● The Washington Post Outlook section describes its weekly “Five Myths” feature as “challenging everything you think you know.” Guess what the topic was on Sunday.
● Following up on last week’s NCCPR column in The Imprint about what is being left out of stories about Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s war against transgender children: Contrary to what one caseworker told the Texas Tribune, Abbott’s behavior isn’t revealing what one family policing agency has become. It reveals what all such agencies have been all along. On the NCCPR Blog: Is even a moment of self-reflection too much to ask? In child welfare – and journalism – apparently, yes.
● Because they have no shame, the people who build and run the foster care-industrial complex would probably claim Sarde Hardie as evidence of how wonderful the system is. After all, she’s a film executive in Canada. Here’s some of what Ms. Hardie has to say about herself and her siblings in the Los Angeles Times:
It is impossible for me not to imagine what our lives might have been like if we had stayed with our birth mother. What others' lives would be if their families were given support and means to survive instead of forced separation.
● Connecticut is
proposing to fund an agency to help link families to real help. It would be a
private agency separate from the state’s family policing agency. But is it
separate enough? The Imprint has a story about it.
● The Imprint also reports on a committee in California looking at a more far-reaching solution: reparations.
● And in South Carolina, legislators heard testimony on a “right to childhood” bill – the kind that would specify that it’s not neglect to let a child, say, do her homework alone in the front yard – yep, that was an actual case. Fortunately, it is not yet considered neglect to let a child testify before a state legislature. One of the witnesses was Caroline Lanz, age 6.
