> This is an OLD study and a lot has changed.

Then where is the new study ? Fact of the matter is that foster care was horrible 170 years ago when it started, was terrifyingly bad between the 2 WW (should I link to pictures of kids getting locked in steel cages in foster care homes (even outside) or should we skip that part ? Many just died), it was bad after WW2, and it was very bad 10 years ago. And in the US it wasn't even the worst it could be. Google "aktion T4" and prepare to be horrified by the child services system. While the US was certainly better, it wasn't by much.

If you want to claim things have radically turned around you have a high mountain to climb. What has been changed in the system in the last 10 years that was not done for close to two centuries ? Because you're just making a claim of radically different results with zero data on what has changed, why it would matter, never mind an actual study on if it has actually changed.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that foster parents of the last 10 years ... are pretty much the same as foster parents of 20 years ago, so of course the study is valid.

> > Under this stress, and that's stress that you as a foster parent cannot take away and have zero control over the continued trauma (so any promises you make are VERY dangerous: if they get taken away (60-80% of those kids), you are actually making a VERY bad trauma worse). Under such stress normal development is not possible.

> We make sure children get therapy to help cope. We take continuing education classes to help US learn to help the children cope. We work with the therapists and often the parents to try and get the children to bond to us. Bonding is healing.

That was equally true 10 years ago. Didn't help back then, why would it help now ? Bonding is only healing if the bond doesn't get broken again, and even that's disregarding quite a large body of research claiming a "critical period" exists, which goes quite a bit further and states that children only really bond to parents the way most animals do. They claim a parental bond can only form in the first 6 weeks of life. After that, it just cannot happen because the hormones that make it happen just won't be there.

Also I have no trouble finding research that therapy is equally likely to make issues worse as it is to make it better (in fact this is why psychotherapy, ie. long talks with a psychiatrist under certain conditions, has pretty much been eliminated from psychological practice). Quite a few studies say entering kids in a sports program has better effects than therapy.

And lastly psychological safety research says that often safety cannot be restored once it's really broken. As in cannot ever be restored, not even in 30 years (e.g. placed children who have to stay in institutions, or women who get raped often still complain of "angst" disorders 20-30 years later). Being taken away and forced to live somewhere else breaks safety. There is no therapy that fixes it. There is nothing that fixes it.

And this makes sense doesn't it ? When push comes to shove we as individuals aren't safe in society. There is a lot of actors, from criminals to accidents to government employees/..., that could hurt any one of us quite a bit with zero recourse. Just watch the news. That is fine, because we don't believe that to be the case. But children who get placed, or victims of crime, well, they've been demonstrated that they aren't safe. No amount of therapy is going to fix that because their assessment of the situation is entirely accurate: they aren't safe. Victims of crime do not magically receive safety from further crimes, no matter how serious those previous crimes were. It's almost ridiculous to state it, but of course no amount of rapes protects a victim from getting raped again. Children who get placed get placed on average 4.7 times in 6 years. If they think they're unsafe from getting "placed" (ripped from their environment, suddenly and violently), that is entirely correct reasoning. They aren't safe. Fixing it with therapy is not possible because it's the ones who believe they're safe who are wrong.

You can see things happen, but you can't "unsee" them.

> > 1) constancy: same environment, same people, SAME RULES tomorrow

> Always. Children thrive on consistency. They need to have some control in their lives and that is provided by the foster parents. They have come out of a situation where they have no control and it is not consistent from day to day.

Most parents of placed children have never abused their children. I find it hard to believe you don't know this, but okay. The biggest reasons for placement are divorce, "autism" (meaning difficult children), and poverty (often combined with drug problems or criminal histories/records). Those together account for >90% of placements, and none involve abuse of the children on the part of the parents, none involve "no control". If you say that these aren't good situations, I'll agree with you, but it doesn't justify doing a placement. In fact the biggest constant factor in these situations is the parents, THAT is the main thing limiting damage, which foster care then takes away.

> > 2) ability to affect their environment: they must systematically get more control over their environment. What they DO must influence their life.

> See my reply to point 1.

Actually in the case of divorce children not only have the ability to help, they often succeed (again, I can link studies if you want) in keeping the parents sometimes together, mostly on speaking terms until they move out. If that's not control of the situation, I wonder what exactly you would call control of the situation. And frankly, if you think about it from an evolutionary psychology standpoint, you could make a very good case that this is in fact the normal situation, the very reason couples exist (meaning men and women form bonds in order to have children, if not on an individual purposeful level, then certainly as a species, so even in very good marital relationships the kids are a big stabilizing factor).

Same with autism and poverty. In both cases there are very obvious actions the children can take that will increase their control (with autism: mask the symptoms, with poverty, well we've all had a coffee in the Bronx, no ?). Are either of those coping strategies ideal situations for children ? Of course not. Both, however, are better than foster care ("your parents don't care anymore" or "your parents are not allowed to care anymore by the state")

> You will immediately realize that the whole POINT of foster care and child services is to take away BOTH of these.

(meaning consistency in not having their environment and parents changed, and taking away control because other people decide everything for them, mostly out of necessity because of the frequent environment changes)

I stand by this point.

> Foster parents, case management, the judges, etc, all want to see children go home. Sometimes that isn't possible and it breaks everybody's heart. But the system you're describing doesn't exist. Not today.

A lot of studies (that, granted, come from many different international settings, but also from the US) claim that this is not true. The biggest factor that keeps coming up is that all those people want maximal physical "safety", absolutely minimizing risk, for the children (but really for themselves), ignoring the psychological damage done to them. The purpose, first and foremost is to avoid mistakes where children for example get sexually exploited or die as an eventual result of a decision not to place them, and the police catches the perpetrators and it gets smeared out in the press. One number I've found, which clearly shows the problem, is that ~400 children get placed to avoid the situation that 1 might get beaten (not killed, beaten, potentially just once). So for instance, children will get placed if there is a sole mother that has to leave young kids alone to have job. The eldest kid will do that and take care of it, and do it well. I'm not 30 years old and I know I've had to do this for my parents 20 years ago when it wasn't a problem. Now if you get caught repeatedly it may result in placement.

Furthermore despite these "safety" decisions the amount of children found abused by the police keeps going up. So if the purpose of child placement is to make those go down, they're placing the wrong children and generally not making good decisions.

Plus this paper by itself makes the point that this claim of yours is false. Read the paper, for one thing, it matters a LOT which case manager decides on the child. This has nothing to do with the child, with the situation the child is in, whether the child gets abused, ... And clearly, what happens in practice is not in the interest of the vast majority of the children getting placed, so that's not it either (unless you want to claim they just don't know that, and they're placing kids not knowing what they're doing)