services they get now. Ideally, we would wrap families with everything they needed. But waiting until that happens to stop tearing apart children only puts those children in greater danger.

In 2025, Washington backed away from reform, and entries into foster care increased. As a result, as of 2025, Washington still takes children at a rate more than 13% above the national average when rates of family poverty are factored in.

None of this means no children should be taken from their parents. But Washington needs to be still more careful about which children it takes, and lawmakers need to stop retreating from reform.