From: elg@elgamy.jpunix.com (Eric Lee Green)
Date: 16 Dec 92 18:11:55 CDT
Newsgroups: misc.kids,alt.child-support,soc.men,soc.women,sci.psychology
Subject: Re: Neglected or Abused Children, CPS, Foster Care and Prison
Distribution: world
Organization: Eric's Amiga 2000 @ Home

From article <ykLsVB1w165w@dogear.spk.wa.us>, by bobk@dogear.spk.wa.us (Bob Kirkpatrick):
> petel@sequent.com (Pete Lancashire) writes:
>> Could someone tell me (without emotion) that why is it better to return
>> a child to to its bio-parents if the parents can not be helped (ex: on
>> drugs) or will not accept help (ex: "We have done nothing wrong", "no one
>> is going to tell us how")
>>
>> Why do these experts feel that this is better that a subsitute family
>> that cares ? Is the bio-attachment more important in a child then his
>> or her family environment.

I think the basic problem is that the foster care system has failed in the
face of policies intended to ease return of the child to the natural
family. For example, in many locations CPS makes a practice of moving
children to different foster families regularly, "in order to prevent the
child from attaching to the foster family, which would make return to the
natural parents a traumatic event." This sort of nomadic, insecure
lifestyle, though, will almost certainly produce emotionally scarred
children. In addition, many foster families are not screened adequately and
are not supervised with enough rigor. They are often the "dregs of
society", rather than people who you would want to raise YOUR children.
This is primarily due to the problem of recruitment. Most middle-class
families are too comfortable and too busy with their own kids to go out of
their way to volunteer as a foster family, and CPS makes no detirmined
organized effort to recruit them anyhow. You don't see CPS caseworkers
knocking on doors in middle-class neighborhoods to ask middle-class
families whether they would like to volunteer to be screened as a foster
family, and without personal contact like that, these families are
unlikely to step forward and volunteer. They're too comfortable. There's no
direct stimulus to jolt them.

In addition, there is the problem of kids languishing in foster care
because the natural parent is in prison/can't care for them/etc. yet is
unwilling to release them for adoption. Or else the kid is older and nobody
wishes to adopt, so the kid is put into foster homes and bounced around as
if he really did have natural parents who "wanted" him...

I think, though, that probably half the problem is the CPS mindset, which
is a social services mindset that I encounter often. For example, it blows
a social worker's mind that I expect immediate compliance from the students
in my classroom. "Why, that's fascist!". Given the population that I teach,
though, I have found this to be the only way to maintain a reasonable
classroom environment in the face of kids who have no impulse control
and a wide range of maladaptive behaviors. The idea is that I'm supposed to
be a "friend" to the kids. Well, I like my students and my students like me
and we do "fun" things together from time to time just as people who like
each other rather than teacher/student -- but you better believe that I
enforce the limits in that classroom, because the results of any other
approach would be anarchy and disaster. My sort of straightforward "my job
is to teach them and this is what I need in order to do so" approach,
though, is anathema to those who have been brainwashed to believe in some
sort of "holistic humanistic approach".

--
 Eric Lee Green  elg@elgamy.jpunix.com   Dodson Elementary
 (713) 664-6446                             Houston, TX
                "Kids are kids, no matter what"
Newsgroups: misc.kids