The Center for New York City Affairs and the Center for an Urban Future issued a joint report documenting the issues facing poor and working class parents with mental illness and their children. Child Welfare Watch, Vol. 17, “Hard Choices: Caring for the Children of Mentally Ill Parents,” looks at issues facing parents with psychiatric problems who come in contact with the city’s child welfare system.

Today, adults who struggle with mental illness are as likely as anyone else to become parents. Yet the city’s human services programs are neither structured to support single and low-income parents with mental illness who are trying to raise their children, nor able to systematically evaluate their ability to provide proper childcare despite mental illness.

Highlights of the report’s findings include:

• In New York City, as many as one-fifth of parents who come in contact with the foster care system have a diagnoses of mental illness.

• Last year, New York City children were removed from their homes in 56 percent of Family Court abuse and neglect cases that involved an allegation of mental illness—while in cases that did not include such an allegation, children were removed and placed in foster care only 35 percent of the time.

• Some parents with mental illness can safely care for their children if given the proper support, but necessary programs are rare, and there is little coordination between the mental health system geared to adults and the child welfare systems designed to protect children.

In light of the rising wave of municipal and state budget cuts, which will hit human services hard—including many preventive family supports—this issue of Child Welfare Watch looks at how the stress of poverty has profound implications for a parent’s mental health—as well as for the brain development of young children. The report contains policy recommendations aimed at helping policymakers address issues of mental illness and parenting. The full report is available online at the Center for New York City Affairs www.centernyc.org .

Child Welfare Watch is published jointly by the Center for New York City Affairs at The New School and the Center for an Urban Future. This issue is made possible thanks to generous grants from the Child Welfare Fund, the Ira W. DeCamp Foundation, the Viola W. Bernard Foundation and the Sirus Fund.