A child's timeline
Date
07/29/2026
Hosted By
A child’s timeline
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WORLD Radio - A child’s timeline
WORLD Commentator Janie B. Cheaney on a foster-care system that waits on adult rehabilitation while children form attachments, lose stability, and need protection before childhood runs out.
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NICK EICHER, HOST: Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher
LINDSAY MAST, HOST: And I’m Lindsay Mast. When children enter foster care, every decision is supposed to serve their best interests.
EICHER: But those decisions often involve parents, caseworkers, courts, and timelines children cannot possibly understand.
MAST: WORLD Commentator Janie B. Cheaney now on what happens when a system built ostensibly to protect children, loses sight of childhood.
JANIE B. CHEANEY: The three brothers were so little: ages two, one, and barely a week old when taken from their meth-addicted parents. Not many homes would be willing or able to take in all three; this family did without hesitation. Long wakeful nights and screaming fits made for a challenging adjustment, but with loving discipline the boys gradually settled into peaceful routines. Their foster parents became attached: bought clothes and toys with their own money and brought the boys to church. Then the children were abruptly removed for another “trial period” with parents who had done little to reform their ways.
They’re so little. How can they understand the convolutions of an overburdened system?
For most of modern history, homeless children were apprenticed to a trade or placed in orphanages – which, at their best, at least provided food, shelter, and training for productive adulthood. But in 1854 Charles Loring Brace of the New York’s Children’s Aid Society organized the first orphan train, sweeping young indigents off the street and out to new homes in the Midwest. This was the first experiment in foster care. It was successful enough that over the next 160 years, fostering and adoption became the preferred model. So much so that social workers in the developing welfare system were sometimes too hasty to judge a parent “unfit,” and remove children from poor but loving families with little justification.
Policies change, and today the assumed goal of fostering is family reunification. The Family First Prevention Services Act, passed in 2018, directs resources away from adoption toward “parental rehab and support”: namely drug treatment, anger management, counseling, or daycare. It sounds noble, but how it works in practice is the subject of No Way to Treat a Child, published in 2024 by Naomi Shaeffer Riley.
Riley found that adult desires often undermine the best interests of children. In an interview with City Journal, she noted that
RILEY: You have a significant portion of kids, as many as 15 or 20 percent who are in the system for three or four years or more. Those are timelines that work for adults who we're waiting for them to kind of rehabilitate often from drug addiction or mental health issues. But while that happens, the kids' childhoods are being frittered away.
Caseworkers don’t receive adequate training to judge whether a child is in danger from biological parents, and bad calls don’t reflect on their record. Family court is a low-status position attracting the least-qualified judges. Foster parents are burdened with excessive paperwork, restrictive rules, and intrusive questionnaires. They have few rights to be informed or heard, and almost half give up after a year. As Riley explains,
RILEY: A lot of people really quit because they can’t take the system. It treats them like glorified teenage babysitters, not like people who are doing the hard work of caring for our most vulnerable kids.
Anecdotal evidence backs up the failures of the system. To take just one example, a young couple I know recently had to give up a two-year-old they had fostered since she was a newborn, sending her back to parents who were still on probation for child endangerment.
The good news is that the church, which once took the lead in salvaging neglected children, is stepping up again. Colorado-based Project 1.27, named for James’ exhortation to visit orphans in their distress, recruits, trains, and provides support teams for Christian foster parents. So does The Call, in Arkansas. And the Christian Alliance for Orphans coordinates hundreds of churches, ministries, and nonprofits worldwide to “inspire and equip God’s people to care effectively for vulnerable children and families.”
We can’t all be foster parents, but we can all do something. Care for the helpless is still a test of true faith.
I’m Janie B. Cheaney.
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