When Child Protective Services (CPS) separates children from their family – a massive trauma is created in these children. Some people will say – “some parents are too harmful for their child to stay with them”. Understandably, those parents end up on the news. Those stories stick with you and legitimize the actions of CPS because these people are some sort of monsters.
Those people don’t realize that there’s a huge gap between “under-resourced parent” and “monster”, when we’re having conversations about family preservation.
Of course, we should always keep kids away from the “monsters” aka truly dangerous caregivers. But we also need to invest resources differently from how we’re currently doing it for all the rest of the cases where the parents need support to be the parents their children need.
The outcomes of foster care are FAR too dismal to justify the continued usage of the program the way it’s being done now. If removing kids from homes was such a positive thing, then a majority of them would be thriving members of the community, instead of having the high rates of harm they experience.
Please realize that those truly dangerous parents are only a fraction of the families who get torn apart by CPS.
One person shares – “My husband put it in perfect perspective for me a few years ago when he first saw a picture of me at about 18 months old (he already kinda knew the story). Flat out said “oh yeah! Blonde hair, blue eyes, mom didn’t have much of anything, dad wasn’t in the picture. You were prime real estate to be taken and sold”. blogger’s note – Exactly, my own mother’s pre-adoption story.
Picture of my mom at 6 months of age before she was adopted. Her mother was exploited by Georgia Tann for exactly the reasons that woman’s husband identified – “Blonde hair, blue eyes, mom didn’t have much of anything, dad wasn’t in the picture.” – though they were married, I will never know why he left her at 4 months pregnant and didn’t return after she gave birth to my mom and returned to Memphis from Virginia (where she was sent after he left her, to give birth out of the view of the family’s local neighbors).
Missing Mom 