In the summer of 2005, a single mother and her four children found themselves homeless in Las Vegas, living out of a car. The police brought the family to Child Haven, a congregate shelter for temporary stays of "abused and neglected" children, operated by the county's child protection agency, the Department of Family Services.

The children were admitted, but the mother was left to fend for herself. She complained that she was not allowed to see the children to say goodbye, or even to instruct shelter staff as to their special needs. The children were temporarily separated from their mother against their will, and were violated in the process.

It made no sense for the authorities not to house or shelter the family together. Indeed, if only a few weeks later they had been victims of Hurricane Katrina, or posed as such, they would have been housed -- at that time, county officials suddenly announced that hundreds of apartments would be made available to Katrina victims coming to Las Vegas.

While critics in recent weeks have expressed alarm about the overcrowding of Child Haven, they, along with county officials, are wrong in suggesting that more children's shelters, an expanded Child Haven or the intensified recruitment of more foster families will provide a solution to the crisis in Clark County's child welfare system.

Many children are placed in Child Haven each year, and most stay there for only days or weeks and are then returned home. These practices not only inflict separation trauma on children and infuse their lives with additional turmoil, but also raise the question of why it was necessary to remove them from their families in the first place. They also raise questions about why the problems of concern, such as inadequate housing in many cases, could not have been addressed while the children remained with their parents.

Surely, we can do better than institutional congregate shelter settings for children -- and such settings are certainly no place for infants. We do not need a plan for expanding emergency shelter, but one for eliminating the need for it.

Child Haven is not only bad for children, such congregate settings are also extremely expensive to operate, requiring 24/7 intensive staffing. Indeed, Child Haven is an enormous drain on the budget of the Department of Family Services, devouring resources that could otherwise be used for preventive services to maintain children in their families, or at least with relatives.

Institutional settings are harmful to children, but even many of those who are eventually moved to foster family homes will be moved from one home to another, suffering additional separation trauma and instable living arrangements. Many will be separated from their siblings as well as from their parents and other relatives, only to be eventually returned home, more damaged than before. Moreover, large numbers of children who remain in the system long enough to "age out" of it become homeless within one or two years. And significant percentages of children who are placed for adoption from the foster-care system experience adoption disruption, either finding themselves returned to foster care or out on the streets.

Foster care is certainly needed for some children, and children should be placed with foster families rather than in institutional settings. But the emphasis on recruiting more and more foster families is misplaced. The focus must be on the funding of appropriate preventive and supportive services. We should be questioning the need for removing so many children from their families in the first place.

By not practicing prevention, we overload not only Child Haven but the rest of the foster care system. Good foster family homes become harder to find. In desperation, foster family recruitment standards are stretched and lowered, even if this is not explicitly acknowledged, and even good foster families are placed at risk by being asked to accept excessive numbers of already troubled children into their homes.

Yet appropriate preventive services are pervasively denied to families in our public child welfare system. In recent years, a federal review determined that Nevada "does not have in place a sufficient array of services that would enable children to remain safely with their parents when reasonable."

In order to protect endangered children from harm, the causes of the endangerment must be identified as best and as specifically as possible on a case-by-case basis, and a full and diverse spectrum of resources must be available from which to choose the most fitting supports and services appropriate to the case.

A prerequisite for the effectiveness of a service is that it be designed to fit the specific problems causing endangerment of children. Such material supports as the emergency purchase of food, the payment of rent, rental security deposits, rent arrears to prevent eviction (and homelessness), and the payment of utility bills that were in arrears can often prevent danger and therefore forestall or preclude the need for child placement. After all, studies have shown that most so-called child neglect reports (which in themselves constitute the majority of child abuse and neglect reports) can be characterized as "deprivation of necessities" (even if unintentional) or "inadequate supervision." It has not at all been unusual for children to be placed in foster care for lack of such supports, in addition to their parents' inability to obtain or pay for child care.

The Clark County Department of Family Services already has an around-the-clock emergency hot line. It needs the around-the-clock availability of emergency services to go with it. Those should include emergency caregiver services that can swiftly be delivered to families in momentary crisis situations, forestalling to a later time the need for decisions to be made as to whether the children need to be placed.

Recently, Clark County, on behalf of its Department of Family Services, expressed the intent to request proposals from community agencies for programs they would provide to child protection cases. Such programs might include "teaching and demonstration services" and might "coordinate, connect, and/or provide" the family with "services." The agencies were asked to describe the "model or approach" to services they would use. I suggest, on the contrary, that selected specific services are needed, not program packages and "models." Owing to their vaguely defined hodgepodge of "counseling" and other services, recent program models in vogue in Nevada and elsewhere have not achieved their intended outcomes.

An investigation should be conducted examining the reasons for placement in all cases in which children had been removed from their parents and placed in foster care, including Child Haven, within the past year. The results should be used as a guide to determine what specific preventive services, in what quantities, will be needed in the future. To pay for such services, we should close Child Haven.

Leroy H. Pelton is a professor in the UNLV School of Social Work. His books include "For Reasons of Poverty: A Critical Analysis of the Public Child Welfare System in the United States" (1989), and, most recently, "Frames of Justice: Implications for Social Policy" (2005).