How bad was the pandemic for the most vulnerable children in this city? A new report on the extreme dysfunction in the city’s family court system should horrify our leaders and provoke public outrage.

According to the study done by the New York City Bar Association and The Fund for Modern Courts, thousands of families had to wait extra months, if not years, for decisions about findings of child maltreatment, visitation, adoption, domestic violence, foster care and termination of parental rights. Women with domestic violence complaints determined they couldn’t leave their abusive boyfriends because there was no court available to ask for child support. A child’s adoption took 15 months instead of three. A custodial father was prevented from seeing his two-year-old son for eight months after the mother refused to return the boy following a visit. 

As the report concludes, “At a time of crisis, when the vulnerable populations who routinely appear in Family Court needed help the most, the courthouse doors were largely closed.” Like the folks running our schools and our child welfare agencies, it seems clear that the family court system put the comfort of adults ahead of the needs of kids.

But of course the crisis in family court started long before COVID. The report found that, pre-pandemic, there were 56 family court judges in charge of handling more than 200,000 cases per year. According to a 2013 report by the New York State Bar Association, more than 715,000 cases were filed in state family courts in 2011, and more than a quarter were still pending in 2012. 

These cases never seem to end and they appear to run on the timelines of adults, not children. For example, during a visit to Queens Family Court a few years ago I witnessed what was supposed to be a hearing in a custody dispute involving a child abuse accusation. As I wrote: “For 15 minutes or so, the father, the sister, their respective lawyers, the ACS caseworker, the lawyer representing ACS, the child’s lawyer, and the support magistrate waited for the mother to show up.

“When she finally arrived, with her court-appointed lawyer, he announced that she had decided to hire her own counsel — but the new attorney would be on vacation for the next two weeks. The court’s lawyer presented a letter to this effect and then excused himself. So ten parties had assembled, consuming a half-hour of the lawyers’ time and the support magistrate’s time and the ACS worker’s time (on the public dime) and most of a day’s pay for the father (a construction worker), only for the support magistrate to look at her calendar and the judge’s calendar and ask if everyone could come back — in two months.”

In her State of the Judiciary speech last month, Chief Judge Janet DiFiore proposed sweeping changes to the court, including increasing the number of judges and doubling the pay of lawyers who represent children and indigent adults. They currently get paid only $75 an hour — a fee that does not exactly attract the best and the brightest our legal system has to offer. It is one reason why many experts argue the system is particularly unfair to poor parents who cannot afford their own representation.

There is broad support for DiFiore’s proposals. The website of a coalition of organizations supporting them, including the Bronx Defenders and the Children’s Defense Fund, says that “the chronic case overload … causes delays… and results in multiple court appearances.”

What’s odd about these complaints, though, is that in a different context these same advocates are actually hoping for more delays in court. There is a broad effort afoot now to repeal a federal law called the Adoption and Safe Families Act, which limits the amount of time children can spend in foster care, requiring states to move to terminate parental rights if kids have been in care for 15 of the past 22 months. 

Groups like the Bronx Defenders argue that we should extend the time children can spend in foster care to give parents more chances to clean up their acts and regain custody of their children. But when children have to wait years for their biological parents who are unwilling or unable to care for them — who repeatedly abuse and/or neglect them — it means they are waiting years before we can find them a safe, loving, permanent home with an adoptive family. The longer they are in the system, the older they are, the more traumatized they are, and the less likely they are to have a successful adoption. 

Children’s lives should not be put on hold by adults indefinitely, whether it’s because of a bureaucratic morass or activists with their own agendas. The average length of time for a kid in foster care in New York is almost 27 months (six months higher than the national average). How much longer should kids have to wait for adults to do what’s right?

Naomi Schaefer Riley is the author of “No Way to Treat a Child: How the Foster Care System, Family Courts, and Racial Activists Are Wrecking Young Lives.”