It happens over and over. Foster parents and, to a lesser
extent, adoptive parents complain about how badly they are treated by child
protective services agencies. Decisions
are made about the children in their care without consulting them, they say.
They’re not treated as part of a team, they say. They’re even victimized by
false allegations of child abuse, they say.
Foster and adoptive parents are more likely to be white and
middle class – in other words, people like us instead of people like them. As a
result, to paraphrase the old brokerage slogan, when foster and adoptive parents
talk, people listen. They get enormous
public sympathy, as
in this case.
I don’t begrudge them that.
A lot of the time, their complaints are justified.
But every time I read another story about foster or adoptive
parents complaining about their ill-treatment, I keep waiting for one thing to
happen – I keep waiting for the proverbial lightbulb to appear over the
complaining foster or adoptive parents’ heads. I keep waiting for someone to
say: “The child welfare system really needs us. If this is how they’re treating us imagine how they’re treating birth
parents. Maybe I need to reconsider my
assumptions about who CPS takes away, and why.”
It’s not that it never happens. When Maine foster parent
Mary Callahan noticed that almost every child placed with her could have
remained safely in their own home had the birth parents simply gotten the aid
she received as a foster parent, it
helped change an entire state foster care system.
But such instances are few and far between. When one turns
up, it’s worth highlighting, even when it happened five years ago, and I missed
it at the time.
So I want to offer belated thanks to Dr. Christine Deeths,
formerly of Bakersfield, California, to her lawyer Shawn McMillan, who has championed
families in many similar cases in California, and to former Bakersfield Californian columnist Lois
Henry who wrote about what happened to Dr. Deeths’ children.
The details concerning what Kern County Child Protective
Services did to doctor Deeths’ adopted children are in this
column by Henry, so I won’t go into them here. Suffice it to say that it
falls into one of those rare categories of cases in which the overreach of
child protective services hits the middle class. And suffice it to say the needless removal of
the 4-year-old and 6-year-old children was so outrageous that the county
offered Deeths a settlement of $1.4 million – before she even sued.
As Deeths put it:
My children will never be the same. They lost their innocence the day they were taken. CPS stole that from them and it can never be replaced.
But instead of taking pains to claim she was different from people who typically get
caught up in the system, Dr. Deeths realized how much she and they had in
common. As Henry writes:
As part of the original CPS case, Deeths was ordered to attend parenting classes put on by Human Services. The classes themselves were useless, she said. But she met dozens of parents who, like her, had lost their children. Unlike her, however, they weren't nearly as educated nor did they have the same resources, money, strong family support, friends, colleagues, etc.
"I learned a lot about the less privileged," she said. "I learned a lot of empathy."
She had the resources to fight CPS, she said, when most other parents don't. She wonders how many more families have been unfairly torn apart.
"A lot of what they're taking kids for is a lack of knowledge about life skills and CPS isn't helping parents learn those life skills," she said. "Meanwhile they're creating generational problems because when you take a child, they're changed forever.
"They're creating a cycle."
If only more middle
class people who encounter the child welfare system had that kind of empathy.
