My job lately has been writing state-mandated reports for county child welfare departments in NoCal. The system is screwed up and they know it. There is host of reasons.

* Social workers are underpaid and overworked. The low pay and stressful nature of the work (it's hard to spend all day dealing with abuse or neglect issues, and it's even harder for them to be responsible for splitting a family up) lead to high turnover. But caseloads don't drop, so the social workers who stay on end up with an unreasonably expanding caseload. That's not good for anyone, because it means less time spent on any one case.

* The budget for social services in CA has been cut every year for the past, what, 3? 4? Departments are underfunded. This leads to more problems like those mentioned above.

* There is a shortage of foster parents -- and an even greater shortage of good ones. When kids do get sent into foster care, no, the stories that come out aren't generally positive. (We did a bunch of focus groups for these reports. It was really eye-opening to read the comments of the adolescent foster kids. Almost to a person, their remarks were along the lines of "Foster mom is only in it for the money and doesn't care about me at all.")

* That said, kids who go into foster care are almost lucky, because the alternative is the group home. Very few positive reports on those, that's for sure.

Okay now, all that said, there are some positive elements. When kids are removed from the home, child welfare's job is to reunify the family as quickly and efficaciously as possible. This means dealing with the underlying issues that caused mom or dad to hit or ignore the kid. [Data point: In rural California counties, their cases are almost 90% neglect cases -- not abuse cases. And of those 90%, 99.9% of parents were neglecting their kids because of substance abuse issues.] When the kids are removed from the home, the parent gets a lot of services: Counseling, substance abuse treatment, employment services. All this is geared to reuniting the family.

CW departments have a set of outcomes that they're required to measure; timely reunification is one of them. CW departments also have units with dedicated staff whose job it is to help transition the family back into reunification.

Also, removal of the child from the home is the absolute last resort. It usually happens only if there is immediate 'risk' to the child (gauged anecdotally by whether the child is likely to end up in the hospital any time soon), or if the parent is not following mandates on how to keep the kids in the home. (Stuff like attending substance abuse treatment or anger management counseling.) Removal isn't really the rule -- it's the exception. And it happens if the situation has gotten so bad that it's unsafe for the kids.

There are a lot of successful reunification stories. No, those aren't the ones you hear. There are a lot of horror stories too. But for the most part, CPS isn't a bunch of meddlesome busybodies who go around sticking their noses where they don't belong. Their goal is to protect kids from abuse or neglect, and they're generally very dedicated people working within the confines of a broken system.

There are good foster parents (maybe Claudia_sf will speak up here), but there are lots of bad ones too. And there are good foster parents who are unsuccessful because they're trying to be a substitute caretaker for a kid who's had a shitty life, has never had a positive role model, and simply can't act right within a family structure.

But my point, I guess, is that it's not all bad. As with so many other things, you just don't hear about the good stuff.

Sorry. Rambled.

Also, the OP of that AskMe was right not to call CPS. Though she seems to think that they would do something, what she described wasn't 'abuse'. It's dickish behavior, but not grounds for CPS intervention.

Oh, it says they smack his head. I read that as 'hand.' Well, yeah, that's no good, and that's abusive. Shitheads.

My oldest brother has adopted 3 children that were taken from their parents and put into foster care. The first they adopted from his foster family, and the second two they fostered to adoption. The children now range in age from 2 to 5, and I believe they've had the oldest for 3 years now. I can certainly say the children are MUCH better off. They are a part of a loving family, have a safe home, are fed well, and are getting educational opportunities they weren't getting before. When they first got one of the boys at 3 years old, he had no idea what grapes were. He thought they were candy.

While they were fostering the younger two (half brother and sister), the parents were given the opportunity to get their kids back, and got visitation rights. The parents did not do one thing required of them, and wouldn't show up for visitation either after the first couple of times.

My own family's experience perhaps isn't the long term case you're looking for yet, but certainly going from homeless drug addicted parents that obviously didn't care about the kids to a loving family and a life full of opportunity that they have now is pretty positive.

Thanks. Interesting info.

I'd be interested in hearing from someone who knew the kid before and after intervention, too.

It usually takes years for CPS to do anything. In Maryland (as in CA, as mudpuppie describes above) they're overworked and underfunded and, the main thrust is to keep the family together at all costs. I actually disagree with that - but then I watched while a drug addicted, borderline mentally handicapped, bipolar and, I'm sorry, totally fucking evil woman kept getting her kids handed back to her after 30 days in foster care or whatever. This despite the fact that she routinely left them alone for days at a time - ages 6 and 2 (2 year old twins,) never fed them ("What the hell you mean yer hungry? I bought you a box a capn' crunch yesterday! What the fuck you mean it's all gone!" - actual quote and, by the way, that box of Captain Crunch would have been the only, and I do mean the ONLY, food in the house) and occasionally smacked them around or let her boyfriends smack them around for kicks. I'm not exaggerating and I wish I was - and I haven't even gotten to the part where she gave her 9 year old cigarettes and beer.

For years CPS dicked around and did nothing. Every so often she'd end up in jail and the kids would go to one or another nightmare foster home. Then she'd get out and they'd send the kids back. I don't think much attempt was ever made to monitor her or the children - it is horribly true that CPS are overworked, underpaid and stretched way too thin and, hell, the kids hardly ever ended up in the actual hospital.

The state finally got moved to take them permanently when she got caught attempting to sell her 10 year old daughter. As in prostitute. As in caught in the act. At that point they finally, finally gave custody to the children's father. There's a long backstory as to why they had refused to give them to him before and none of it is pretty.

Sorry. It's been some years and I still get upset. Anyway, when CPS finally, finally, fucking FINALLY moved to get those kids, well, at first it was, yes, foster home nightmare. Then they found the father and while he is not a poster child for stability either, he's one thousand million times better than she was. Now the kids are doing well - they're all on the honor roll at their various schools; they've been taken under the wing of a large and ever shifting "family" of artists and general good people and it's all okay. And they even see their mom once in a while - supervised. If she shows up. Which doesn't happen often.

I've known one of the kids all her life. She's one of the coolest, smartest, most together people I know - and she's the one that Mama sold, or tried to. CPS failed her so badly, so many times, that it just makes me ill to think about it. The system is overtaxed and it doesn't work or it barely works and I don't know what the solutions are.

There was a kid running around without supervision and i wanted the story. The story was that he had escaped from the tiny apartment he was kept locked in almost all the time. He was around four years old and his mother was continually incapacitated on one thing or another, and while everyone seemed to know all of this, no one seemed to have done anything but gossip, lots of lip service, no action. The kid seemed fine, bright, eager and in desperate need of attention and stimulation from spending most of his time alone.
The next day, i ran into her with the kid as she was stumbling in from her car, barely able to stand and jolly as all heck. Later that day, i mentioned all this to someone who had a direct line to family services. Very soon after that, he was taken from her custody and was said to be doing tremendously well immediately, in school and with a family.
The mother died months later, to absolutely no one's surprise. i don't think it was ever thought his mother would be a capable care giver but in this kind of situation, he had a much better chance in a small town system no matter what.

What needs to be taken into account with some of these stories is:

* Is the kid better off in foster care than he would have been at home with abusive parents?

* Are the problems the kids are having with foster parents due to issues caused by the abusive situation they grew up in? That is to say, kids who have grown up in shitty situations aren't always the easiest kids to manage (through no fault of their own, obviously).

We talked about this question in one of my supervision groups, and for me, those two factors are what make this question really hard to answer, and, for me, kind of sway me toward the side of CPS and foster care. It's easy to look at a chaotic foster situation and conclude that foster care must not be working, but what I've found that even my classmates seem unable to do is put a huge part of that blame on the abusive parents. They are the ones who severely fucked up, in most of these situations; everyone else is doing the best they can to clean up their mess.

On rereading mgl's story: I hope that some of the "women aren't the only ones competent to raise children" progress we as a society are making is filtering down to this level, where fathers are sought out much earlier for custody. I'd be interested to know if that's happening more now; it would certainly be a step forward.

I'm going to respectfully propose that the answers above should be read as specific to the states that the posters identify. NY's ACS is vastly different from these reports, particularly in terms of its willingness to remove.

WRT your question about whether removal and placement in foster care benefits the child, I agree with occhiblu's two prong test, but would add a third prong, which mudpuppie touched on in her thoughtful answer -- how is the state's foster care system set up? Is it well funded? Are foster parents trained to deal with the multiple problems that removed children present? Are foster care subsidies and other supports adequate to help a foster parent provide for the children? Is the goal really reunification, with necessary services being provided to birth parents to correct whatever behavior caused the removal in the first place?

After every well publicized horror story like Nixmary Brown's, the number of removals that I see spikes up radically, without a corresponding spike in qualified foster homes available for placement. Needless to say, this is a huge issue. I agree that foster placement sometimes fails because of the interference of the birth parent, but it also fails because the foster system is simply not equipped to deal with the number of removals in any given year.

And finally, don't forget ASFA, the Adoption and Safe Families Act, which mandates that the local child welfare agency in each state SHALL (with some rare exceptions) commence termination of parental rights cases for all children who have been in foster care for twelve of the last fifteen months. While this might sound like a long time (and it is in the life of a child), it can often prove to be a woefully short time for a parent trying to get her life back on track after fucking up, particularly in the absence of services that will help her along that road. The pressure that this deadline can bring to bear on an already fractured family is tremendous.

In NY at least, kinship foster care must be explored by the agency as a first resort by the agency. Sometimes it works out, often it doesn't because the kin most suitable to take the child is also often the kin closest to the birth parent, thus raising concerns about inappropriate contact between the kid and the parent.

As you can tell from the number of eloquent answers here, it's a really, really tough issue, for all parties involved, but particularly the kids. I can say with honesty that, absent abuse, I really hate seeing a kid placed in foster care in NY, because I don't see many good things come out of it. Of course, for every story I can tell you of the absolutely ludicrous reasons I've seen for removal, someone else could tell you a horror story about what happened to a kid who wasn't removed. If you haven't already seen it, you might enjoy "Love and Diane".

Very thoughtful answers, one and all. I wonder, why is there such a shortage of good foster parents?

I wonder, why is there such a shortage of good foster parents?

I suspect the reality trumps the romance on it. It sounds great to take in kids from bad situations and help, but I can't imagine how hard it must be to take fearful and/or angry kids into your home who often don't really want to be there in the first place and who've picked up whatever dysfunctional dynamics existed in their families that caused them to be taken away. It seems like all the difficult aspects of parenting, x 100,000.

Plus, I would think (hope) that many foster parents like kids, which would mean that at least some (if not the majority? I have no numbers here) of them have their own kids, so you have to balance out the effects of having potentially difficult foster kids coming in on your own kids.

I would imagine all the difficulties would lead to some really great rewards, too, but I almost can't think of a more emotionally difficult job than being a foster parent.

(And all of this is conjecture; I may be overstating the difficulties.)

I wonder, why is there such a shortage of good foster parents?

In addition to what occhiblu says, one of the problems I see in my practice is that removal often involves multiple children because actual neglect or abuse of one child can be imputed to all the other children in the house (in NY, at least). Because there's a public policy in favor of keeping siblings together, a potential foster home is looking at taking in all the removed children, who might be at different stages of trauma, age, and development. As you can imagine, this exponentially increases the challenges the foster parent(s) faces.

CPS placed one of my little sister's best friends with my folks for a while, just long enough for her very troubled family (adults as follows: in prison, on drugs, senile) to get the house in habitable order. I think it was the best thing for all involved, and it was fortunate that the little girl had someone nurturing and present in her life to take up the task.

I can't say why more people don't foster, but I know from my experience with my adopted sister (the one with the friend), that biological differences matter in relationships, and Reactive Attachment Disorder makes it all the harder. For me, however, I think the only thing that would stop me from fostering is if being an unwed couple becomes a problem for placements, or if I wind up adopting out of foster. I don't think I could care for more than two children at a time, and really would prefer only one, as I see it now.

The other side of this coin is the routine caseload. When my son was 11, he burned his finger while microwaving some spaghetti while I took a nap. Nothing major, it barely blistered, and I treated it and forgot about it. However at school, his teacher asked him why he had a band-aid on his finger. She reported the incident through the usual channels, and this sparked a DFACS investigation.

The first interview with me lasted well over two hours, mainly because I was not the custodial parent and my son was living with me while his mother was unemployed and trying to get a bit more stabilized. Well, ok, there was her recent suicide attempt, but both her doctors and her friends agreed it was just an attention ploy. Anyway, I never told DFACS about that little incident.

DFACS insisted that my son live with the custodial parent (his mother) while the case was open. She was virtually homeless at the time, so the only alternative was for her to move into the house with us.

Of course the usual arguments ensued, though few if any involved our son, and when DFACS learned of the arguments, they brought in the sheriff to remove my exwife and son into a shelter. Why the sheriff? Because my ex did not want to leave. I was not involved because this all occurred while I was at work.

Although they had a doctor's report that my son was in perfect health and did not display any signs of neglect or abuse as well as the denials from both my ex and my son that that I had ever been physically abusive, DFACS kept their location secret from me for four months. Get this, DFACS suspended my support payments because the cancelled checks could lead me to which city they were in! So, not only were they stuck in a shelter, they had no money!

The biggest problem here though was that the caseworkers knew that the whole situation was bullshit, but their procedures stipulated that all these actions had to occur. I do not know how this would have resolved normally because this was pretty much the last straw for my heart and I had to stop working.

Well, this led into another mess for DFACS. I had already eaten most of my short term disability with the heart attack the previous September, so when I stopped working, so stopped my income and so also stopped my support checks. DFACS had been counting on my support income to finance the housing for my ex and my son, and they had no provisions for long term situations. I don't really know how this resolved because by then I was recovering from heart surgery.

Anyway, because of one minor burn, my son was pulled out of the first real home he had had for years, the stress on me led up to the final heart attack that put me on disability, and my ex developed a meth habit that landed both her and my son in a drug rehab community.

"I wonder, why is there such a shortage of good foster parents?"

I imagine one of the biggest hurdles is the extensive background investigation that, in Georgia anyway at one time, included periodic piss tests. Not to mention, married with an income sufficient to own (not rent) a house that meets or exceeds a number of specifications.

Important correction of a misstatement I made: writing up my comment late last night while simultaneously watching the primaries, I mistakenly noted that ASFA requires child welfare agencies to commence a Termination of Parental Rights proceeding if a child has been in placement for twelve of the last fifteen months. Those of you familiar with this legislation of course thought, "That's not right -- it's fifteen of the last twenty-two months," but were too nice to correct me. So, I correct myself -- sorry about the factual inaccuracy.

Holy shit Ardiril, that's terrible. I hope things start going better for you.

Interesting this topic should arise now - I attended child protection training yesterday. There have been some major cases in the UK that lead to a statutory inquiry into child protection, the result of which was the Children's Act 2004, major changes to child protection procedures and in universal services for children. The social workers I know working in child protection say the reforms have created a whole lot more paperwork, and little else.

I spent three years in care (10-13). It was the best thing that could have happened to me at the time, and I turned out fine.

As a kid growing up in an abusive home I was terrified of Child Protective Services. But, had one of my teachers actually called them, there is no doubt my life would have improved over what it was.

They didn't actually get involved until I was sixteen, but then the sorts of things they did were good for both me and my mother. They insisted that both of us get into therapy. They hooked me up with the Crime Victims Board, which is an unbelievable blessing. They took care of a lot of crazy paperwork for us. And they did their best to keep me from being re-traumatized by having to tell my story over and over again -- though there was a lot of re-telling that couldn't be prevented once the DA's office got involved.

If there's anyone I'm angry with now, it's not my father, the abuser, or my mother, who lived in denial for so many years. It's the teachers and guidance counselors who knew something was wrong and threatened to call CPS to get me to shut up about it.

When I was in seventh grade, I told a teacher I was being abused at home. She took me to the school guidance counselor's office, where both the teacher and counselor accused me of lying and told me that CPS would come to my house and "find out the truth" if I stuck to my story. So I took it back, afraid that some inspector who didn't believe a word would come to my home and anger my father even more.

It took me four years before I could work up the courage to say anything again, and more damage was done in those four years than I can possibly relate.

Yes, Child Protective Services may not function ideally. It may vary from state to state. Some agencies may not do so well at the job of protecting children who really need it; some may be over-zealous. But they do have a real, serious and absolutely important role. In some circumstances -- especially in the most extreme cases -- they can and do help people.

If it weren't for that dreaded agency, I really don't think I would be alive today to talk about the whole thing. So ... one vote here for CPS.

God, I'm so sorry, brina.

My internship is with a group that provides counseling for school kids, mostly in elementary schools. It appalls me that so many of the very young children my classmates are working with know exactly how much they can tell the counselor without triggering a CPS report, that in addition to the pain and terror these parents are inflicting, they're putting that intellectual burden of "It's your responsibility to know what to say" onto these kids.

Huh. Here's a timely Craigslist ad seeking Native American foster families. (Interestingly, it's in the Jobs section.)

For reference, Federal legislation -- the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) -- requires that Native American kids get placed with Native American families when possible. In CA, anyway, the local tribes employ ICWA representatives to work with the local child welfare department in finding suitable placement for kids.

And another.

So apparently, FFAs recruit foster parents through Craigslist now.

(Interestingly, it's in the Jobs section.)

It's a profession for the few people I know who are fostering/ have done it - the pay in the borough I work for is >£450 per week for a child with a disability, and ~£350 per week for a teenager without any additional service needs. More than one placement is a full time job, anyway.

And yay for brina!

Some more good news: the social services dept I work for has the best percentage of kids in care studying at university - 16%. That's almost 10% higher than the national average. They also won the Best Corporate Parent award in 2006.

Thanks, goo. My ex and I had to flee Georgia with our son to get out from under their scrutiny.

The biggest hassle was that since our case was classified minimal risk, we always got reassigned to the new hires, so we had to go through the same interviews time after time after time. Plus, we had no route for appeal because supervisors only had time to get involved in high risk cases.