Comment by candiodari | Hacker News Reader

Comment by candiodari | Hacker News Reader

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The whole thing there can be reduced to the observation: why does society let foster care and youth protective services exist?

You might say "well to protect kids". Except, there's a massive body of research proving that they make things worse, certainly on average:

https://sci-hub.se/10.1257/aer.97.5.1583

Massive negative effects, from reading scores, to later earnings, to subjective happiness (yes, really, kids report more happiness while being abused than in youth services), to later crimes.

So no youth protection is better for everyone. This is obvious in the case of scandals and the many "accidents". But it is true in general. And it is true for everyone. No child protection is better for the kid, for families (obviously I guess), and due to the increase in crime if we destroyed youth protection causes, it is better for society itself. If you start checking, you will find that youth protection is involved in the raising of many of the worst criminals we've ever known.

Even child psychiatry and "special needs schools" ... well. Comparing symptoms upon entry and symptoms upon exit paints a very clear picture that really questions why they're allowed to exist.

https://sci-hub.se/https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007...

And then of course there's the many scandals that these people keep and keep and keep producing. Abuse within foster families is higher than in families in youth protection services. In institutions it is a lot higher.

So they don't protect kids.

And crimes are astronomically higher in both foster care and institutional care (and youth psychiatry).

So they don't protect society against those kids either.

Child protection is like a loaded gun sitting on a table waiting for someone to pick it up. Anyone who doesn't like you or the way you raise your kids can phone in a trumped-up complaint and send investigators in your home to see if your child needs to be taken away and put into a lowest-bidder archipelago of foster homes and group facilities. Disgusting all around to me.

I have actually been a foster parent, and have had kids come to my house at 11pm, that you can smell from 7 feet away, covered in lice, with a single backpack with all their possesions. One kid called 911 because mom and dad wouldn't wake up (heroin). Some suffering from Sex Abuse, some literally starving, etc. Yes, Foster Care has its problems (and part of why I don't do it anymore) but there ARE legitimate needs in the communities. I would love to know what you think it should be replaced with?

So where is a child supposed to go when their parents have died or been imprisoned? Should they just be homeless? What alternative do you envision?

This is a big aspect of structural racism tbh. The disproportionate incarceration (duration and frequency) of black and indigenous people dumps a lot of their kids into the foster system. These kids overwhelmingly get sucked into the school-to-prison pipeline, around and around it goes. Relatively lucky ones have a family member, but they probably can't afford another kid, and the cycle of poverty keeps turning.

That is much less than 1% of the kids in youth services. A bit like saying we must have a million nuclear weapons in case there's another cold war in 200 years.

The answer to this question doesn't really matter for that reason.

The vast majority of kids are in foster care because otherwise their parents would be "unreachable" for social workers, for various reasons, like refusing psych treatment for their kid that the school insists on, like autism treatment for "difficult" children, sometimes just because they can't because treatment can only happen during working hours, but the parents need to work. Meaning they are hostages to "force change". That group is huge. Next largest group are kids suspected of a crime. Keep in mind that the way our law works kids don't have any legal rights. They may be convicted of a crime but for kids there is no difference between suspected and convicted.

The thing is, with just kids in youth services that really NEED to be somewhere the current system cannot possibly survive.

Ideally parents agree this with somebody appropriate in advance. Like end of life planning it's something that people are told to do, but most don't bother.

If my parents had both died during my childhood we knew we'd live with our cousins Catherine and Victoria. If somehow we didn't come with a pile of money (from insurance paying out or other mechanisms that fire when two child-rearing age people suddenly die) things would have been very tight for my Uncle and his wife but we'd have family.

I see you citing a study that appears to be about the inadequacy of the USA system. You could read that and decide it means the whole system is inherently broken, but you could just as easily see that as an indictment of the US system and a need for reform or a replacement with the parts that work better in other countries.

Yeah, how much of this is just the same problems as the US huge prison population, but applied to children? The "carcerial state".

In this particular example of the mother being in prison, where would the children live without these services?

The best answer for that question is in 99% of cases (light offenders) also in prison (not locked up. With the mother still taking them to school, ideally the same school). There's research that this is both the best for the child and a very effective way to reduce recidivism.

And let's not forget that there really aren't that many effective ways to reduce recidivism, so this ought to be worth a lot to society.

Generally carrots work a LOT better than sticks.

I think we all agree that in this case the mother - who is a light offender - should not have gotten such a harsh sentence. Your vision of the mother being with the child effectively means that the mother gets a lighter sentence. But sadly that's not the case here... so you're either saying we should abolish hard sentences to light offenders (or maybe just those with children?), or you're not really answering the question.

I think he's talking about systems where the child actually lives in the same facility as the parent.

Such programs exist, in a limited way: https://www.npr.org/2018/12/06/663516573/programs-help-incar...

They exist as good intentions which are then controlled by busy-bodies who destine lives to feed from state-administered family planning (I'd consider this in the same category as public welfare).

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