"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive...those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
Perhaps that quote best expresses my thoughts after reading Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare by Dorothy Roberts. This book provides a mixture of anecdotal personal accounts and statistics to attempt to explain the over-representation of black children in the child welfare system. The author points out that most children in foster care, including black children, are not there because of abuse. Instead the foster care system has become a warehouse for child-neglect related to poverty, mental illness and drug abuse. She points out that the court ordered generic parenting classes that parents must participate in in order to get their children back rarely address the families problems. As a society, we have become too willing to believe that poverty and neglect are the same thing. Sadly, when you look at the number of black children in foster care and compare that number to children of other races, even if one controls for other variables, there are still more black children in care.
I was a foster mom for awhile. I never intended to be one. I wanted to adopt an older child and I was told by the agency I went through that I had to become certified. When I completed my paperwork for adoption, I checked that I was not interested in a legal risk adoption, that is an adoption in which the child's parent's legal rights had not been terminated and the state was still pursuing reunification. During training, this type of adoption was consistently called foster-adopt. Anyway, the first child placed in my home was a legal risk adoption. The problem was that I didn't speak the language of DCFS. When I was contacted and asked whether or not I would accept the child, it was explained to me that my home was a "pre-adoptive" home. This is a code word meaning the state is schizophrenically attempting reunification while the child is already in an adoptive home. Ms. Roberts accurately described the problems that I observed.
- Parents involved with Child Protective Services are considered guilty until they can prove themselves innocent.
- Social workers make life changing decisions about child placements based upon their own bias and cultural beliefs rather than objectively applied standards.
- The "care" the family receives is generic and not based upon individual needs.
- In most cases, there is an underlying belief that children are better off in "loving" foster or adoptive homes than with their families.
Reunification is good for kids. Children want to live with their mom or dad. When that can't happen, they want to stay in contact with them. The children are angry. They may lash out. They probably won't appreciate the efforts to place them with more suitable parents. I couldn't help but think of all the kids who have been taken from their family of origin, abused and neglected while in foster care and then diagnosed with Reactive Attachment Disorder. I suspect most of the kids treated by "Attachment Therapists" would have been better off in their family of origin. (For those unfamiliar with this diagnosis and the "therapy," Report of the APSAC Task Force on Attachment Therapy, Reactive Attachment Disorder, and Attachment Problems.)
Or you can watch:
I am parenting Marissa because the state found her mother incompetent to do so. I am parenting David and Beverly because their mothers live in poverty in Haiti, a country without any social services. This book forced me to contemplate, "Who is worthy of maintaining the right to parent their children?" It reminds me that I have been tremendously blessed with a real power that comes from being white and wealthy. It reaffirms my commitment to view the work Marissa's mom did trying to get her back as honorable, a sign of love, rather than wholly inadequate.
But, more than that, I wonder at why our society defines "good" parenting as having wealth and mental health. I don't have to go back very many generations in my own family's story to find people parenting in poverty or while suffering from mental illness, alcoholism and/or developmental disability. There are chapters in our story that include suicide, living in kwansit huts and babies sleeping in dresser drawers. My grandmother raised ten kids in a very tiny 3-bedroom home. Reunions with my husband's family include hearing, again, how the kids used to miss school to do farm work. These stories, rather than being hardships, are the stuff memories are made of. It is what binds us together. Yet, if the standards described in Shattered Bonds were applied to us... there but for the grace of God.
Hat Tip: Attachment Therapist Neil Feinberg Terrorizes 10-Year Old Adopted Boy
Related Post: Attachment Therapist “Three Feet Federici” Proves Able to Fool Some of the People All of the Time
No comments:
Post a Comment