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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote]Um, what’s this based on please? Because my personal experience (I’m the PP foster kid), is obviously very different. The social workers did everything to keep me in a home with a drunk and drug addict, no electricity or food at times, and complete filth. Who are these social workers you suggest are messing up close calls? Don’t really think that’s common, but if you have data I’d love to see it. Obviously my experience is only my own.[/quote]

Question for this poster---from the perspective of your now adult self, do you think it would have been preferable for the social workers to have given your biological mother one (maybe two) chances to get her act together and then arranged for termination of parental rights and your adoption by a stable family, instead of shuffling you between bio-home and multiple temporary foster situations?  [/quote]

My kid self would say staying with my mother, who I thought loved me, kept me with my siblings and I knew how to navigate the chaos, esp as I got older.  I didn’t have the perspective of understanding what I was missing.  I would have fought like all get-out to not be adopted and would have been easily manipulated into thinking what a terrible outcome that was.  As an adult?  I should have been removed so, so many times more than I was.  There were so many reporters who failed me (back before I’d lie about it).  My mother was not capable of “getting her act together.”  It just wasn’t a possibility.  To have had a stable family probably would have been better.  That said, it’s really hard to know.  I understand that adoption is challenging for adoptees and the grass isn’t always greener.  I have a great life now so I can’t regret the choices I made and that were made for me.  But I really do take issue with potentially minimizing when / how children should be removed.  Probably because it was the excuse my mom would use - that the social worker overreacted, didn’t know what they were doing, the police were wrong, etc - all while I’d been scraping mold off of food to eat, having bugs crawl on me at night from filth or when I was in the actual car that she drove off the road into a pole while drunk.[/quote]
Termination of parental rights makes the kid a legal orphan. They do not get adopted. A child left to the system is better off thinking that they still have a parent out there, rather than have nobody. These legal orphans change school and families frequently and age out[/quote]
The federal government gives states money for every kid in the foster care system. There are definitely some, not all, CFSA workers who are horrible at their job and pull kids from homes without a thorough investigation. And if the family doesn’t have the money to fight back, those kids are SOL. Twenty to thirty percent of kids who age out of foster care are immediately homeless. Boom. No Home or family to go back to. Seventy percent of the girls who age out of the system are pregnant before the age of twenty-one. In DC, 65% of the foster kids cannot read or graduate from high school. The foster care system is horrible, for the kids in the system. I know someone who lost her child because of a dispute with a neighbor. cFSA went into their home based on a lie from a neighbor. It took that family months to prove their innocence and retrieve their child. The trauma that family faced was horrible, just from the PTSD aspect.  Of course that family had it easier than most, for they had jobs and were able to hire attorneys to fight back. [/quote]

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