● There’s still another major study documenting the extent
to which children are needlessly in foster care – and this one also documents
the success of one solution: high-quality legal defense for families. There’s
a story in the Chronicle of Social Change. Here’s the press release from New York University School
of Law. And I have a post about it on
this blog.
● One of the lawyers who provides this kind of high-quality
family defense has an
excellent essay in Paste about a family
in which the mother accidentally dropped her five-year-old son. He suffered a
fractured skull. But this family didn’t
need a lawyer. Can you guess why?
● The Arizona Republic
has
a story about the hypocritical way child protective services agencies
invoke concerns about children’s privacy – because it’s the agency’s privacy they’re really
defending.
● One child welfare agency, the Los Angeles County
Department of Children and Family Services countenanced a massive invasion of
children’s privacy – and that was only one of the problems with the HBO
documentary Foster. I have a blog
post about it.
● Daniel Heimpel, publisher of the Chronicle of Social Change has a column
criticizing Naomi Schaefer Riley for using “cherry-picked statistics on child
maltreatment deaths – a horrific but incredibly rare occurrence – to insinuate
that ramping up domestic family separations has a corollary in reduced child
maltreatment deaths.” (I have more
about Riley here.)
● The Chronicle also
has a column from Nora McCarthy, director of Rise, about Rise’s
Handbook for improving frontline practice with parents (There’s a link to the
full handbook.)
● And, 26 years after I wrote a cover story for the
alternative weekly in Chicago about the foster-care panic caused by certain
media and politicians, I
have an update. (The media are doing
better; the politicians, not so much.)
