36% of infants reenter foster care
36% of infants reunified with biological parents re-enter foster care, typically within 12 months, highlighting the danger of premature reunification.
Snapshot · The Shawn Ryan Show
#314 Jen Lilley - The Dark Truth About the American Foster Care System
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Jun 18, 2026
Where this was said
The 2018 Family First Prevention Services Act: Seven Ways It Made Things Worse
At 1:55:13 · chapter starts 1:48:40
Lilley delivers her most detailed policy analysis of the episode, methodically working through the ways the 2018 Family First Prevention Services Act — well-intentioned and bipartisan — became, in her view, the single worst thing to happen to foster care in her lifetime. Problem one: the law's requirement that prevention funding only go to programs with at least 50% evidence-based research excluded many effective rural and minority-serving programs that lacked the resources for scientific validation. Problem two: the law funded the wrong things — substance abuse programs and therapy already covered by Medicaid — creating a bureaucratic nightmare where social workers spend their days figuring out whose money pays for what rather than doing case management. Problem three: the law has no data requirements, so no one can actually measure whether prevention is working. Problem four: it made residential treatment programs dramatically harder to access and fund, effectively shutting down places like Childhelp's California village. And the capstone statistic from a 2025 study: of the $9.6 billion Title IV-E fund, only 2 cents of every dollar reached prevention, and 60% of that was consumed by administrative costs.
The 2018 Family First Act: Best Intentions, Catastrophic Outcomes
The 2018 Family First Prevention Services Act was supposed to prevent kids from ever entering foster care. Instead it created mountains of new bureaucracy, defunded therapeutic group homes for the most severely abused children, and produced zero measurable data on whether prevention was even working. Eight years in, only 2 cents of every Title IV-E dollar went to prevention.
Premature Reunification: Why 36% of Infants Return to Foster Care
Throwing a recovering addict parent back into full-time parenting of a traumatized child without a graduated transition plan is a recipe for failure — and 36% of infants prove it by re-entering foster care. California's monitored-to-overnight visit system works. The rest of the country hasn't adopted it.
Jen Lilley Goes to Congress — and Walks Away
Jen Lilley and Dr. John DiGarmo went to Congress in 2020 to push premature reunification reform. Every member they met loved the idea. Then a senior HHS official pulled them into a room, told them to leave their phones outside, and explained the reality: their bill would become 300 pages long, get Christmas-treed with things they'd never intended, and ruin the very kids they were trying to help. She walked away and never looked back.
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