When Foster Parents Don’t Want to Give Back the Baby
In many states, adoption lawyers are pushing a new legal strategy that forces biological parents to compete for custody of their children.
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This is such a horrible situation for all involved. Understandably the birth parents and blood relatives want to have the right to raise their kids especially when they clean up their act and find themselves in a better place to raise their kids and make things right for their family.
On the other hand I imagine it has to be heartbreaking to foster a child who was unwanted or removed from an abusive situation and raise them for several years like your own only to have a court come in and tear that child that you were raising and caring for away because you're not their real parents.
The whole thing from both sides is just awful.
To be fair, it is implied that foster care is temporary, no? Like you have to know what you're getting yourself into
I know a lot of people who foster. There’s generally two situations, ‘foster to adopt’ and ‘emergency placements.’
Emergency placements are when a 13 year old shows up in the middle of the night with a trash bag holding the sum total of their belongings because they were in a dangerous situation and while the courts figure things out they need a place to stay for a couple weeks.
Long term fosterage is often done with the hope to one day welcome the child legally into your family. I know two different young couples who raised infants into toddlers and had to ‘give them back’ to families who were strangers to the child.
They knew the risks, that doesn’t mean it hurts any less
You're right, but imo when you know the risks of what you're doing its pretty vile to rip a child from their parents especially in this case where the parents clearly worked very hard to get clean and get their shit together for the kid.
Yup. You knew what you were getting into. That, best case scenario from the child's pov, is going back to their real family. Always.
That's not normal. Foster placements are almost always intended to get the child home. The parents don't stop being the parents and usually have a list of conditions to follow, this might be drug testing, improving the home, etc.
It can be quick, a couple of weeks, but it's often slow. With having to get off drugs they have to do X amount of weekly drug tests to prove they're long term clean, 6 months isn't uncommon for serious addicts.
This baby was intended to go home and they knew it.
This here. My wife and I went through the process with a local agency that handles fostering for Child Protective Services. Sat through nearly two months of weekly classes, many hours of online classes. They spend a significant time making sure you understand what the situation is, and what your expectations are. For our situation, there were three options for being certified and licensed: foster, foster-to-adopt, or adopt.
For fostering, you could get a different child every night who's only with you for a night. You might get a family of 5 siblings at 2am who are gone in two days. A child might be with you for a day, a week, a month.
For fostering-to-adopt, they generally only place kids with you who seem likely to not end up back with bio-parents, or where the process for the child(ren) going back to the bio-parents seems like it's going to take a lot of time (maybe rehab, or some kind of lengthy court proceedings, etc). But it doesn't always end up that way. Since where I live you have to go back through the licensing process every 5 years, there were people there who talked about how they had been placed with a child who was with them for 2-3 years before ending up back with bio-parents. One foster parent had a child with them for almost 5 years and then the child returned to the bio-parents.
Yes, people who get into that understand what they're getting into. Time and time again you have to make it clear you understand. But when you have the idea that each new child placed with you could end up being permanent, and especially when the placement lasts for significant amounts of time, it's impossible for it not to hurt.
For people who are only interested in adoption, they don't do any foster placements with the parents. They only get to meet children who's bio-parents have lost all legal rights to them. However, the agency made it very clear about halfway through the program that this will basically never happen. That's what our goal was. They said "when you're done with the classes, we'll get in touch with you for home visits, etc. and then get you licensed, but our timeline for that is 6-8 months." They never got in touch with us, even when we and others looking to adopt in our cohort tried to reach out to them after not receiving anything. They only care about fostering.
Going through all this made it very clear that the entire system is fucked from top to bottom. The govt is far too happy to leave children in horrific, abusive, and terrifying situations, while also being far too happy to tear families apart who don't deserve it. There are far too many foster parents who only want to do it for the clout and to feel like they're saviors. And there are so, so, so many children in the system and it makes these agencies far too eager to recruit new foster homes. The agency worked with 5 different counties, and each time we met for classes, they'd say something like "just to help you understand the need, we took in 20 new children last night, and 10 the night before ..." and talk about how they didn't have enough homes for placing them.
Everything about it is fucked, but regardless of how tough it is on foster parents, the children are ones who really suffer for it. I have no idea what the solution is though. It's all a complete nightmare for basically everyone involved.
This is true, but that doesn’t make it any easier. Especially since it’s not always a guarantee
I'd imagine it is incredibly hard, and that entering with the knowledge the arrangement will only be temporary is unlikely to make handing back a child any easier emotionally, but from the article it seems some foster parents have been using the foster system as a means to circumvent the far more onerous adoption system, rather than merely finding themselves alarmed that a child they took in is being returned somewhere they believe to be unsuitable, and willing to fight such a return.
Have no issue with the latter, even if their beliefs happen to be incorrect (that's for the courts to sort out), but the former is an intentional manipulation of the lives of vulnerable children from the outset - before a placement has been initiated, before attachments have formed within a foster family, before the foster parents know any details of the lives of the biological parents & before any indications could have arisen that it would be in the best interests of a particular child to remain with their foster parents.
The whole area is a maze of incredibly difficult decisions, and I don't think there are obvious solutions, other than to remind judges in the family courts to be particularly cautious about the advice of experts & the behavioural theories they invoke.
