TV REVIEWS : Focus on the Struggle to Keep Families Together

“Broken Hearts, Broken Homes,” a documentary hosted by Glenn Close, points out that the number of children in the foster care system has doubled in the last decade, due mostly to the increase in child abuse. The result is that, often, instead of protecting the child, the overburdened system adds to the abuse.

Yet the program--part of Lifetime cable’s “Your Family Matters” series (tonight and Saturday at 10 p.m., next Wednesday and Dec. 12 at 2 p.m.)--is “a story more of hope than despair,” Close informs us.

The cases profiled here, however, complete with excerpts from “confidential” files, court hearings and film of adults and children involved, seem chiefly to highlight the terrible complexity of the problem and how narrow the line is between information and exploitation. The children, after all, are too young to have consented to such public exposure.

The main focus is a program in San Mateo that emphasizes parent rehabilitation to keep families together and limit the time children spend in the foster care system.

A toddler whose schizophrenic mother has threatened his life will not go home again. Another, disabled by his teen-age mother’s abuse, probably will one day. A 7-year-old whose mother beat her up because “some children need harsher treatment than others” is sent home after six days. The mother was given family therapy, then monitored for six months.