I just read Audrey’s blog about Terminations and of course it got my attention and made me a little angry. Not because I disagree with her approach. I understand what her job is and that she has to be pro-parent and pro-reunification. What burns me is that our adopted son manipulated the system to the point that his CPS worker was considering terminating our parental rights.
Bart and I are both have master’s degrees. While we don’t live in a spotless house, it certainly is not filthy. We both have jobs and are smack dab in the middle of middle class. We buy our children new clothes and even brand name shoes. They get an allowance each week. We do at least one family activity a week, like a movie or something similar. We have dinner together around a table where we pray together before meals. We go to church on Sundays, send our kids to camp, involve them in sports. Sure, we have 10 of them, but they are not being abused nor are they being neglected.
We worked our case plan. We did everything that we asked. No caseworker ever had to come to give us a ride to a visit. We never missed a visit nor a phone call. We’ve done it all.
And yet because he manipulated one therapist into saying he “deserved a family who cared and there should be no further efforts to reunify this young man with this family”, the social worker actually was considering terminating our rights. If he hadn’t managed to get kicked out of his foster home (because they were as unreasonable as us, according to Mike, who never accepted responsibility for his behavior there either) and break the law, the termination plans have ceased.
I just think it is INCREDIBLY interesting that a system will go to every length to reunify families like the one in Audrey's blog entry and yet adoptive families, who take on VERY troubled kids, are suspect and the object of the blame.
I am not sure if it is the difference between counties or states or just the situation, but the discrepancy is at bare minimum, annoying.
Bart and I are both have master’s degrees. While we don’t live in a spotless house, it certainly is not filthy. We both have jobs and are smack dab in the middle of middle class. We buy our children new clothes and even brand name shoes. They get an allowance each week. We do at least one family activity a week, like a movie or something similar. We have dinner together around a table where we pray together before meals. We go to church on Sundays, send our kids to camp, involve them in sports. Sure, we have 10 of them, but they are not being abused nor are they being neglected.
We worked our case plan. We did everything that we asked. No caseworker ever had to come to give us a ride to a visit. We never missed a visit nor a phone call. We’ve done it all.
And yet because he manipulated one therapist into saying he “deserved a family who cared and there should be no further efforts to reunify this young man with this family”, the social worker actually was considering terminating our rights. If he hadn’t managed to get kicked out of his foster home (because they were as unreasonable as us, according to Mike, who never accepted responsibility for his behavior there either) and break the law, the termination plans have ceased.
I just think it is INCREDIBLY interesting that a system will go to every length to reunify families like the one in Audrey's blog entry and yet adoptive families, who take on VERY troubled kids, are suspect and the object of the blame.
I am not sure if it is the difference between counties or states or just the situation, but the discrepancy is at bare minimum, annoying.
1 comment:
Now my curiosity and social work ethics attention is caught up... Any therapist that can't tell the difference between manipulation and truth shouldn't be practicing. In my county we also ONLY terminate parental rights if we have an adoptive resource...and a lot of adoptive parents (understandably!) don't want to take on a kid that may, or may not be free (and open themselves up to the heartache if for some reason the child goes home) so its literally stuck between a rock and a hard place. I wish a lot of my kids could be in a LAF so that they'd learn that the whole world doesn't owe them some absurd debt based on what their birth parents did (or didn't do). I want to add something to the DSM IV called Foster Child Syndrome....
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