The New York Senate is considering a bill that will allow child welfare agencies to stop payments to parents who have adopted children only to stop caring for them, and we, Rob and Kathey Raskin of Las Vegas, couldn’t be happier to see one less way people can continue exploiting vulnerable children who are in state’s care for money. There have been cases in which parents have continued to receive subsidies of up to nearly $2K per month for children who were no longer in their custody. This takes money out of the system that could have gone to these children and instead puts it in the hands of adults who are no longer fulfilling their caretaker role. Once you consider the fact that the state provides subsidies for over 17K children, you’ll see that the money saved by cutting these payments would really add up. Since 2012 alone, New York has ended subsidies for 500 children for this very reason.

Children or Paychecks?

The vast majority of adoptive parents are very loving caregivers, but there are also those who take children they then do not care for, only to continue cashing the checks they receive, and some do not longer know where the children they are receiving payments for even are. Subsidies were meant to help adoptive parents, but as usual there are always going to be those who abuse the system. Some have done so deliberately, while others simply adopted children whose needs were too much for them to handle and then simply failed to follow-through. One concern is that this bill could penalize parents who are not currently in custody of their child through no fault of their own, for example in the case of a child who ran away but the family is still in contact. We, Rob and Kathey Raskin, are concerned that these decisions could be left in the very same hands that created the situation in the first place—the corrupt child protection agencies and court system that far too often fail to property vet caregivers in the first place.