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Heleen Zeegers / Getty Images
Heleen Zeegers / Getty Images
The number of cases of children in foster care has more than doubled since 2000, JAMA Pediatrics.
(AFCARS), a federally mandated data collection system that includes information on children in United States.
They looked at nearly 5 million instances of children between the years 2000 and 2017, and their parents' drug use each year.
"A lot of the work out there [on the opioid epidemic] "We have focused on mortality and overdoses and how it affects adults," says Angelica Meinhofer, Weill Cornell Medicine instructor in health care policy and research.[It’s] the known epidemic And that's something I'm trying to shed light on. "
April Dirks, an Associate Professor of Social Work at Mount Mercy University in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, says the findings correspond with what she's seen as a child welfare worker in the Midwest, where parents' drug use, and the state's response to it, has torn many families apart. "I'd say it's a crisis at this point," she says.
Of all the entries logged during the time period, nearly 1.2 million had the primary cause. And over this period, the researchers saw a steady rise in the proportion of removals attributable to parental drug use, from around 15% in 2000 to 36% in 2017. During this period, other reasons for removal, like neglect and abuse, mostly declined.
Children being removed for parental drug use are more likely to be 5 years old or younger than children removed for other reasons. And the proportion of drug-directed cases involving white, Midwestern and non-urban children.
While the surge of drug-related foster care has coincided with the epidemic epidemic, Meinhofer says increased opioid use is only one possible explanation for the trend.
Other potential explanations include augmented drug use, increased coverage, and more care for children.
"We hope our findings will provoke researchers to ask … what is this growth, what are the implications of this growth, and whether or not our system has to absorb the capacity of increasing foster care," Meinhofer says.
Following more than a decade of decline, U.S. foster care cases began to increase again in 2012 according to the AFCARS data. Between 2012 and 2017, the number of children increased by 8% overall, according to JAMA Pediatrics study.
Dirks says she has seen the first year Opioid and methamphetamine use damaged nearby communities. To train child welfare worker herself, she now instructs her students on how to manage and help families with parents suffering from drug addiction.
She says the increase in drug-related foster care suggests a need for reforming the foster care system. "There's a lot of trauma in the second you remove a child from their parents," she says. "And there is not enough families, not enough services."
Dirks believes that it is the most effective way of providing treatment for people with mental health problems. These courts can provide parents with the support they need to recover from their addiction and regain custody of their children.
"If they're going to remove the children, the best thing [to do] would be immediately treating the parent, "she says.
Nabarun Dasgupta, an epidemiologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who has studied the social and economic underpinnings of the opioid crisis, calls the numbers in the study "heartbreaking," but says they do not tell the whole story.
"Our general approach to drug use in the United States has been predicted on removal: asylums, prison, foster care," he writes in an email. "Long-term goal remedies will only become apparent when we take a compassionate approach to supporting people who use drugs to maintain meaningful and healthy lives."
He calls for a comprehensive policy interventions, like universal pre-kindergarten.
Susie Neilson is an intern on NPR's Science Desk. Follow her on Twitter: @susieneilson.
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