The tough cases
Today’s New York Times’ magazine has a long story about a family in the foster care system. Marie has five children, the first of whom she had at age 13, and has a history of drug use, incarceration, and involvement with abusive men. She’s completed a course of substance abuse treatment, is testing clean, and has jumped through the hoops the child welfare agency has asked her to. But the agency is moving to terminate her parental rights, because they don’t think she has the emotional stability and personal resources to cope with the many needs of her troubled kids.
I’m not going to presume to second guess the agency based on a magazine article. The one thing that’s clear is that this case falls in the awful grey range, where there aren’t clearcut right choices. One of the things that was hardest for me to accept in my CASA training is that once families are in the child welfare system — particularly once they’ve messed up enough to have a child removed from the home — in many ways they’re held to a higher standard than families in general. Things that would never get CPS involved in the first place are enough to prevent reunification. But you can’t keep kids in limbo indefinitely while you wait for their parents to get their acts together.
The article raises the fact that poor kids are disproprortionately likely to be removed from their homes by CPS, that the same types of problems are much more likely to result in termination of parental rights when the parents don’t have other resources to draw on. It needs to be read together with another article from the same magazine, After the Bell Curve, which discusses the evidence that being raised in poverty stunts kids’ intellectual development, so that they don’t achieve their maximum potential.
The article about Marie quotes a DFS official as saying "Some people just should not be parents." I’m sure that’s true. But the article raises the possibility that Marie isn’t one of them, that she loves her children and with enough support could be a good parent to them. But that support isn’t there, not from the child welfare agency, not from anyone in Marie’s life, and not from society at large.
July 24th, 2006 at 2:24 pm
I just finished reading the article and wanted to offer my two cents. 🙂
I was a foster kid for many years. I saw some unimaginable things during that time – perpetrated by birth parents, foster parents, the CPS agencies, caseworkers and the foster kids themselves. My own experience was not too terrible by some standards – I was abused in many ways by different foster families, but I managed to end up with two wonderful people that saved my life. I may still be an ambulatory After School Special (teen pregnancy, gasp! Didn’t make it to college, shock!) but I do all right.
For parents like Marie, the support of an inherently flawed system will not save her or her children. I would wager that most of the kids in the system, all over this country, come from that grey area that you spoke of. We do not have a one-size-fits-all yardstick by which we can measure a parent and deem that parent worthy or not. So many things come into play – finances, education, common sense, emotional support – it’s almost impossible to judge.
Add to that the bureaucratic, red-tape-choked system that is a CPS agency. CPS agencies are often filled with overworked and underpaid caseworkers. Some of these caseworkers came into this job thinking they’d change the world, one kid at a time, only to find they can’t save any of them – they get disillusioned and jaded, they stop caring because they realize that caring will bleed them dry. Some of these caseworkers never cared at all to begin with.
Some CPS decisions are based on office politics or influenced by the behavior of the birth parents or foster parents, without regard to the well-being of the children involved. Some CPS decisions are made without complete information. Some are made for who-knows-what reason.
There is no yardstick.
If you ever have the misfortune of getting close to a CPS environment, you’ll see that it’s like a tiny jungle scene being played out over and over again, in courtrooms and living rooms, in group homes and kitchens. Parents are desperate, foster parents are desperate, caseworkers are, by turns, impassive and desperate, and the kids are broken and clawing. The foster care system in this country is, as a whole, a great shambling beast, moving slowly and swallowing lives in its wake without ever fixing the things it was put into place to fix.
In order to effect change for those children that are already in the system and those that may one day be absorbed by it, we must have a complete overhaul of the system itself. The way it is now, it ruins lives and cannot do otherwise. There’s no point in supporting birth parents in their endeavors to succeed if the system itself is still so flawed it cannot properly judge those parents’ worth.
I have some ideas on how to fix things, but you might have noticed I am overly wordy, and we probably don’t want to be here all day on it. 😉
Thank you for bringing this article to my attention.
Take care.
July 24th, 2006 at 4:09 pm
That was a really interesting article, Elizabeth. I’d be curious to know your thoughts based on your experience with the CASA program so far.
I’ve often thought that when Basil and I are older, it would be wonderful to be foster parents. But I don’t know enough about the system to know whether we could do anything truly meaningful for a child along the way. This article and the comments of the PP make me skeptical that we could be a part of something good. I think the CASA program would be a good way to see the system at work before making a decision about being foster parents.
July 24th, 2006 at 4:52 pm
I read the story yesterday and was heartbroken when I put it down.
What is CASA?
July 24th, 2006 at 5:32 pm
I read that article, what I found interesting was the questioning near the end about the effect of class and race on how these kinds of family situations are handled, and the apparent discrepancy. I wonder if others have done research on that topic?
July 24th, 2006 at 9:08 pm
Mieke, CASA is an acronym for Court Appointed Special Advocate. The Washington Post ran a nice article about the program that I’m in a couple of weeks ago:
“http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/12/AR2006071200673.html”
Merseydotes, or anyone else who is local, let me know if you’re interested in the CASA program — there will be a training cycle starting in September.
July 24th, 2006 at 9:59 pm
Zombie, thanks for that powerful comment. I was struck by the sense that women (and it’s mostly women) are stuck in impossible situations that require a high standard of parenting without ensuring that the resources are present to help those standards be met. It’s a depressing situation all around.
October 15th, 2006 at 10:01 pm
i couldnt bring myself to read this at all.my e-mail is out there for other grown up foster children only!I am 30 now and married with kids-not lookin for a love connection.a different connection-if its out there.I want to talk with someone who has that common ground with me.i was a foster kid 6 years with the in and out deal and lies and such.anybody out there?-nicole