Foster Parenting Adventures: What is wrong with the System part gazillion

 

My predictions for the future include the possibilities/probabilities of further placement disruptions, continued sexual acting out, increased aggression, school expulsions, teen pregnancies, depression, sociopathy, possibility of future residential treatment or jail.  Because this is how and why it happens.  I just gave you the recipe.

Foster Parenting Adventures: What is wrong with the System part gazillion

I want to scream! Yep, the system is broken.  Again I say, there are not enough good foster homes, how long are we going to keep doing the same thing and expect different results? 

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Noah baby • Severely beaten child was under county watch

 

Yet another case of a foster child being abused by his caregiver

Noah baby • Severely beaten child was under county watch

My comment:

“Sometimes I think the problem that no one wants to face is that there NOT enough quality people who can and will become foster parents. Instead of accepting and licensing people who “will do” are supposedly “good enough” we need to take fewer children into the system. In cases like poverty driven neglect, or the type of generational “ignorance” I see every day we need to do a better job of supporting and educating parents. When children need to be removed for safety, maybe it is time we start looking at small professionally staffed care homes instead of continuing with a system that doesn’t work OR protect children. I know nobody wants to go back to the days of large orphanages, but what we are doing now is further damaging already hurt kids. Putting kids behind closed doors with strangers with little over site is putting them in harm’s way. The elephant in the room is that foster homes don’t serve kids well AT ALL!”

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I Am Here

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So Proud!

Tomorrow is payday, I am flat broke and jonesing for a Diet Coke! I ask my oldest if she has any money. She says, “Yes. But you have to pay me back….

Double!”

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You Never Know How They Interpret The Things We Say

They are short staffed, so I have been working “like a dog” this month. That phrase sent Miss CoCo into an uncontrollable laughing fit. Since unlike seeing me coach gymnastics, she has never seen me doing this job, where “I work like a dog.”

You know, where I crawl around on all fours with my tongue hanging out, lifting my leg to pee on things.

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As I was leaving for work yesterday morning, CoCo asked where her daddy was, she remembered that I had said that I was going to work and that daddy would be home with them.

I said,  “Daddy had to go to a funeral.”

“What is a funeral?”

“it is a place where people who know someone who has died go to talk about how much they love them and say ‘good bye.’”

“WHAT?” Horrified she said, “MY DADDY IS DEAD!”

Oy Vey!

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“Orphan” and Poor are NOT Synonymous

This is a FaceBook comment I made regarding the Pat Robertson video, I just posted:

  As an adult former foster child I find is implication that those of us who have survived adversity are profoundly and permanently damaged and not worth the effort offensive, and clearly untrue.

HOWEVER, when we talk about so-called “Orphan Care” worldwide what we are talking about is “Orphans,” the majority of whom have one living parent and poverty is the overwhelming factor in their availability for adoption. When people quote:

“James 1:27 Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.”

I am always struck by the fact that it says AND, The fatherless AND widow, it says nothing about take her child, change their name seal its birth-certificate and make them “your own.”

Abused and intentionally neglected children need and deserve loving permanent homes. Children living in poverty who have parents who want and love them but can’t feed them, deserve to be helped at HOME with their family of origin where they belong.

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“We love Orphans”

“We minister to Orphans from all over the world, thousands of them. We love Orphans. We love helping people, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that I want to take all the Orphans from around the world into my home.” ~Pat Robertson

Classic!

As offensive as I think this clip is…

As much as it makes my skin crawl…

I would bet there are some “good Christians” and the children that they adopted, only to try to return, re-adopt out (disrupt) who would agree.

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We Made Them a Promise

And those years that we were "protecting them" and "giving them a better life?" We've all heard the horror stories. We ourselves have a son who was neglected in his birth home because of a birthmom's drug habit. He wasn't getting enough supervision as a toddler and so he was removed. He wasn't abused though .. .until he entered the system. Seven years and 15 placements later, he now had a history of sexual abuse, physical abuse that was so calculated and deliberate that it almost makes me vomit, and years of emotional abuse. And then the "system" made the decision that it was OK for him to be separated from his younger birth siblings. As a woman I met with yesterday said passionately, "who thinks they have the right to make the decision to separate people from their siblings???" And, because of the situation, no contact was allowed for these then three little boys until they were all eighteen. When he came to us it is no wonder it took years and years for him to heal.

Go Read The Rest PLEASE

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