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 very common in regards to parents who use illegal drugs. If you give birth to a child and it has drugs in its system you will be deemed unfit. This includes alcohol or tobacco which can severely damage a child's development.
This article doesn't do much more than state the obvious, drug use in parents is a sure way to lose your kids.
The article says a lot more than the obvious, and really has very little to do with the topic of placing children in foster care. It’s not claiming infants shouldn’t be removed from unsafe homes or trusted to foster parents as long as those homes remain unsafe. It’s saying the foster system is being manipulated to the detriment of children, birth parents, and foster parents. The main family in this article is a shining example of when placing a child in foster care works perfectly, where the parents expediently turned things around and managed to bond with their child despite the tragic circumstances. The goal of foster care is to reunite families, and even in these ideal cases it’s easy to turn the system against its own goal.
The argument will always be which household is better for the child. Bio parents are regularly found not to be the safest fit.
No, because that's just an excuse to re-home children. The argument needs to be "is the bio-home safe for the child"? Not, which home is better. We must default to keeping the kids with the bio-home, even if another home is "better", it's not good enough.
But that isn't how it works in child welfare cases. They only care about which location is better for the child.
I was taken from my parents by CPS when I was a kid. The other commenter is correct, it's "is their home safe" not "is their home safer". The latter is waaaay to subjective when we're dealing with people's children.
That is exactly how child welfare cases work. Is the bio-home safe for the child is the base line litmus test for 'which location is better' because you absolutely-must-have equitable and fair standards that aren't subjective under the whims of individual welfare case workers who are themselves human beings with their own flaws that may sway them towards biases that are unrelated to a child's welfare.
'Which location is better' is an open ended subjective concept without a defined contextual standard. The biological home being safe is where that standard must begin and it is entirely reasonable for it to be weighed in favor of from the outset of such a consideration.
Yet that is the argument these lawyers are forcing a judge to make. Safe vs Safer.
This is wrong and misinformation.
No, that is actually the argument the lawyers are making.
I've BEEN IN COURTROOMS. WITH THESE LAWYERS. IVE HEARD THEIR ARGUMENTS AS A PART OF MY WORK. You do not know what you are talking about. At all. Full stop.
I believe what he is mentioning is the specific type of case brought up in the article called an "intervenor" where a foster family can still get rights at least in Colorado after the biological family has already been declared safe.
The "lawyers" I believe he's mentioning is the lawyer Einrich and specialist Baird mentioned in the article as being pro-intervenor.
I am not in this field, like at all, so if I'm mistaken please correct me.
This is wrong and misinformation.
No. There is always a better household. That is ridiculous. Say we are good parents providing a safe home with only cheap food, sometimes having to skip meals to feed the kids. There's a richer family who could do better. But if they get the kids, there's a better off family with a psychologist mom who can do a better job. Oh, wait - there's a household that can get them both cars when they are 16 and send them to a private school that gives them better opportunities.
Where does it end? And who decides?
There is always going to be a family who can financially provide more than the parents of any child. And often, having kids gets people motivated to make more money, go back to school, improve their lives. It would take all my fingers and some of my toes to count the families I know who had kids when they were poor and ended up getting better lives. Their kids see that struggle and learn it's possible to get ahead. Their kids are great people.
