CHILD-WELFARE POLICY SHIFTS FROM FAMILIES : ABUSIVE PARENTS LOSING CUSTODY.

Byline: Peter T. Kilborn The New York Times

Years after their drug-addicted mother walked out, a Juvenile Court judge in July 1996 decided to award custody of three children - ages 10, 6 and 4 - to the grandmother of two of them.

The grandmother, whose son fathered two of the children, seemed to have everything going for her. She had a new house, a prominent lawyer and the power of her appeal to keep the family intact.

But city caseworkers were skeptical, and the decision was appealed. What they did next reflects a monumental change in the way cities are dealing with children from troubled homes.

``We hired a private investigator to watch her house,'' said Hunter Fisher, a lawyer who is manager of human services for the Richmond Department of Social Services. ``And in court, we introduced 10 hours of tape showing a hundred people entering and exiting each of two nights. Children were coming and going, too.''

Since most of the traffic occurred in the middle of the night, the city convinced an appellate court that the house was being used for illicit activities, including drug dealing, and the children remained in foster care.

Overturning the long-held premise that keeping families together is the best policy, child-welfare officials here and across the country have been doing everything possible to delay or avoid the return of children to potentially abusive or neglectful families. The result is that more children are spending longer periods in foster care. And that, in turn, is contributing to what is already one of the biggest problems facing the child-welfare system: a ballooning foster care population.

Since 1985, this population has almost doubled - to 500,000 children from 276,000 - as an epidemic of crack cocaine use and other drug and alcohol abuse has torn families apart. The children stay in foster homes for three years, on average, as overwhelmed caseworkers try to help the parents with the problems that made them abusive or neglectful.

Federal cost soars

In fiscally tight times, the federal cost of such support, which the states match, has leaped to $3.3 billion annually from $546 million, in large part because of the soaring cost of treating children born with a variety of ailments because of parental addictions.

Concern over costs, and the welfare of the children, has led to a push for more and faster adoptions - most often by foster parents themselves - and for permanent placements in foster homes when adoptions cannot be arranged.

This year, two bills racing through Congress with wide bipartisan support would urge juvenile courts to make children's safety, rather than family preservation, their paramount concern. The bills would offer states money for increasing the number of adoptions from foster care. That would mean being quicker to terminate parental rights and would free children for adoption when preserving the family would pose a greater risk to children's safety.

The shift in federal policy began last year, when Congress approved a $5,000 tax credit for each child adopted by a family with an income below $115,000. It also removed most barriers to interracial adoptions, making it easier for African-American children to be adopted by white families.

Late last year, President Clinton ordered the Department of Health and Human Services to find ways to double the number of adoptions of foster children, currently 27,000 a year, by 2002.

But some child-welfare experts say these changes - the move away from keeping families intact and the push for foster care and adoption - may go too far in the other direction.

``There has been a backlash against family preservation,'' said Susan J. Notkin, director of children's programs for the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation in New York. ``If you have a child at risk, you have an obligation to do something. But I believe many children are removed because we have not taken the time to determine what the parents need.''

Providing families with intensive services, including therapy and drug-abuse treatment, is also much cheaper than putting a child into foster care, Notkin said.

Adoption is not an easy answer, either. Children who have suffered abuse and neglect often need professional help, wherever they live, and many potential adoptive parents are reluctant to take them on.

Bad memories

All the hopes, scars and frustrations of children from abusive homes and the parents who take them in are on display in Vickie and Tim Ladd's five-bedroom brick ranch house, with a pool, a trampoline, a swing set and a basketball hoop in a tranquil development just south of Richmond.

As their three foster children recounted their earliest memories, it was easy to see why they no longer resided with their biological parents.

``There was a lot of drinking,'' said Dawn, 17. ``My stepfather would attack me so I'd run away.'' She was rescued by the state when she was 11, but, by then, she was out of control; she was taken into seven foster homes that then turned her out.

Her foster brother, Lonnie, 14, sweaty after jumping on the backyard trampoline, said that when he was 8 and 9, he would slip out into the night to look for his mother in bars.

In a heart-shape frame in her room, Stephanie, 13, wiry and a little fidgety, has a picture of her mother, who went to jail briefly for beating her. ``She'd bring up her fist and hit me on the side of the head,'' she said, mimicking the whack. ``I have ADHD,'' she said. ``That's attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. I take medicine. It calms me down.''