My mother pounded on my door about 7:30 last night to tell me I HAD to go watch Nancy Grace. She said it was about a child that died because social services kept giving him back to his meth head mom. I stepped outside with her and made a 'shush' motion. I told her I can't watch Nancy Grace right now because Lis is in bed and not asleep yet. Mom said, well, you should watch it, the relatives are just like us! I told her no one is dead here, go home, I'll watch it later.Later when Lis was asleep I close captioned the second airing and watched. Turns out everyone is upset with social services in the case because the child's mom has a sister who wanted little Caleb. She had begged social services not to send him back to his mother because of her meth addiction and anger issues. But, the mother would either clean up her act for awhile and take the parenting classes, get her son back, then go back to heavy meth use, or she would move across county lines out of sight of DHS. The aunt has spent the last year searching for Caleb and begging social services to help her. Now his body has been found under the mother's trailer house. HERE is one article.
I don't know who to blame. Social Services has guidelines and rules that must be followed by law. But the bottom line is, parents must be given a chance to parent. I was told (by DHS) the goal is to return children to their biological parents. I think that's the wrong goal. I think the goal should be to keep children safe, no matter how long it takes. Returning them to their parents should be secondary. Until we change the focus and goals of DHS by law, then cases like Caleb will keep happening.
4 comments:
children's safety should ALWAYS be #1....i understand that the goal is to return children to the parents, but after how many times?? i know in summit county, they are given so many times (3 in the case of drugs) and after that, they loose permanent custody and have their parental rights terminated.....
and if a parent is in the midst of an addiction, if they aren't willing to check into a long term rehab facility, DHS should never return custody as an addict cannot just be 'cured' w/o any form of rehabilitation.....
rules/laws need to be changed as too many children are harmed psychologically by ping ponging between foster care and parents who cannot parent---and no child should be seeing their parents strung out on drugs or unable to care for themselves; and children are ending up dead......
and good old common sense needs to be applied---that is lacking in society today all over.....
Well said.
I won't bore you with all the details, but, the situation with my neice's children broke my heart. I tried to intervene with social services when her second child was born, but to no avail. Later, when I couldn't stand it anymore, I persevered through channels that clearly were not set up to benefit a child, and the end result was that she was "allowed" to give up those two children. I was told that the baby almost died, though.
She went on to have three more children with the guy she married, and they both lost all three due to neglect and abuse. The system got the children out of her care, but it was really almost to late. My neice had kept contact with the foster family, and quite happily told me (after many months of their being in foster care), that the littlest one was starting to make eye contact. How sad is that, that the little one couldn't even look at anyone?
It broke my heart that she would treat her babies this way. It also broke my heart that she didn't tell us that she was losing them until they were gone. I would have loved to care for those babies. I found out when the foster parents were actually in the process of adopting them.
The system is set up in such a way that it feels as though the last concern is the child's actual welfare.
I think that the emphasis should be on the parents proving consistently that they are capable, mentally, emotionally, and physically, of caring for and meeting all the needs of their children. If you make a mistake and do meth or whatever, you get a chance to redeem yourself. If you have a relapse, make a mistake,whatever. . .you are done.
Repetitively removing, replacing the children in the home, etc., causes far more harm than any good that could be achieved by doing so.
Just my opinion.
You wouldn't bore me, I'd like to hear those stories. I understand parents make mistakes. You can have a night of bad judgement and fix it. But, how many times do you get to use that excuse? How many damn times do the kids get returned to these fuck ups?? Again and again and again and again until it's too late.
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