Child "Protection" Agencies Do More Harm Than Good
When do-gooding doesn't do good, stop doing it!
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The budget discussions have made it clear that our federal, state, and local governments simply must cut costs by shedding some of the responsibilities they've accumulated over the years. Having listed Child Protection Services as an area in need of cutting, we went into detail why protecting children is beyond a government's abilities. Janice responded:
Such a negative and inhumane attitude - I guess its survival of the fitness in your world. Being part of the child welfare system as a social worker and now as a private practice clinician I have seen children's lives turned around in a positive way because they were given a better opportunity to grow and thrive in a healthier home. The media rarely covers these stories. As a tax payer myself I feel that helping the disempowered is an investment in our future because in some circumstances it does make a huge difference in a person's life. [emphasis added]
Janice is entirely correct. Not only is helping the disempowered, which includes most children, an investment in our future, it's an utterly necessary investment. Unless we give the vast majority of our children the tools they need to take their places as responsible, productive adult members of our society, our high-tech civilization will collapse and half our population will starve to death.
We and Janice are in vehement agreement on that principle. Where we differ is on how it can be achieved.
Janice believes that government programs can make a positive difference in children's lives. Unfortunately, we're convinced by overwhelming evidence that Child Protection Services do far more harm than good.
Investigations and Interventions are Useless
American Child "Protection" Services are based on the Mondale Act which was signed by President Nixon in 1974. The law requires that CPS agencies solicit anonymous reports of child abuse and that the agencies investigate each and every one.
This turns out to be a huge waste of time and money. Even the New York Times, normally one of the bureaucracy's most vehement cheerleaders, has been forced to admit that child abuse investigations don't do much to reduce risk of harm to children:
Child Protective Services investigated more than three million cases of suspected child abuse in 2007, but a new study suggests that the investigations did little or nothing to improve the lives of those children.
The study cited by the Times pointed out that when investigation leads to action, the situation seldom improves:
A critical third barrier [to prevention efforts] is our limited understanding of the effectiveness of interventions after child maltreatment. Traditional CPS interventions such as family preservation and family support services after investigation are not associated with reductions in repeat maltreatment or foster care placement. [emphasis added]
The Times says, "Traditional interventions," which are the cornerstones of our CPS system, "are not associated with reductions in repeat maltreatment or foster care placement." In other words, even when children are being mistreated, government-approved CPS services do not reduce mistreatment or help families stay together.
Foster Care is Harmful
An MIT study has found that on average, abused children still do better when left in biological homes, even if those homes are very far from ideal. MIT reported:
An MIT Sloan School of Management professor has for the first time used the analytic tools of applied economics to show that children faced with two options - being allowed to stay at home or being placed into foster care - have generally better life outcomes when they remain with their families.
Our government can't even teach kids how to read; why would anyone think they're able to substitute for parents? The federal government pays state agencies money when they remove kids, however, so that's what they do even though the MIT study shows that government makes a lousy parent.
Why are government bureaucrats such bad parents to the needy children it's their job to help? Is parenting rocket science?
Parenting is a great deal of work, but it's not rocket science. A New Yorker article "The Poverty Clinic" cited research which shows that one of the keys to successful parenting is creating strong emotional bonds between child and parent.
A study in Oregon showed that overstressed children could be helped by changing the behavior of parents or caregivers. The study encouraged foster parents to be more responsive to the emotional cues of their foster children. A Delaware study promoted secure emotional attachment between children and their foster parents. Both studies measured levels of stress hormones in children and found that teaching foster parents to bond emotionally to children reduced stress levels.
What kinds of parents have to be encouraged to bond with children? Government-ruled parents, of course. The New Yorker told of Monisha Sullivan, who had been placed in nine different foster homes and had had to adapt to nine different sets of foster parents. How can any child bond emotionally to foster parents when she knows that she can be dragged away to another home at the whim of a bureaucrat? How can a parent become emotionality bound to a child which might be taken away at any moment?
Our reader Janice is completely correct in saying that proper intervention can make a huge positive difference in a child's life, but that's not what government does. By dragging children to and fro through the system, they mess up the child's emotions so badly that Monisha wasn't able to bond with her own daughter after giving birth.
It's Systemic
Janice is undoubtedly correct in saying that some children benefit from CPS intervention, but the agencies do more harm than good. The problem is that government agencies operate by fixed rules which make no provision for common sense. Some time ago, we discussed a particularly idiotic CPS outcome:
In an article "Hard lemonade, hard price," the Detroit Free Press reports:
The way police and child protection workers figure it, Ratte should have known that what a Comerica Park vendor handed over when Ratte ordered a lemonade for his boy three Saturdays ago contained alcohol, and Ratte's ignorance justified placing young Leo in foster care until his dad got up to speed on the commercial beverage industry.
Even if, in hindsight, that decision seems a bit, um, idiotic. [emphasis added]
Everyone involved said that the police and social workers were "only following orders" based on agency rules.
The Freep quoted Don Duquette, a U-M law professor who directs the university's Child Advocacy Law Clinic, as saying that the emergency removal powers of CPS, though "well-intentioned" are "out of control and partly responsible for the large numbers of kids in the foster care system," which is almost universally acknowledged to be badly overburdened.
Here we have a bureaucracy which experts in the field say is "out of control" and is "universally acknowledged to be badly overburdened." In other words, everyone familiar with the system knows it's out of control, yet there are no protests and no one wants to fix it.
Consider the effects of this "out of control" bureaucracy. Unjustified child removal traumatizes children. My friends who were wrongly removed during their childhoods distrust government deeply; their parents see government as a vast conspiracy to trash as many citizens as possible. Is it sound public policy to turn good parents into enemies of government? Is it a good idea to mess up children like Monisha so badly that they can't bond with their children? It's good for the bureaucracy because they can increase their budgets by providing services to the messed-up children of children whom they abuse, but it's bad for society overall.
Starving the Beast
The more money CPS agencies get, the more children they can afford to abuse. As far back as August 1989, the page-one article "Child-Abuse Charges Ensnare Some Parents In Baseless Proceedings," in the Wall Street Journal reported that two-thirds of children who removed from their homes as a result of child abuse interventions turned out not to be abused at all.
Abrupt removal is always traumatic for a child and MIT has shown that it generally leads to worse outcomes. This means, mathematically, that our government abuses twice as many children as parents do.
When this history of our time is written, it will be shown that government Child "Protection" bureaucracies abused and harmed far more children than parents ever did. One good thing about the upcoming cuts in state spending is that we taxpayers will be funding less child abuse.
What, then, of Janice's concern for helping the disempowered? As with education, that's best handled by the private sector as we'll explain later.
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What does Chinese history have to teach America that Joe Biden doesn't know?
And of course a more sinister issue, that of human trafficking which has been tracked back to officials and organizations in the child protection services should not remain unmentioned.
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It costs a childless couple between $30,000 and $60,000 in legal fees, etc., to adopt a child. Social workers tend to create situations where foster girls become sexually active and have babies. If they can show that the girl is too young to be a competent mother, they can usually get a friendly judge to terminate parental rights.
Infants are relatively easy to place. Where do you think the money goes?
A friend of mine knows a girl / young woman who kept having babies until the social workers "let me keep one." Willy is right, it's a racket.
Julia, what does this statement mean?
>Social workers tend to create situations
>where foster girls become sexually active
>and have babies
Spot on about a lot of things, Will. The only thing I'm curious about is the study you mention showing that kids allowed to choose foster care or staying with parents do better when they choose to stay with parents. I'm thinking this is probably not a random selection of kids; presumably more severely abused children would not be given a choice to remain with their parents. Under what circumstances were some children allowed to make a choice? I can only imagine that they were very mild cases of abuse where parents looked likely to have changed their ways.
You are correct that much that is wrong with the CPS system is due to the way the money flows. My own state was rated worst in the nation for abuse of foster children, and its agency's answer was (predictably) that it was terribly underfunded. This is after oversight placed more than one child into the hands of abusive foster parents who killed them.
CPS is especially pernicious as "everyone knows" its entire purpose is to "save children". No politician wants to be seen doing anything but giving more money to an organization that "saves children", no matter how horrible a job it does. It's just too risky politically.
Much the same said here could be said of the various Departments of Child Support Enforcement. After Reagan got smacked down for going after welfare moms, he tried to recoup some welfare losses by encouraging states to actually collect child support (which repays the fed when collected in welfare cases). His encouragement included an offer of a percentage of the money collected to be returned to the states. Almost overnight, child support awards doubled or tripled as states realized that the more money they forced the NCP to pay the CP, the more money they got in federal kickbacks. While well-intentioned, this has led to many of the more egregious and grotesque abuses perpetrated by DCSE and the "family" courts. Meanwhile anyone who tries to report them is painted as either a disgruntled (and probably dangerous) "deadbeat dad" or someone who wants to deprive innocent children of food -- and the beat goes on.
To anyone interested in learning more about this situation, I'd highly recommend reading Glenn Sacks. He's one of the most fair and balanced fathers' rights activists and is willing to give the feminists their due when they are right.
@Werebat
The MIT study of foster care versus leaving children with their families did not involve children making any choices at all. In all cases, the decisions to remove or not to remove were made by either judges or the agencies.
To read about the study, you can click on the link "Kids gain more from family than foster care" above.
There are 700,000 mentally ill people in U.S. prisons. How many are unloved children? Families need help. We have 730 billion dollars for war. Imagine if we spent that on families?
You are assuming that spending money helping families will do some good. It doesn't - government agencies harm far more children and families than they help. Read the articles.
the state laws do cause a lot more problems because they don't let parents be parents, kids read about it and think that they can do anything they want to, and the parents can't do anything about it. there are a lot of kids that abuse their parents because of this broken system and often is the child that ends up hurting him/her self because of the government.
THINGS NEED TO BE CHANGED IN THE ROLES OF GOVERNMENT IN THE LIVES OF CHILDREN AROUND THE WORLD. OUR CHILDREN DO NOT BELONG TO GOVERNMENTS, THEY DO NOT BELONG TO SOCIAL SERVICES, THEY DO NOT BELONG TO COMMUNITY, THEY DO NOT BELONG TO THEIR FATHERS, THEY DO NOT BELONG TO SOCIETY, THEY DO NOT BELONG TO ANYONE - EXCEPT THEIR MOTHERS!
Several thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of children have been savagely ripped from the arms and homes of their mothers all over the world by greed social services representatives and corrupt family courts for the favor of greedy selfish, sadistic men who want to control or harm the childrens mommies. NO ONE SHOULD HAVE THE POWER TO TAKE A CHILD FROM ITS MOTHER! If ou want to do something to help children - help their mothers! We did not create this warped and twisted society we all live in. We did not make the laws or the rules or the businesses or the destruction of the planet or the waste of resources, or the building of tanks and guns and weapons of mass destruction! WE, MOTHERS AND CHILDREN DID NOT DO ANY OF THIS. YOU DON'T HAVE ENOUGH TO DESTROY, YOU'VE GOT TO DESTROY OUR FAMILIES TOO?
Mothers and grandmothers and fathers and families and children ARE ALL SICK OF SOMEONE ELSE BUTTING INTO OUR LIVES AND STEALING OUR JOY AND CREATING CHAOS, AND COSTING US HUNDREDS AND THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS AND CREATING GRIEF, AND MAKING US MAD AS HELL BY MESSING WITH OUR CHILDREN!
If you are all so CIVILIZED then stop destroying the world by destroying mothers. If this were a movie and I was a character it would be AVATAR and I would be Neytiri, and if you came NEAR MY CHILD, CHILDREN OR FAMILY you would pay by the wrath of the wild animal in me that protects my young and the helpless and innocent of MY WORLD!
This is not a movie, it is more like a nightmare I used to have where I would be running and running to get away from the scary thing that was chasing me, and every time I was caught I would wake up...
I have to say this more and more every day or we will never get our children back: We can no longer "go back inside and play nice" we have cried and begged and screamed into our pillows and we have asked nicely, over and over and over "please give us back our children" THEY ARE OUR CHILDREN, first after God, children belong to their mothers. And whatever it takes, however many times i have to say this, no matter who i have to argue with, there is no GOOD ENOUGH ARGUMENT for taking children away from their mother on a long term or permanent basis. NONE, we try to rehabilitate murderers and pedophiles and release them back out into an unsuspecting, innocent society, we spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on criminals that REALLY HURT PEOPLE, INCLUDING WOMEN AND CHILDREN and we let them go... I must say everyone, if you have read everything I have written, or even if you have not, it is time to know that we must DEMAND OUR CHILDREN BACK NOW because we are NOT GOING TO GET THEM ANY OTHER WAY!
If you read my open blog you will see some of the stories and some of the moms and my own daughters story about her children being taken by evil men with wealthy families. There is so much proof against them for all of their crimes and lies to take her children from her in sneaky, illegal, conspiratorial ways, but she has yet to be heard in court... we haven't seen or heard from the boys in over a year and they want to be with their mommy... but no one listens to them, and the baby girl adores her mommy and needs to be with her more than four hours a week at a public venue. THESE CHILDREN BELONG AT HOME WITH THEIR MOMMY just like many others do and if we do not do something pretty soon they are all going to grow up without their mothers...
It has been state that if foster children could sue the state for neglect and abuse the state would go broke. It is now on record more children are sexually abused,physically and emotionally abused while under state care. Foster homes are not under the severe strict guidlines cps has for the average family.I know of a mom who was washing clothes when the doorbell rang and she set down her bottle of bleach to answer the door. It was cps..a neighbor in revenge called cps on her. She without thought let the women in(never never allow cps in your home)The cps spotted the bleach and removed her young children. When those children were finally returned their spirits had been so damaged.At nights the mom had to sit with her children until they fell asleep as they feared every car door or sound outside fearing it was the cps and they once again would be ripped from their loving parents arms. Cps had become the monster in the closest.
THE CPS IS A DOG AND PONY SHOW..
I wish it was only a dog and pony show. In fact, it's a bunch of bureaucrats who kidnap children for the same of federal subsidies. They don't want kids who have really been abused because they're hard to handle. They want to mess them up enough that they are in need of services so they can provide services for the rest of the kid's life.
CPS goes after parents on some minor issue, while ignoring the families who truly abuse and neglect their children. My granddaughter is well taken care of and my daughter is working on doing better. Yet Nazi CPS says she cannot be with her daughter without supervision. My daughter has back problems that cause her a lot of pain and she has taken medication that is not prescribed to her for it, yet CPS treats her like she is a drug addict who is endangering her daughter. She has been in treatment programs, is currently in IOP and is doing very well, yet CPS still says she cannot spend time with her daughter alone. She had to go back to the emotionally abusive father in order to see her daughter at all. She and my granddaughter were in a stable environment in my home, yet she had to send my granddaughter to the father who lives with his parents where there is constant bickering and fighting. How is that good for the child? CPS has emotionally damaged more children than they have helped. My granddaughter wants to live here with me and my daughter, but because of the Gestapo CPS, she can't. Yeah, they care about the child's welfare alright! Just like all the other corrupt, evil government agencies who destroy people for their own greed for power! CPS is truly a monster!
CPS has been allowed to run amok and ruin lives because all they have to say is that they err on the side of caution where children are concerned. They have medical people so afraid of being investigated that doctors and nurses call CPS at the drop of a hat, not realizing the horrors they are inflicting on families. Soon no one will want to take their children to ER with injuries etc. CPS investigators have waaaaay too much power, and no consequences when they violate civil rights and/or cause extreme emotional damage to families for little to no reason. The big question is, not that we have allowed this mess to get so big, how do we back track and clean it up?
The major corrective is to recognize that all people have a constitutional right to petition their elected representatives, and the public, fir redress of grievances. the Mondale act requires that all child protection hearings be confidential. Secrecy is the main tool of tyranny, and CPS workers use it. They threaten parents with jail if they complain when CPS acts illegally. Making it clear that parents can go public would be a big first step.
The second step would be to remove immunity from social workers. It's been demonstrated that they can be sued personally if they act illegally enough, but it needs to be made clear that they must follow the law and that lying in court is a crime for which they will be punished.
Immunity is the second tool of tyranny.
Day care harms children! So says Dr. Gruber, Obamacare architect
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/424667/universal-childcare-jonathan-gruber-study
It turns out that exposure to childcare in Quebec negatively impacts children in both the short and long terms. Compared with their peers in other provinces, young Québécois children had higher rates of anxiety, aggression, and hyperactivity. As teenagers, these children committed more crimes and were generally less satisfied with their lives. The program had no long-term positive effect on children’s standardized test scores or cognitive abilities, and may even have had a negative effect. Why is this program failing children in Quebec so miserably? Nobody knows for sure. There is no evidence that the program was underfunded or understaffed, and its negative effects persisted even after new regulations designed to improve the quality of care and increase wages. So it seems unlikely that substandard services are the culprit.
It’s possible that center-based care has an inherently negative impact on children. Most of the care provided by Quebec’s program occurred in regulated day-care centers. The number of such centers rose from 78,864 in 1997 to 245,107 in 2012, an increase far greater than that seen in other Canadian provinces. Accordingly, children in other provinces had far less exposure to center-based care.
This isn't the only bogus abuse case. "Real Pizza, Fake News" at http://www.scragged.com/articles/real-pizza-fake-news observes that although our mainstream media produced huge amounts of anti-conservative fake news about bogus child abuse, bogus rapes, bogus racist acts, fake hate crimes, and misquoting Mr. Trump, fake news was never a problem until Hillary said that fake news had denied her the presidency.
https://www.newyorker.com/sections/news/why-has-daryl-kelly-been-imprisoned-for-the-last-twenty-years-for-a-crime-that-likely-never-happened?mbid=synd_digg&utm_source=digg&utm_medium=email
For the past twenty years, Daryl Kelly has been imprisoned in New York State for a crime that may never have happened. He was living with his wife and five children in Newburgh, New York, in the fall of 1997, when he was arrested for rape and sexual abuse. The supposed victim was his oldest child, Chaneya, who was then eight years old. Chaneya testified against her father at trial; the jury convicted him; a judge sentenced him to twenty-to-forty years in prison. At the time, Chaneya’s mother was addicted to crack cocaine, among other drugs, and Chaneya and her siblings went to live with her grandmother. The following year, when her grandmother asked her what exactly had happened with her father, Chaneya told her that, in fact, there had been no rape or sexual abuse.
In the fall of 1999, the judge ordered a hearing, and Chaneya returned to the witness stand. This time, Chaneya testified that she had lied during the trial. The judge did not believe her, however, and Kelly has remained in prison ever since. An attorney named Peter Cross agreed to represent Kelly, pro bono, five years ago, but he has been unable to get him out of prison. I wrote about Kelly’s case for New York, in 2013, and in January, for the first time, Kelly will appear before the state Board of Parole.
His attorney has sent the parole board a packet on his behalf, which includes a letter that Chaneya wrote to her father in prison in 2002, when she was thirteen years old. Her schoolgirl handwriting fills each line of a page of three-ring-notebook paper. “Dear Daddy,” she wrote. “I do feel bad about telling a lie. All I want to do is put it all behind. You want the truth. I’ll tell you the truth.”
She recounts the day of the alleged assault—a Friday in October of 1997—when she stayed home from school sick and hung out with him in the living room. “I went upstairs to where mommy was,” she wrote. “I went in my room and laid down. All of a sudden, I guess Mommy was drunk or something. Mommy came in with a belt asking me, ‘What did your father do to you? What did he do?’ I said ‘Nothing.’ She said, ‘Tell me or I’ll beat you.’... I didn’t want to get beat so I made up a lie that I’d take back any day. I regret everything I said.” She added: “I feel guilty when I talk about it. I feel that I should be in prison instead of you.”
Missing word in these screeds is PARENTS. These kids had a woman and a man bring them into the world. Mom and dad knew ( or should have known ) that the maturation period of a First World child is at least 18 years. Our government told them that they can enjoy the process of inception and ignore the process of maturation. So the guy bred and fled while the mom either soldiered on or used the system to get some pharmaceuticals to handle the maturation process. And our prisons expand.
Parents have to understand their responsibility . It should be taught in schools . And be punished if they expect fellow citizens/tax payers to support their child. Try castration for the serial breeding dad as a starter. And mom's welfare benefits are cut off if she breeds one more baby. The govt bureaucrats who live off this system have to learn that it is an aberration and should figure out another way to milk the tax payer.
Something that should be widely advertised is that CPS personnel take a dim view towards trivial complaints. They get angry at the complainer. Some well-funded activist could find ex-CPS personnel and make some You-Tube videos or a documentary or something, and then advertise it. This has the potential to do a lot of good. This is a necessary antidote to the proliferation of cell phones.
An ex-CPS worker relative of mine adopted from the system. During a runaway incident with one, she quickly gave all her children to a relative because she was afraid CPS might come after her.
Prior to having kids, I was carded three times in my entire life for suspicious behavior or minor rule breaking. (I am not counting as a driver) No criminal record, I'm not a minority, we are married, and I am one of those pokey speed limit drivers.
Since we started having kids ~five years ago, we've had ~20 police calls, in at least six communities. One caller complained about breastfeeding. Many of them were for lacking shoes in a public place (little kids take them off sometimes), the others were related to the temperature outside or to fussiness or tantrums. Thankfully God was with us, and I was never arrested, cited, etc. None of them were from our house/yard. Instead it was when we were at a stadium, library, public sidewalk, parking lot, or cemetery, or park.
We have had no CPS calls, I am thankful to God about this. One officer did threaten CPS for shoes off (while I carried a child for a distance of about ~20 feet into a gym where shoes weren't needed, during a cold winter day where I had pre-heated the car before driving). Later I called back and she said she wouldn't report us. All of the other officers have not threatened my children. However, for a while one or another might start crying if they saw a police officer coming at us.
Recently I took my two oldest to an event where a politician spoke to kids about the branches of government. They were amused afterwards when I pointed out that he was afraid of speaking in front of children, likely due to the fact that has never had any of his own. They both thought they would be afraid of the politician, but decided on their own that he was not scary.
The good news that since Trump was elected, we've had maybe four calls. It has definitely slowed down. We sold the house and moved to a different state and only one call has been here so far.
I think the Obama years may have been stressful on the elderly/mothers and so they decide to take it out by calling cops on tantrums and shoe-less children. Obama took on a lot of things without the strong posturing from a leader that helps some people feel safe. Change brings fear, but a profile in courage makes people feel safe. As best as I can tell, Trump has helped us by the posturing, as obnoxious at it may seem to me. I'm pretty sure our experience is related to all of that Black Lives Matter stuff, in the sense that police calls on blacks have probably gone up too in the last decades due to the proliferation of cell phones.
One of my distant cousins a little younger than I was not so fortunate as us. She had her baby taken from her because she tested positive in her bloodstream for pot. She played with the system for one year, did everything she was told to, and cared for her child where the state kept it. After one year, her child was taken for good. Devastated, she took a reckless course of action that may have been suicide but of course you will never know for sure.
I know a good former police officer who took an uncle and minor child into custody years ago for what turned out to be a mistake. The guilt still haunted him last I talked to him.
Have you ever gone to adoptuskids.com ? Notice how many kids are on medications and weekly therapy visits. If you adopt them, it seems you have to keep the visits and medications. I think the U.S. should permit overseas adoptions--these children might actually get adopted that way because of less rules.
CYA/CYS agencies are a joke of monumental proportions. How many adolescent teens who have their first encounter with CY services and see the threats made against parents who try to maintain some semblance of discipline in a house and spare the child of any accountability? Its a green light for teens to keep disrespecting their parents. Where was all this government intervention when I was growing up? If the same laws and standards applied to my mother and father as per discipline I do NOT hold any ill will towards them bc they raised me right)...they'd be doing jail time! Fact is...I NEEDED the discipline to become the man I am today and to have succeeded in life. So many people see a kid acting out and wanna say..."What kind of parents did he or she have?" I say...think twice about ever saying that when you witness bad behavior again, because as long as the government wants to get involved inside your home....It will be an uphill battle for many parents to raise their children to be good successful respectful adults in society!
The government really can't take care of kids. The Boston Globe is VERY liberal; for them to admit that there are any problems in any government agency means that the problems are very, very bad.
She’s been bounced through more than a dozen foster homes. And she’s just 6
https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2019/08/24/she-been-bounced-through-more-than-dozen-foster-homes-and-she-just/cygwikaaMDb2LgHfuNlGNN/story.html
The Globe admits that this sort of chaos undermines a child's ability to form stable relationships and leads to all kinds of trauma and upset.
You aren't the only ones who see this.
https://nypost.com/2019/11/09/why-my-college-pals-went-to-yale-while-my-high-school-friends-went-to-jail/
Why my college pals went to Yale while my high school friends went to jail
My high-school friends led similar lives. None of them grew up in intact families, and none of them went to college. Some did go to jail, though.
It is fascinating to hear affluent people discuss the reasons for upward mobility. They suggest solutions like “opportunity” and “education.” Seldom do they mention “parents” or “family.” This is why: Affluent people take their families for granted. They’re so used to having stable families, it doesn’t occur to them what it would be like to go without. It’s like asking a fish about the importance of water.
For instance, 85 percent of children born to upper-class families are raised by both of their parents. For working-class families: 30 percent. In one of my college classes, I learned that out of 25 students, only me and one other student were not raised in a two-parent home. This aligns with research by Jennifer Gerner and Dean Lillard, which found that only 10 percent of students at Cornell were raised by divorced parents. Compare this with a national divorce rate of about 40 percent. Or with a finding from the Bureau of Justice Statistics that 56 percent of jail inmates report being raised by single parents or non-parental guardians.
A study led by Amy Dworsky at Chapin Hall, a policy research center at the University of Chicago, found that 60 percent of boys in foster care grow up to become jail inmates.
Another study by Ronald Hallett and Melinda Westland found that less than 3 percent of foster kids become college graduates. For every foster kid like me who obtains a college degree, 20 are incarcerated. It’s not just foster kids, though. My high-school friends grew up in garden-variety broken homes. And they align with findings from a paper by Cynthia Harper and Sara McLanahan that revealed boys raised by single mothers or by caregivers other than their parents are five times more likely to be incarcerated than boys raised by both their parents.
I attribute my own success to the rigid structure, tough mentorship and sense of community I experienced in the military. But, like my friend, I could easily have wound up in jail.
Some publications are catching on to the harm done by CPS agencies. All states let cops or social workers remove kids without a court order. This often resuls in the kids going back in a few days. Research shows that it's like being kidnapped in terms of inflicting trauma on kids.
The Hidden Trauma of “Short Stays” in Foster Care
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2020/02/11/the-hidden-trauma-of-short-stays-in-foster-care?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Experts and studies on child development say that the moment when a child is taken from her parents is the source of lifelong trauma, regardless of how long the separation lasts. ...
Child-welfare experts told The Marshall Project that except for certain unavoidable scenarios that require temporarily placing children in foster care—such as when their parents are sent to jail overnight and no relatives or friends can take them in—these traumatic removals are most often unwarranted.
“It’s hard to imagine that a week ago it was such an emergency that we couldn’t even wait to ask a judge to separate a family, but just seven days later, it’s all good, you can go home,” said Christopher Church, an attorney at the University of South Carolina School of Law who is a national expert on short stays.