The Changes Will Help Family and “Fictive Kin” of Children Taken into Care to Become Licensed Foster Care Providers
Albuquerque – CYFD unveiled updated regulations for licensing foster care providers in the State. The updates, which CYFD worked on with the American Bar Association, bring New Mexico’s regulations up to date with Federal law and best practices. They are designed to better serve children who have experienced abuse or neglect by helping those children’s extended family members become licensed foster care providers for them in a timely manner.
“When children come into foster care, they have already experienced trauma,” said Cabinet Secretary Brian Blalock. “Being placed with strangers can be an additional trauma – an additional Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE) - that we can avoid when kinship placement is a priority.”
Licensing family members as care providers promptly when children come into care has the effect of reducing the number of placement moves for children, ensuring more social stability and helping facilitate continuity of sibling and parental relationships while children are in care.
Research shows that children and youth who have experienced abuse or neglect and are placed in foster care do better across several measures, including time to permanency, educational outcomes and mental/behavioral wellness, if they remain with family or “fictive kin” during their time in out-of-home placement.
“No one wants to be without their family,” said Joseph Garcia, who serves as the President of LUVYANM, an advocacy group by and for young people who have experienced foster care. “Without your family, you lose a sense of security and love, and it makes you question yourself. When I finally got to a relative [after being in traditional foster care], it was a lot easier for me to feel and work through the emotions that I was feeling and to and to grieve [being away from my parents] in a healthy way because I had that comfort zone of being at my grandmother’s house.”
The updates include provisions for licensing people who are undocumented as foster care providers and ensuring that processes are in place for performing the required background checks for all caregivers – including undocumented caregivers – using accessible, appropriate and accurate methods for doing so. “All placement plans include emergency and back-up provisions so that there are clear steps should a placement dissolve, and that includes when children are placed with undocumented relatives,” said Annamarie Luna, Acting Director for Protective Services at CYFD.
The updates also clarifies the process for assessment of non-child-abuse-related criminal histories for prospective foster care providers, which exceeds the federal requirements related to criminal history by setting additional protocols for evaluation of crimes that are not automatic disqualifiers. Additionally, the updated regulations limit the number of foster children that can be in any one home to six (6) (up to 8 children total) with exceptions for sibling groups, teenaged youth in care who are parenting, and others.
The American Bar Association supports CYFD’s updated regulations. “Across the country, child welfare systems are shifting to prioritize kinship care, because research consistently shows children and youth do better in both the short- and long-term if they are placed with relatives or ‘fictive kin’ – people they already know,” said Heidi Redlich Epstein, JD, MSW, Senior Staff Attorney and Director of Kinship Policy for the American Bar Association’s Center on Children and the Law. “New Mexico’s updated regulations are some of the most diligent I’ve seen in the country as far as following the Federal Families First Prevention Services Act to ensure that they can place children with relatives.”