We are sending more foster kids to prison than to college
kansascity.com
kansascity.com
On the last day of the school they were drawing pictures of what they'd do that summer. His photo was of him being sad. He told her.
"Some of us are sad because of summer vacation because we don't want to be at home every day."
Just brutal to hear.... some kids have the deck stacked so far against them....
I wish there was a community just for people in tech who've overcome messy childhoods.
I hire people with these qualities, most intelligent people I know are like this :)
Saying "not trying to be snarky" does little to minimise the snarky attitude.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactive_attachment_disorder
Reality is that, certainly on average, CPS is worse than neglect, worse than abuse. Reality seems to be that what parent figures provide for children is simply a predictable, stable environment. It does not matter if said environment has violence (especially if it doesn't directly harm the child). If the child is well provided for (ie. even poverty or neglect to the point of irregular availability of food). The vast majority of cases, by the way, are neglect, which means in practice the child being left alone for longer periods of time (hours, not days). Needless to say, this is not going to seriously damage any child over the age of 3 or 4.
The same even with violence against a child. The not-so-common-but-considered-typical image of a father who gets drunk on fridays and then yells or even hits a child with flimsy excuses, but otherwise cares for them is just not going to do the damage even a single CPS placement does.
Just to be clear: none of those things are good for a child. But they do not prevent the formation of a stable adult. CPS and child placement (and especially re-placing them on average 14 times before they grow up) prevents the formation of a stable adult in something like 45-60% of cases.
I guess CPS just feels they "need to do something". The result of that need is tens of thousands of destroyed lives per year. But nobody can be blamed for doing nothing ...
As for the idea that "even a single CPS placement" is worse than being left with violent parents - I've never seen anything supporting this but if you have some I'd love to read it.
https://sci-hub.se/10.1257/aer.97.5.1583
> As for the idea that "even a single CPS placement" is worse than being left with violent parents - I've never seen anything supporting this but if you have some I'd love to read it.
Well, reactive attachment syndrome is the expected outcome for something like 60% of placements, and 80%+ of kids that are placed more than once. These multiple replacements are not exactly rare. Apparently there is a small group where the first placement remains stable for a long time which has reasonable results, and there is a large group that keep getting placed again and again where the outcomes are terrible.
The vast majority of parents aren't violent but neglectful. And even then, our standards of neglect have moved quite a bit. These days some interventions are done because of "bad" food in lunch boxes (think: mars bars, not sandwiches).
The long term consequences of neglect and violence that isn't random are "parentification. TLDR: kids start acting like adults at a very young age, and obviously with less than ideal success. Think 7 year olds that make sure the rent is paid and their little sister sees a doctor once a year, or when she's ill. These kids will fight for their independence, for obvious reasons, at a very young age. This can, and does, lead to depression and less than ideal school results (because in that situation the kids don't consider school very important and of course caring for others takes time that can't be spent on homework or hobbies or even actually going to class when there's a crisis). The worst outcomes are observed where the kid takes total control of the home situation and the KID abuses this power. But even that is nothing compared to even mild attachment syndrome.
The worse cases of reactive attachment disorder, well, from Wikipedia: "Actions that otherwise would be classified as conduct disorder, such as mutilating animals, harming siblings or other family, or harming themselves intentionally"
And of course, it is anecdotal and probably lacks validity but if you look up mass murderers, whilst diagnosis is missing their family background is really quite common and are the sort of circumstances that you'd expect to generate RAD. Obviously, that outcome is very rare, but does exist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parentification
I would say, read both entries and judge for yourself which is the worse one. But I don't think there will be much disagreement.
> Well, reactive attachment syndrome is the expected outcome for something like 60% of placements,
Absolutely, completely false. Also nonsensically false that "mars bars instead of sandwiches" would get any intervention.
You are very misinformed on this topic. Almost everything you have said is directly, easily contradicted simply by looking at the widely available data on foster care. Children arrive in foster care with attachment disorders - the majority of children don't even enter foster care until they are too old to develop an attachment disorder, according to the diagnostic criteria. Almost 50% of children who are taken into foster care in the US have only one placement (1). (Unsurprisingly, being diagnosed with RAD correlates very highly with having more placements. There's likely causality in both directions there.)
I don't know why you have such a strong opinion here, but it's not based on reality.
(1) https://www.childtrends.org/blog/the-share-of-children-in-fo...
Can you elaborate on this? It abstractly makes sense, but what does this look like in practice? What kinds of situations come up whereupon a foster-kid-turned-adult wouldn't be "equipped"? What is it they wouldn't know to do? Or, what would they mistakenly think was an appropriate response?
I've known children who left unstructured, chaotic situations and were placed in... unstructured, chaotic foster homes. Many foster homes are like warehouses with upward of 6-8 children at a time. Fostering children is a paycheck for some foster parents.
I've also known a foster child who was placed in a home wherein the foster family had biological children in the house. The biological children were treated better and more lovingly than the foster child. The foster child left an abusive situation, only to find inequitable treatment. The foster child never had anyone model a loving, supportive relationship. So they bounced around from abusive, drug-addicted partner to abusive, drug-addicted partner until they got tired of being around abusive people and drugs.
Without a role model, it's hard to be equipped once you're legally an adult and don't have someone making decisions for you. Being an adult is a big responsibility, and a lot of these children weren't prepared to make healthy decisions. And they don't have health coping mechanisms.
The story about the foster kid who gravitates towards abusive relationships is closest to the level of analysis I was hoping for. In that specific case, what is still unclear to me is exactly how -- in the details -- a lack of a stable/loving home pushes one towards abusive relationships
Do you perhaps have some anecdotes about specific people behaving in ways that well-adjusted people wouldn't? Speaking for the rest of us, I think it's hard to grok this kind of stuff without a lot of detail.
I recognize that this is a hard question to answer, of course. It effectively asks you to become a novelist. I'm grateful for anything you can provide, but also don't want you to feel obligated.
It's hard to say definitive, concrete examples because trauma is so personal. The same things can cause two divergent reactions in other people. As a random example from a single friend, I had a friend whose dad died via suicide by cop after he became addicted to drugs he prescribed as a small town's ER doctor. She saw her dad murdered by her friend's father from her living room window. This friend said I had it worse than she. While I definitely have my own scars, I don't think they're anywhere close to what she experienced.
I'll share how I was ill-equipped for life. Please note that while I was never put in foster care myself, I likely should have been; the only thing that stopped me going into foster care is a terribly overburdened and underfunded Child Protective Services department. Every single one of the complaints alleged against my family (of which there were several) were true. The social workers and CPS department as a whole simply has too high a caseload and I fell through the cracks. For better or worse.
I never had anyone around me that modeled how to successfully handle stress and anger. So I constantly walked around in fight or flight mode for all of my teen years and most of my twenties. It led to more than a few of assaults (both as a profession--I bounced a bit--and otherwise). I also made many other impulsive decisions, because I only knew how to solve interpersonal problems one way.
It literally took me until I was in my early thirties and hospitalized with what I thought was a heart attack to figure out I had problems with anxiety, ultra-vigalence, and a hair-trigger temper with associated anti-social behaviors. That's how I was ill-equipped for life in normal society. And again I wasn't even in foster care like some of my closest friends and loved ones.
Just one of those times I let my fists do the talking for me could've led to someone geting knocked out, falling the wrong way, and dying after landing with their head against a curb. That's manslaughter (at best). It's blind, stupid luck that I eventually got my shit together and work at a FAANG rather than shooting you a kite from behind bars.
I have someone very close to me who did go into the foster care system, and was placed in what amounted to a juvenile jail. She had a 'bunkmate' who burned their entire house down in an attempt to kill her family. And then the bunkmate tried to burn others while in the foster care facility. Now my friend has troubles sleeping; especially in areas around which she's unfamiliar (e.g. hotels) or around people she doesn't know well (e.g. B&Bs, friend's houses, etc.).
>It literally took me until I was in my early thirties and hospitalized with what I thought was a heart attack to figure out I had problems with anxiety, ultra-vigalence, and a hair-trigger temper with associated anti-social behaviors.
Out of curiosity, how does one get from this place to gainful employment in a FAANG company? I realize much of it has to do with luck, but surely there were a number of "stages" during this recovery/relearning process. Did you go to some sort of therapy? What were the major steps in becoming well-adjusted? For example, do you remember the first time you noticed your hair-trigger temper rising, and managed to get it under control?
>I bounced a bit
I actually did too! In my 20's I was very involved in my local MMA gym, and bouncing seemed like a 'cool' way to make some beer money.
All in all it was a pretty good gig for me because I actually had very little exposure to violence before then, and this was a way for me to confront a pretty severe aversion to conflict that I'd been carrying with me for some time. As a matter of fact, this was very much the reason I'd gotten into MMA to begin with, and bouncing was a way to move from an environment with highly-controlled violence (the ring) to a less controlled one (a bar where I had backup, and a technical advantage in a fight). I ultimately ended up in the military doing MOUT operations, but that's a different story, and I digress. My reason for bringing this up is that I remember being quite shocked and horrified at the unbridled violence in some of my colleagues. You basically had three types of bouncers:
1. Calm professionals looking to get the job done and go home
2. Cocky assholes looking to be the protagonist of a badass story, but nevertheless with some self-control
3. Tough-as-nails guys with zero self-control or ability to direct their violence usefully
I think I was mostly in the first category (though shamefully with about 30% of the second category ... I did have something to prove...). It was the third category that horrified me because it seemed like these people weren't even fixing to get into fights; they just couldn't prevent themselves from falling into a blind wrath at the slightest provocation. There's this idea in evolutionary psychology that the emotion of disgust relates to things that should be inside the body (blood, vomit, feces, saliva, etc) finding themselves outside the body. In that specific sense, I think I was disgusted by the third category of colleague -- this terrible, ugly rage that should have stayed inside was somehow spilling out. Quite a few of those guys ended up getting charged with battery over stuff they did on the job, and it all seemed so damn preventable and absurd.
I realize that I'm speaking with someone who may have been this third type of person, and I sincerely hope you don't feel judged. My reason for bringing it up is that I've never fully understood what was going on when these (otherwise super nice!) guys went off the rails. I always suspected there was something like what you described, but never managed to figure out when -- let alone why -- the switch would flip. It was truly terrifying stuff, even for someone who knows their way around a fight, because it all seemed so random and bestial. As an MMA fighter, I was used to clear rules about when the fight started and ended, but with these guys, I would worry that I'd gotten on their nerves without realizing it, and that I'd have a bottle broken over my head before I even knew the fight had begun.
In any case, I'm truly, honestly happy that you seem to be doing well, and I really appreciate this conversation.
Anyways, glad you made it out of such a tough spot doing ok.
How much time does that take of the person who is helping?
Also, from article, “Most of the $30 billion spent on child welfare annually is funneled into foster care or adoption services”, “Roughly 23,000 kids across the country are churned out of the system every year”.
That averages $100000 per child per year, assuming 300000 kids in care and all $30G spent on them.
It doesn't appear to be hours, although they help, but rather consistency over large periods of the child's life. In happier cases this is provided by parents and close family friends; teachers come and go and the family might move, but the parents provide emotional stability in the child's life. In less happy circumstances the issue is that some teachers and some foster parents might be great at what they do, but they only exist inside the child's life for a very short period of time.
Again, I am far from an expert here.
Yes, and you'll find nearly all of that money is spent on employees and organisations, mostly for locating abused (and "abused") children, with most services paid per-child (and of course ALL services have to catch a minimum amount of children or cease to exist).
In the best of countries (not the US) in 60% of foster placements something bad enough happens that the foster family requests their immediate removal (this is called a "break-down"). The US is much worse. Foster care does not offer stability, so every kid has to be found a new foster home on average every 8 months.
https://wehavekids.com/adoption-fostering/What-does-being-a-...
$800 per month per kid is very well paid for foster care. All the other money goes to government services. The child receives, at most, $250 per month (in cases where they care for themselves).
Studies point out that if you take outcomes, it would literally be better (children helped vs children harmed) if these services just outright did not exist. But I guess the problem would be much more visible.
None of the others she knew from foster care did well in life. All on drugs, homeless, many in prison, spent time there. Many are having kids that will soon be take away by the state, for good reasons.
Our own has done better, but was years of insane drama.
Knowing that bio family was out there hurt her immensely.
She finally had to spend time with them. Literally Pulling her drunk biological dad out of a ditch, to realize that they were dragging her down.
She does aight these days.
Foster kids can be helped, but you really need multiple strong families or support groups dedicated to the task. For a couple of decades, at least.
What are the most common situations that require a kid to be placed in foster care?
To sort of hammer the point home in my brain, does the following summarize what you are saying?
In spite of all the trauma, you still think foster care is better than leaving kids with their family? E.g. the article says "more kids are removed for neglect than abuse" and only 35 percent of them finished high school. So, between the two evils (abusive family and foster care), do kids really fare better in the foster care system?
As someone who grew up outside of USA, but now live here, this is all rather shocking to me.
But the family is often very unattractive. Adults can be such reprobates: Drug addicted, "lazy", wasteful....
So the state tends to remove the child and inject them into what they know is at best a failing system and at worst a fertile training ground for child abusers.
Better to help the families, never mind that they will have lifestyles you disapprove of. It costs a lot of money. A huge amount.
But it is cheaper in the long run to put aside the moral panic about the behaviour of the grown us....
Can you imagine being a child in a shitty home life, all you had before the pandemic was your school for being around people who didn't hate or at best were indifferent to you.
America needs new social structures.
More than unattractive, they are often completely hopeless, beyond saving. So when resources are not infinite, better to focus on saving the kids, that has much better chances of succeeding.
While the UK might be more conservative with regards to child welfare, in the US you generally have to nearly kill a child or be in jail to have them removed.
https://sci-hub.se/10.1257/aer.97.5.1583
The result is that by every metric, from reading scores, to subjective and third-party assessment of happiness, to years of study, to taxes paid (which means how much money they earn as an adult), kids left in "abusive" homes do better than children helped by CPS. Other studies point out that this applies on every point on the spectrum, even when the children simply receive psychological help at school or other less invasive things.
A very significant group of them develop "Reactive Attachment Disorder". And ... well, just read:
This is comparing abusive homes to marginal foster care children, which means children that were repeat care kids, meaning that the failure was not in foster care, but in the decision to reunify and then have them return to care. The success rates for children that are not intervened early or that are reunified are terrible, and research like this edge case for a PHD are the exact things that get kids reunified that should not be.
From what I saw of Foster care. The only thing they really care about is your alive until you age out.
If I had to guess what the most common flag is it would be a lack of food and clean clothes.
It's sad but I don't think that this is sustainable.
There's a reason societies used collective parenting for centuries and only recently with the push towards individualism that has stopped. There's still collective parenting in places of the world that don't have that same desire of individualism.
We've built our society and economy around the idea of 2 parents and some children. This is an arbitrary decision we've made and it wasn't how we came to this point. A push for accepting multi-node families would help nudge us in the right direction. Just changing the tax law to support and provide the same benefits to a union of multiple parents would be extremely useful.
We've codefied a single way of living. Maybe we should change that and allow for more dynamic family structures.
This article has a lot of information about the development of the nuclear family and what preceded it, so might be a good jumping off point for those who are interested: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/03/the-nuc...
Could you provide more data here? The only information that I found was traditional families, where the grandparents and relatives take the responsibility for the education too.
I lived some years in South American, and I was impressed how many middle class families have their Nanny taking care of their kids (bringing to the school, cooking, controlling home work, taking care while they were sick, etc).. could be that be seem as "collective parenting" too?
> There's still collective parenting in places of the world that don't have that same desire of individualism.
Would provide more data here? I'm interested to see how they are doing.
It's so normal, you don't think about it, but it is less than 200 years since every regular kid can attend school. Before that this was only available for the upper class.
> There's a reason societies used collective parenting for centuries and only recently with the push towards individualism that has stopped.
Do you have reference to literature or research confirming your statement?
'We' never did 'collective' parenting in the broader sense.
Both Asian and Western families were essentially nuclear, but multigenerational, and closer ties to extended family.
70 years ago, this was generally normative - and frankly often today - in that families were 2 parents + kids, but grandparents, uncles/aunts /cousins were part of the mix.
Obviously, more so in some places than others (particularly with parents living-in i.e. Asia, Italy)
Even today: 100% of my buddies who are married live within 2km of their mother-in-laws.
I think the term 'collective' is just a little bit too broad, and Romanticizes these quasi-aboriginal notions of truly more collective parenting, which frankly hasn't been part of the mix for a very long time (i.e. millennia) in most places.
The basic, communitarian concepts which we are mostly all familiar, which is to say 'quasi nuclear with strong extended family ties' will work just fine.
I think both neoliberalism and certain kinds of progressive social ideologies, without necessarily intending to move away from this, are effectively doing this, and pushing us into the 'hyper nuclear' (i.e. 1 or 2 parents only) scnenarios, which I think is less than ideal.
Having grown up in a single parent situation, and then two parents later on, it took me 30 years of reflection to realize how much single parenting is a massive disadvantage. Surprisingly, there is reluctance among many progressive circles to recognize this, whereupon the notion of 'single motherhood' is contemplated on equal footing with 2 parent families. (Though I think this is usually derived from concerns over the fact that single parent households are often the result of abuse etc.)
This odd paradox can be seen within the African American community whereupon well over 50% of kids grow up without having much of a relationship with their fathers. To some, this is an abomination, and a 'root cause of malaise' (and I'm not pointing fingers here, there are lot of men in jail that don't need to be), but surprisingly among many, they just don't see it as a problem for a variety of triggering reasons.
The nuclear+extended and obviously - community participation (i.e. teachers, role models) I think will work just fine so long as we recognize it.
And any parents who adopt foster children are straight up heroes, of that there is no doubt.
Here's why:
https://www.webmd.com/parenting/baby/forming-a-bond-with-you...
Biological bonding with baby is recorded to happen after 80% of births at first sight. The bonding is so strong that parents will literally lay down their lives to protect a child.
I highly doubt that this type of bonding forms for people who aren't the biological parent of the baby. When choosing their own lives or the baby's life, most unrelated people will choose their own life. Therefore under "collective parenting" it is likely that the other "parents" function more as "caretakers" and are tertiary to the parents that formed the biological bond.
Foster care is largely comprised of tertiary care that is missing the primary care of the nuclear biological mother and father. So foster care is essentially the same as collective parenting just without the actual biological parents. This is the causative factor and the essential missing link:
Foster care doesn't have enough people who are willing to invest the same amount of blood, sweat and tears as actual biological parents.
That is why I said such support services are unsustainable. People don't have enough energy, resources or will-power to spare for a stranger that is not their own biological progeny.
You also need to consider the evolutionary logic behind this type of behavior. Does it make sense for a biological entity to maximize Darwinian fitness by caring for children that have less genetic relation to them? No. Obviously there will be an evolutionary imperative for parents to spend the most resources on the child that is most genetically related to them.
The 2 parent system exists as a primary biological component rather than some "idea" because a child can only have 2 biological parents.
> societies used collective parenting for centuries
I see these claims made regularly in discussions about kids, families, etc, but I never see a clear example. Which parts of the world have collective parenting? How do you even define that? During which periods did we have collective parenting? What forms did it take? I would be really interested in seeing real examples I can look into to understand better how they could potentially be used as inspiration.
This is a question of priorities.
I think people that say things like this overestimate how much we spend on things like this and underestimate social spending. About 50% of US government spending is health and social services. So even cutting everything else to zero is only a doubling of health and social services. A doubling isn't nothing, but a game changer? And not all (or even most) of that other 50% will be spending you feel is frivolous, so it would be much less than doubling.
Luckily, fine folks like aaomidi walk among us. Not many of them, but some.
allright (US english, colloquial)
As I had to look it up
Thanks!
https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/all-right-or-a...
That shows the amplitude and the spread of the carceral problem in the US.
American state run prisons and their surrounding ecosystem of courts, municipal govts, vendors, etc have much of the perverse incentives and a far larger overall footprint
Why do these institutions have perverse incentives? Is it because the voters reward high imprisonment rates because it creates the impression of safety?
To go further, when you warehouse a bunch of people who can’t vote in a geographical area, you create a situation where few voters get to wield disproportionate power at all levels.
What would be considered bribery in many other countries is still legal in the U.S.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not a fan of mass incarceration, but you can see where the skepticism of reform comes from. It's impossible to overstate how bad things were perceived to be in the 90s.
First, my foster home cared for me. Somehow there is this idea out there that you shouldn't form an attachment to your foster kids, but I think that advice is plain wrong. I know because years later I attended foster-parenting orientation out of personal curiosity, and this is more or less what they told prospective foster parents. For me, that change made a massive difference. My foster home parent made sure my teacher, my school principals, my coaches...etc knew of my situation. They even went as far as letting me stay in my school district despite living outside of it.
Second, because of this community-awareness, I had allies at every turn. Teachers spent extra time getting me caught up during tutoring hours. My school counselor sent me email reminders about college application due dates. My AP & SAT tests were paid for. My school lunch were covered...etc.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, I wasn't a pay-check to my foster parent. I think that somewhat ties back to my first point, but you'd be surprised at how many folks do this for the money (at least in the state were I was based).
How to fix the foster system: This is a really tough one, but I think more emphasis should be placed on putting foster kids inside existing families, if possible. Maybe more outreach is needed to find such folks, and maybe the economic incentive of it should be held back until a kid has been successfully placed for more than a. year inside a family. Furthermore, the whole notion that no attachment should exist is flawed. Lastly, getting the community involved. It really does takes a village to raise a foster kid.
I was in Florida (mostly GOP ran) and they had similar training. These policies (to not be attached) sounds very wrong, especially when numerous studies support attachment parenting as the best way to nurture child development.
Let's focus on the a mutually agreed problem (shit training) and work towards a better solution through better policies that either experiment with attachment or outright support it.
The problem has nothing to do with training, and all to do with legal policy regrading termination of parental rights.
The training is a result of appellate risk for TPR with regards to state effort for reunification.
But thanks for the attack of my character.
I currently have three bio-kids. The wife and I have been talking about fostering or running an orphanage. Hmmm. I've never really considered how much it would benefit the foster children to experience a healthy home.
I was told by my Aunt that fostering kids that they weren't supposed to 'get attached' but I never realized this as apart of the process b/c she always broke the rule, lol.
Caring and attachment is extremely important. IMHO, this training (to not grow attached) is the source of the problem. There is numerous research studies about the importance of healthy attachment to nurture the development of a human into the next stage of their life.
The most despicable of which is a constellation of bigoted state-by-state policies on "racial matching". The end result is that black foster kids on average spend twice as long in the system as their white counterparts.[1]
[1] https://ij.org/press-release/institute-for-justice-challenge...
This resulted in a hugely disproportionate number of specifically african american children never finding adoptive homes due to a lack of racial matched adoptive resources.
There are now reporting requirements for this specific issue in the egregious counties Fulton and Dekalb.
Also, racial matching is not just about parents wanting white kids because of "racism", it's usually easier for the children to fit in and feel integrated into their new environment if they look more or less similar to their family.
Probably not. The difference is that we can do things to prepare foster parents or adoptive parents for it - more so than natural birth.
And to be fair, you aren't "fixing" a baby: You are doing the same thing - providing a loving home, trying to give another person the things they need. You just have a head start on some of the problems you'll be facing with a teenager - the sort of thing that blindsides parents of babies if it happens.
I'm not sure why it is an issue that "things are hard".
To be clear, that was not the motivation. There were lots of reasons why things changed and institutionalization fell out of favor (and not just in the US, but across the West). For example, right now, in most states, you couldn't forcibly institutionalize, say, a schizophrenic homeless individual legally, even if the request came from the individual's family. And if you try, municipal and state governments, bolstered by activists and rights organizations will fight you.
Ignoring that, what other motivation do the people denying health care to the mentally ill supposedly have?
They throw the mentally ill in prison to avoid providing care, so any argument that it’s for the welfare of the mentally ill is a hard sell.
The people I’ve met working to help these people universally express dismay at the fact that the law sets them up for failure.
Some institutionalized patients stabilized not because they had prescriptions or therapy appointments, but because they were coerced to actually take the meds and show up at the therapy appointments. Subject to lights-out at a reasonable hour. Denied access to alcohol and recreational drugs. Etc.
Either way, our current understanding is that these were gross violations of medical ethics and human rights. We locked people up who had not been convicted of any crime. We confined people indefinitely who had only been convicted of nuisance crimes. We took people who had the capacity to understand the medical care they were being offered, and we didn't care what they had to say about it.
It doesn't matter how expedient any of this was for society or for the patients, it was wrong. We are as likely to walk this back as we are to re-normalize sexual harassment or slavery or something.
It was wrong to provide a place, staffed by clinical professionals, providing professional healthcare, and regulated by government agencies? Uh huh.
Well, I'm glad you feel all that was 'wrong', because apparently what replaced it, mentally ill people living in squalor, exposed to the elements and diseases, in makeshift shanty-towns ... that's been a real improvement. A homeless individual suffering from schizophrenia and unable to make rational decisions, I'm sure he appreciates you fighting for his right to live in squalor.
Unbelievable.
> It was just kept out of your sight.
That's what we have now. Homeless, and homeless encampments are so normal in progressives cities, it's like background noise. You'll literally step-over a sleeping homeless on your way to work without a second thought (and I can guarantee you do that every day, if you live in one of those cities). Sorry ... I forgot, we're protecting their rights to not receive institutional care.
"Pretty sure"? That's a some standard of evidence. Care to expand on that .. maybe with with something other than "I thought about it real hard and I can't think of anything else it could be"?
new yorker cartoon - remember, we're not just making money, we're building prisons.
Form the kids perspective they are either dealing with temporary guardians or with a parent that provides next to no super vision.
The state can’t parent children, but foster care is in a real way keeping children off the street.
Bottom line: young children can be broken severely at a very young age and it is extremely hard to fix then going forward.
After taking the forth one, they were too over stretched to take anymore. Lovely kids. It was amazing watching them socialise gradually. So sad what happened to them really.
That's truly tragic. You've been a blessing to those children, and that's beautiful.
Given the harshness of this reality, I understand why past generations looked to forced sterilization. There's really no winning with that, but after 4 kids (to date) with that fate, it's a legitimate moral debate (not an easy one, nor should it be) as to the relative good. I guess it's a sibling to the abortion debate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Prevention
The kids I worked with were so lucky to get a nice loving family, a very strong community to support them, lots of opportunities for socialisation and education etc.
God knows what happens if you're not that lucky.
Edit: I have to be honest, I enjoyed the work. I wouldn't have done it otherwise. :) the kids had their moments but mostly they were really excited to do anything and getting male attention was a big draw for them (one they got over the fear of men they all arrived with).
And that makes it _perfect_ -- too rare in actual life. Wonderful. Buy yourself a pint! :-)
The 'foster-care-to-prison pipeline' metaphor is such a misnomer and completely unfair. Nobody is moving these kids into the prison system. Traditional parenting can provide personalized rearing and still have that child end-up in prison. We also know that a single-parent household, even with a dedicated loving parent, will have challenges rearing children. How is the state supposed to do it? Worse, the kids who end up in foster-care, more often than not, will already have significant trauma and behaviour or mental issues.
So to summarize, you have the State dealing with two major issues that individually create an immense challenge, but together make it even harder:
1) The state can never scale resources to match typical parental rearing.
2) The state has to deal with a population of kids who are already suffering from behavioral or mental issues, drugs, or trauma. An affluent two-parent household with dedicated support workers would have trouble raising kids like that. How is the State supposed to do this?
I'm not sure what the right approach is here but it's clear as day that there is no easy answer here.
Trading second and third chances for bio parents at the cost of children's futures is too high a cost in my opinion.
Better education around sex and children, as well as easy access to birth control would go a long way.
Permanency is a child welfare term regarding a permanent placement for the child, not some grotesques parent sterilization program as you are implying.
You are operating under the incorrect assumption that I somehow think the parents are at fault, my argument is that the children should not be the ones that pay for the learning process of the parents.
Also implying that I am a Nazi/eugenics promoter is a red hearing and you should be ashamed of yourself.
I wonder what the sequence of events was where nobody said anything about putting shackles on kids that aren't prisoners or being arrested.
In the best case, these children have been traumatized by their removal from a family, however dysfunctional. In the worst cases, they’ve suffered abuses that make people support the death penalty. While none of those scars is written on a person, they do manifest in sudden outbursts of screaming, hitting, stealing, and scores more destructive behaviors. For a neglected child, negative attention is preferable to not existing, and if acting out is the only way to make your existence register to the outside world, so be it.
Many of those people who placed said children in shackles aren’t practiced in methods to manage traumatized children or understanding of their past, and identify them as ‘problematic’, not ‘traumatized’.
I also wonder, because the default position is to not shackle kids obviously. Social workers really are good people who try their best in real hard situations (and dealing with 'at-risk' foster kids is one of the hardest areas of social work). It may be the case that this bad solution came out of solving something, like kids running away, or physically hurting themselves, other kids, or social workers - during transport. It's not totally fair to impugn motives, as others in this thread are, without at least understanding what it is they were trying to solve.
Again .. I'm not justifying or excusing this policy, but I do want to understand why this policy exists in context with realities on the ground encountered by good people doing really hard social work.
Being home schooled I've only seen the way kids in public school are treated from a distance and from the stories I've been told from people who are now adults. Based on what I've heard this sounds pretty consistent with the general attitude of public employees tasked with caring for children.
There was another story following two homeless kids - think of how much worse off they'll be with COVID and remote learning https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/11/19/nyregion/stud...
> why can't we as a society solve this
We can. We (collectively as a society) have chosen not to.
Foster kids don't vote, don't pay taxes, and their advocates aren't nearly as well funded as those for many other special interest groups.
Most folks have no concept of the types of trauma many of these children go through. Sadly, by the time the state has to step in, it's no easy journey forward. People watch movies and TV dramas about these kinds of things. It does not prepare anybody involved for the reality of the problems. I've heard second-hand stories I wish I could forget.
It does absolutely seem like there are many wonderful homes out there who aren't able to adopt because they aren't quite well-off enough, or the couple is gay, or some other factor that a reasonable person could look at and say "this shouldn't disqualify you from adopting."
[1] https://pathwayfs.org/foster-care-vs-adoption-differences-an...
[2] https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/life/parenting/a35860/adopt....
The best solution to this kind of problem is making a more family-friendly society so we end up with fewer kids in foster care.
I don't know how we get there from here. The past decade has really taken its toll on my faith in humanity and the past year has put the world at large through the wringer and trying to focus on doing something positive seems overwhelmingly hard and entirely pointless.
America doesn't actually value having a functional society. It values "heroics" and that fact means we don't want to actually take care of our citizens simply for existing. We only want to do something after it's so bad, they need a hero to fix something and then good luck with that. It's too far gone to ever really be functional again.
We need housing solutions. We need healthcare. We need to stop enriching the billionaires and giving money to charity while not taking care of ordinary citizens and no one wants to do that.
Some people want to provide UBI -- which I think will not take care of people -- or they want to claim that people who aren't making it are just lazy or something.
Bezos gave about a billion dollars to his workers in 2020 as either Covid relief in, I think, June or as Christmas bonuses. It amounted to as little as $150 twice for part-time workers.
Then he was lauded for giving $10 billion to charity.
He could have given $10 billion to the people who helped make him obscenely wealthy, thereby providing a total of $3000 to his least paid workers and more for others and still given a billion dollars to charity.
Why do we need so much charity? In part because we don't bother to take care of our people unless they are "charity cases" and then we still don't really take care of them. (Yes, I know, he gave money to climate change. Irrelevant to my point.)
We actively turn our people into charity cases and then blame them when their lives don't work and punish them and no amount of virtue is enough to make your life work for far too many Americans.
It is not far from the beginning of the article. Here is the written caption:
"Before she was an inmate, Michelle Voorhees was a kid in foster care. Painting a vivid picture, Voorhees asks you to imagine the harrowing, disconcerting experience of being removed from your own home."
Search-in-page any part of the caption and it should be easy to spot.
From my experience, they try to place children with immediate family if at all possible. But I’ve also seen children come from appalling circumstances - with mothers who literally sell or give them to convicted pedophiles, or who witnessed their father attempt to murder their mother in full view of their children. I’m far from thinking the foster care system is perfect, but I’ve seen more than enough to doubt the idea most children should stay with in their homes. I’ve never seen a social worker treat the decision to remove a child from a home flippantly.
My partner and I are planning to become foster parents, so I've spent the last two years or so reading a lot about fostering, and we also took a course to prepare us.
My impression is that many cases aren't quite as clear, and it's often hard to say if removing the kids was really the best course of action. I don't think social workers are careless, but they do have to make decisions based on limited information, and they often don't have sufficient alternatives to taking kids away.
But of course, I'm just a random dude commenting on the internet, and maybe I'm wrong. I also live in Austria, so maybe the situation is totally different to the US (the system does work differently). I've also tried to find statistics about foster kids, and it's surprisingly hard to find them.
Sure. To be clear though, the state doesn't really take children away for no reason. I'm sure there are isolated incidences, but in general, the kids who end up in the foster care, did not land there because they came from loving stable environments.
If there's any research that shows I'm wrong, and that taking troubled kids away from their families is actually the best thing for their development, I'm eager to hear about it.
And then the second preferred outcome is finding a caregiver in the extended family.
A distant third is a foster care placement.
No, I've just read a little on the subject.
Obviously comparisons are hard since we dismantled the orphanages in the 50s/early 60s but the best comparisons show orphanages performing favorably. I think people got caught up too much shows and plays about this stuff.
I think that says it all. Despite all the propaganda/cultural brainwashing, convincing many Americans that their country/culture is somehow better than others.
There is no data available for total recidivism, but I would more than guess that the vast majority of the negative outcome foster stats come primarily from multi-cycle children. Meaning they go in to care, get reunified, then go back in care, and wash and repeat. Tada we are at 16 years and the trauma fruit of "family preservation" policy is ripe for the picking.
"Family preservation" is the pervert uncle of a mantra that is the anchor that has dragged foster care outcomes down for decades. Supported by the "evidence based policy" con that has been propagated by services companies.
I have not had a child in my home that was not the victim of the family preservation cult. In case you don't know, let me explain the toxic buck passing shit storm of terrible that family preservation programs are.
This practice is the plan of taking child neglect cases and not removing children, but assigning a social worker to write a safe plan, such as parent can have no contact and child must live with grand parent that lives in the same house as the parent. Then when that fails 90 day later(80%), we do it again and wait 90 days, and then we wait 90 days, and then maybe we remove the children from the then child cruelty or child endangerment case. Then the charges, which have no impact on the permanency case for the child are usually dropped.
We then reunify the children after 12-18 months, and then start the 270 day safe plan again after 6 months or so, and then place the children in care, and then reunify after 12-18 months and then start all over. So all of the people that are telling the kids that they are there to help just keep placing children back with the parent that has demonstrated over 2.5 years at first reunification, their in ability to provide for the child.
This legal/policy structure allows for children to exist in a grossly traumatic cycle of permeant psychological and physical damage. This is a legal problem and not a foster care problem.
So much of the entire legal system is structured around 'reunify at all cost' that children simply pay all the risk cost of the second chances that bio parents are given. For this type of "justice" that is propagated by people that have no experience or non-"academic" knowledge of long term trauma in children.
Children should at least have the right to speedy permanency, and should not be forced to dole out second chances to bio parents that they can never get back. You only get one chance to by 5 or 4 or 3 or 2.
There is also a lot to be said for separating child welfare laws from family laws. I mention that because in many states we end up with divorce law that bleeds into welfare cases, specifically regarding visitation of children with parents, even physically or sexually abusive ones out of fear that a TPR may be overturned.
If people did something to actually help children instead of voting for pro-surveillance laws or "against those people I don't like", maybe kids would get some help.
I think that says a lot about our society.
No it doesn't. People have children because having a genetic connection is important to them. That's not a 'society-thing'. That's just humanity. There are exception to this, and that's why foster parents should be applauded because fostering and adopting is great moral act. But I wouldn't impugn the rest of society because most people don't adopt, but instead choose to have biological children.
I really wish people understood the long term effects of childhood trauma, and I hope parents can be considarate, prepared, loving and financially stable before having children.
My parents were definitely not financially stable. I grew up in the equivalent of what the US would call "the projects" but a key difference was that it was a community. There was a rec center, a school, groceries, health care all within a couple of enclosed city blocks. Average income was poverty level. All of the services reduced burdens on the parents who often worked two jobs. My mom had two jobs, my dad had two jobs.
If you use an iPhone, you are using my code. If you played a Wii game in the last decade, you're using my code. Many more examples. That's how far I came and most of my friends went as far if not farther. One of us manages a global tech organization now.
Most kids I know who didn't do well or treaded water were the product of contentious divorces as this was the time when "rah rah women's liberation" was at its height and many men were kicked out of their family. I still remember my friend lamenting to me that the only time he can see is father is during school lunches. That friend did better than he would have because he basically lived at my house as a result of his family situation.
Surprisingly, in this area, there were fewer such divorces than the general population. I have looked up the stats.
Raising kids is not hard but somehow we went from village to complete independence. We need to go back to a village mindset. We are all in it together or we will all feel the pain one day.
It's truly not clear to me that the choice we made in America is the correct one. My wife's family is full of wonderful and loving people, they are suffering from our country's social dissolution (which has hit non-college educated people outside major metro areas especially hard). Nearly everyone is divorced, often several times over. Grandparents raise their grandchildren. Fathers are in some cases are absent entirely. Children grow up without stability. And now folks are getting close to retirement age with divorces having devastated their finances.
There was also a semi-hidden system of forced labour for those women that did have children out of wedlock. The "mother and baby" homes. The amount of abuse involved was horrific and the country is still untangling and confronting it decades later.
Be wary of changing a system where the abuse is borne silently because there is no way out for one that makes it visible and thinking that is worse because just now you can see it.
Divorce rates are on their way down in the West. The transition period is definitely rough, but eventually the cultural norms adapt.
I would be interested to see if you canvas the views of Bangladeshi women on the comparative systems.
Divorce rates are down, but so are marriage and birth rates. The "cultural norms" are "adapting," but don't appear to be adapting in a direction that combines modernity with population stability in a steady state.
Much of "the west" is now dependent on people from more traditional cultures (in Europe, Muslims, in the United States, Latinos). That's not an anti-immigration rant (I'm a Bangladeshi immigrant to the United States). My point is that anything we call a "successful culture" should probably be self-sustaining in the steady state. If divorce rates in the west are declining mainly because nobody is getting married (and nobody is having kids) then you don't actually have a successful culture. It might be great for all the freedoms it provides, but on its own it will cease to exist eventually.
In a way it's a sort of arbitrage. If everyone in the world acted like Germans, it would be nice for a while, but humanity would cease to exist. There is an illusion of sustainability that is being provided by people from traditional cultures--with their traditional views on marriage and child-rearing, etc.
I grew up with my parents married. They were married before I was born and are still married now. That didn't and doesn't stop the abuse, the mistreatment, the violent rages, the substance abuse, the mental illness, or the cruelty. I wished every day State authorities would come take us away because the alternative couldn't possibly be worse than this. They never came and I never had the courage to tell anyone. I just had to suffer.
The system failed me badly, but it would have failed me worse if the authorities did come and said "well your parents are married and you have food to eat and a bed to sleep in. Looks good."
We've entered a transactional phase where your partner is supposed to show up perfect, well-adjusted and no work on your part for a healthy relationship is required. Not working? Ditch 'em and try again. That's the other extreme, sort of the exact opposite of staying due to social pressure with someone you hate and makes you unhappy, and it's also unhealthy.
Kids end up in foster care for many reasons, and its not necessarily because their parents are violent and abusive. The ubiquity of single parenthood, for example, dramatically increases the risk that a child will end up in foster care if anything happens to the remaining parent. Likewise, in a society where divorce and single parenthood are ubiquitous, other members of the family are much less likely to be in a position to take in a child when something happens to his or her parents.
I'm not suggesting we do away with social workers who can check in on kids in abusive situations. To the contrary, if social workers weren't overwhelmed taking care of a large number of kids who are in challenging circumstances simply because their dad doesn't feel like being a dad, or for other mundane, solvable reasons, they would have far more attention and resources to devote to kids suffering from alcoholism, physical and sexual abuse, etc., in their families.
The argument about shame based "norms" keeping people together aside, it was in many places, quite literally the law that forced women to stay with their husbands.
Up until the 70s and later, in many US states it was:
* Legal to rape your spouse
* Legal to restrict a woman's access to contraceptives
* Illegal for a woman to abort an unwanted pregnancy, even due to rape or incest (the previous two combined with the first essentially stripping a women's autonomy to decide when and how many children to have)
* Illegal for women to work in certain careers/legal to discriminate on whether a woman was pregnant or had children
* Legal to prevent a woman from opening a bank account or line of credit without their husband's consent
This was more the case in some places vs others, but talk to an older women in the US what the culture was like for women then. The women's liberation movement happened in reaction to severe oppression and we absolutely should not consider reverting to a society before then.
EDIT: Yikes. I was curious about the norms in Bangladesh. I don't think Bangladesh should be held as an example for anything related to marriage.
https://www.girlsnotbrides.org/child-marriage/bangladesh/
> 59% of girls in Bangladesh are married before their 18th birthday and 22% are married before the age of 15.
> Bangladesh has the third highest prevalence of child marriage in the world, and the second highest absolute number of women married or in a union before the age of 18 globally – 4,382,000.
> 4% of boys are married before the age of 18.
So you wave aside my actual argument, about norms, then proceed to refute a straw man? Let’s posit that laws against spousal rape and gender discrimination are good things. Are those the only things that have changed in our culture and in the laws? Can we have laws allowing people to escape abusive marriages, while discouraging the vastly larger number of divorces that don’t involve those things?
More than half of Americans, including over 40% of Democrats, disagree with the proposition that “changing gender roles have made it easier for women to live satisfying lives.” https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2017/10/18/wide-partisan-gap.... By contrast, just 10% think that contraceptives should be banned. There is clearly a significant number of people who think the changes you list are good things, while disagreeing that all of the social changes that have happened are good.
There is in fact widespread discontentment about the status quo among women. Women report wanting more kids than they end up having. Women report wanting to get married but being unable to do so. Many women aren’t super thrilled about a culture where people call them “crazy” for wanting normal things like a marriage and kids at the biologically normal ages (20s) for having those things. (This is completely unsurprising, because women disproportionately bear the burdens of our social changes that have freed men from the responsibilities of fatherhood.)
As to Bangladesh—it’s a poor agrarian society that suffers from the problems endemic to poor agrarian societies. In particular, strong economic incentives to marry off girls. My dad, in fact, works on public health programs to discourage child marriage in Bangladesh. But there’s a pretty big gap between child marriage (something most Bangladeshis agree we should eradicate) on one hand, and normalizing and enabling pervasive divorce and out of wedlock childbirth on the other.
But on the flip side of all that, Bangladeshi society is at least somewhat functional despite crushing poverty. What would Bangladeshi villages be like if men could decide, like in America, that they don’t want the responsibilities of fatherhood and it was socially acceptable for them to abandon their families? The society would break down completely. Death and calamity would result, because unlike in America the government can’t afford to throw money at the social ills that would result.
Strong norms in favor of marriage and strong taboos against divorce also however go with larger rates of domestic violence rates and no way out. That the perpetrators of those don't end up in jail does not make such society better behaved or less criminal/violent. Just tolerant of violence toward some people.
The fact that in out modern world many women (in heterosexual relationships) are the ones who desire to leave, and can reasonably fend for themselves, is pretty novel, and we haven't figured out how to adjust the rest of our social structures to account for it. It is a good thing that women can leave relationships where they're being mistreated and be better off on their own, but it means we need to rethink designs elsewhere in society that were based on the assumption that they wouldn't.
I agree with you about the village mindset, and it's kind of the most robust option. Even ignoring divorce, a parent can be emotionally incompetent at caring for children, and certainly can be called to work (or fight) elsewhere, can get sick and/or die, etc. We should be ensuring children have multiple backup options if their own parents are unavailable for whatever reason.
Though the females are regarded as assets, they're not allowed agency, freedom and inherent value. This is the history and hurt that is behind most of feminism of today, and there are still remnants in Western societies. Not because the laws and rules today are inherently discriminatory, but the cultural expression still inhibits life for half the population in many cases.
I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader what this may mean for BLM.
Raising kids IS hard in modern America. Agreed that it doesn't have to be, and that the disintegration of societal structures is a huge part of why. Unfortunately, all signs point to it getting worse, not better.
I bring up his research a lot it seems, but Robert Putnam published Bowling Alone, which is about the utter collapse of American Civil Society and social ties, in 2000. The statistics were daunting then, and I doubt many people would disagree that we're worse off today than we were 20 years ago.
I'm old enough that I remember living in a US that still had plentiful communities. I worry about the children being raised in our modern transactional society. I take comfort in knowing old men have worried about these things since the dawn of civilization though.
Ideally, you forecast these shifts and make preparations, rather than being dragged into the future, as seems to be what happens with institutions responding to these civil rights social movements.
But I agree that support systems, rather than "grit" or "personal agency", are almost always the most important aspect of healthy development, in pretty much any arena. Teaching, job training, child rearing, legislation development, entrepreneurship, on an on, the failures happen when people decide or are expected to go it alone.
non-parent typing detected. :)
Now we're running around tearing down Chesterton's fence every time we see it, without bothering to ask why it was erected in the first place.
As an atheist, it's becoming increasingly evident that atheism has done great damage to society at large. We're foolish to think that social technology that has worked for thousands of years was only built (and replicated independently across hundreds of disparate societies) because we were too stupid/evil/backward to see real enlightenment.
You may want to look at the long history of severe abuse perpetrated by the Church in their pursuit to "combat this".
We've just seen the Irish Laundry report released and it's fucking horrific.
https://www.history.com/news/magdalene-laundry-ireland-asylu...
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/women-on-seco...
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/treatment-of-...
Looking at the past with rose colored glasses is dangerous.
It can and should be improved, but that does not mean we have to pretend that part was all that better.
It's like being overweight. Everyone knows what they should do. Most people can't do it, however, and there isn't much social support for it. In Asian culture, we have all of this social reinforcement about our weight and eating habits. (Though south asians differ quite dramatically from east asians with respect to what they consider fat.) In the U.S., you're left to fend for yourself. Some people go to the gym regularly and eat healthy despite all of the cultural forces working against those good decisions. But most people don't. They just get fat.
Genuinely asking, because it never struck me that the foster care system was ever not horrible in America.
There isn't a good answer to the problem of kids when the parents don't care for them.
It was horrible match and there was huge amount of abuse going on.
Or some of these customs, traditions and institutions evolved to combat it through unconscious group selection. The tribes/towns/cities/countries/groups that had superior civic norms (superior defined as those norms which promote harmony, prosperity, in-group cooperation, etc) tended to attract immigrants, be capable of dominating geo-politically, etc, and thus those cultural values become dominant through this process of selection.
Also, while I think that explains things to a certain extent, it's just part of the picture. Culture also come from (i) self-interest, (ii) power asymmetries, and (iii) an unintended by-product of our evolutionary psychology/emotions/personalty traits such as jealousy/disgust sensitivity among others. For example jealousy mediating a desire for taxation (this has been studied by psychologists, it is one of the three common motives), or disgust sensitivity mediating a desire for borders and authoritarian leaders.
Add to the fact, often the most impoverished countries tend to be more religious. You're not finding a strong correlation to your point.
Poverty and education is a foremost problem.
Which way does that correlation run? Maybe impoverished countries are especially in need of the social organization provided by religion because, unlike rich countries, they can't afford to "f--k around?" They can't just spend government funds to deal with the negative social consequences of out-of-wedlock births, divorces, etc.
I think we have to be careful when we say "be financially stable before having kids" though. Not that we shouldn't be, but we can't just let certain classes of people have kids. Also, those who are stable now are one accident or emergency or job loss, etc. away from being unstable.
Edit: I think what I said might be unclear. IOW, having kids should NOT be dependent on your financial state.
Even the professional classes have instability issues. E.g. just look at how stable a high flying banking executive was in 2008. Or tech workers in the 2000s.
We should make it cheaper to have kids, rather than expecting people to wait until they're millionaires.
Why not? Choosing to have kids one can't feed and making decisions that will require taking resources from others by force is the definition of neglect.
However, once we say, as a society, that someone is not allowed to have a child because they don't make <threshold> amount of money, that will lead us down a slope I don't think we want to be on.
I'm gona walk right past the 'taxation is theft' dog whistle.
You can talk about 'personal responsibility' all you want, but at the end of the day, the urge to have kids is probably our second strongest drive as a species. Babies are gona happen. When they do, they should be fully supported as much as necessary to make sure parents and children get what they need at a base level. I don't mind my taxes paying for baby formula and diapers. We should probably fund daycare too. This is that 'equality of opportunity' conservatives are so fond of in place of 'equality of outcomes'. Well, if that's true, at the very least we need to make sure that everyone gets the bare essentials to properly raise a child.
There is a huge difference between fait accompli past events and future planning. Feeding and supporting and loving children who exist does not at all preclude planning to reduce the percentage of future children born into unfavorable circumstances.
There are ample means to avoid having kids until one is ready, at every stage of the process. We kind of know what causes childbirth by now. It is wantonly irresponsible for a couple to choose to have children, or for people to engage in activities that produce them, without taking measures to prevent the creation of more children before they are ready to support them.
If everyone just decides to sleep around without availing themselves of the means to avoid pregnancy and thus have unfed children, where is the food going to come from? Has society completely given up on the ideas of family planning and personal responsibility?
What we need are more caring people to adopt, and put their words to action, and give these kids good home. The problem is everyone says it's a problem but not enough people want to do it because it would be an inconvenience to their daily lives or some other excuse.
It is easily doable for all the worlds orphans to be adopted by good families, if only we could get people to see the good they could be doing
Money does not help, people help!
I admire your pragmatic embrace of working on this problem; I also think chalking up the cost of adoption as "an inconvenience to...daily lives" is...underselling it?
I don't know what there is to regret about having kids, yep its difficult but everything worth doing is difficult! Adoption is definitely very difficult, especially the kind I did, international adoption of special needs children. My family didn't understand, many people in the public don't understand, and if they somewhat do they ask why I didn't adopt an american child, to me a child is a child.
I will say any ounce of love you can give these kids is better than what they have, seriously, the things I've seen.. picture your life from age 1 - 16, tied to a crib, malnourished, not educated, treated like a feral animal weighing under 100 lbs now, and all kinds of spine issues because you were not ever allowed to walk! Or if you are lucky enough to be in a place you can develop a bit, but then you are molested and abused but still have the intellect of a feral animal.
Many of these kids don't know what bonds of love are, but they can still form even tiny bits of it, and there will be times you think ..why the hell did i do this, but there are times when you think i am so happy i did this, you push through those hard times, get support from friends etc and the life of that kid will be a million times better than the life they would have had.
I think people don't give themselves enough credit, and somewhere inside i know they could do it, I never thought I could do it. One thing I do know is, if we all sit around questioning what we can't do we never will know what we could do and in the meantime children are suffering. I'm actually internally battling the want to adopt a third child vs being at limit!
Oh also adopting is an expensive venture, i went into debts to do this so i recommend to anyone get familiar with the community of adoptive parents and let them help fund raise.
But yes overall I think it's a huge problem that gets little attention, and once and awhile you will see a super sad advertisement on TV and hear everyone whine about how bad it made them feel and how they shouldn't show those kinds of ads. Big disappointment to me when i hear that, I feel like its more rug sweeping under
ah well
Something is wrong with the system in America when I've got a child who can now write their name and that took less time from beginning to present than getting a single adoption from the foster system accomplished. Those matches that failed? Those kids are still in foster care.
We do need this, but we also need loving, caring people to foster. We've been fostering for over 6 years and every one of our kids have gone home to family. That should be the goal. People like to think, "oh I'd be able to provide for this kid much better than their family." Maybe that's true financially. But family is family and if there's ANY way to reunite the family, that should be the way forward.
That's neither ethical, nor is it possible since reproduction is such a strong biological drive. However, what is possible, is having the government rethink social support, making sure that each member of society has a safety net, and doesnt need to worry about getting his basic needs met (food, water, shelter etc). Basic income seems to be the best fit here.
This won't completely solve the problem, because food, shelter will not heal the attachment problems of some people (people also need companionship), but it will provide a stable base, that is a radical improvement on today's status quo.
What about this sentiment isn't ethical?
The realistic question is - what is the considerate, prepared, and loving response of a financially stable society when these things inevitably happen?
but dont read this too negative, kids are the best there is!
and while a lot of the hn audience may think like:
> I hope parents can be considarate, prepared, loving and financially stable before having children.
if you wait til everyting is "perfect", you loose to the despicable retards that dont care.
I'd probably have children when I'm retired, whatever age that be.
There's never time unless we prioritize. Plenty of people are great parents despite being busy.
My rabbi has ten kids. Ten. And he is still able to run the congregation which is probably not less demanding than whatever you do (statistically speaking). This kind of thing is common in certain communities.
So it's possible just a question of what's important to you. If kids fall behind brunch and posting on HN then yes we are too busy :)
I'm pretty sure that I wouldn't be able to spend months travelling every year, or a week cutoff from the rest of the world, doing my own projects, every couple of months, if I had children.
I'm also sure the rabbi has a massive support circle. I, on the other hand, am alone with my partner.
But I bet his wife is the one who does overwhelming majority of leading kids and care. Because with standard 40 hours and 6 kids he would already be impossibly stretched.
I know what my parents sacrificed having me and my siblings. The world today is not build for nuclear families and the world before was nothing close to nuclear families. My parents had to relocate and had no support. They really cared about us and had no life outside of their children. I couldn't do that.
There is a significant loss of freedom and time when one has children today.
Yes, I know that a significant number of parents are horrible people or have children in horrible conditions but I do not think that should require me to have children.
I've never viewed having a child as a competition. What am I losing?
The latter claim is perfectly valid to make when 100% of survivors have trait X; you are correct in implying that it would be invalid to say having trait X will guarantee a survivor.
I am not a native speaker, but to me he clearly suggests with takes that it should be possible for every case.
The "surprising" modifier here makes the object something that needs extra context, what's surprising here is that the number is small and not large. If bio mom and bio dad and foster mom and foster dad and all the extended family and most of their teachers are distant, but their track coach is emotionally invested (thanks, Buzz), that's, surprisingly, sometimes all that it takes.
Yes, if no one's invested, that's not enough, as you'd expect. It does leave the possibility that everyone is invested and it's still not enough.
Consider the idiom it takes two to tango. Now, one of the two could be a quadriplegic, or a dog, or maybe they both come from a severe religious cult which has forbidden dancing and just can't bring themselves to do it.
That's fine; the meaning is that two are necessary, not that two are sufficient.
It takes two to tango is about the tango going to happen, not the minimal required circumstances for it to happen if all other stars align.
The family that adopted them was wealthy. They poured enormous amounts of time and resources into raising those kids. One turned it all around and works for Google, the other ram away and hasn’t been heard from in 20 years.
Same birth mother, born two years apart, she was an addict.
They were drug impacted, but its weird how research goes in cycles. Crack babies were going to ruin America's capacity for caring for all these children. Then it was said that Alcohol is the only drug that effects babies in the womb. It was called the "Crack Baby Myth" but now things are changing again.
Anyway, you're not wrong about the chaotic environment that is child rearing— the other side of this coin is sets of identical twins with differing sexualities, eg: https://kinseyinstitute.org/news-events/news/2019-07-26-twin...
Actually, controlled experiments on this could be a lot better than N = 2, and the small-N problem dwarfs the positive features of the experiment here.
The amount of variation in the human condition would completely negate any conclusions from a sample size of two, however close the conditions.
It's also really easy to explain how one kid does well and the other doesn't, look at any life situation. One kid falls in with bad friends, one does not, one has a hobby that takes them somewhere, one does not, one gets a DUI the other does not, one has an amazing Hockey coach, the other does not, one takes a risk and wants to be a rock start, the other does not etc. etc..
I definitely respect people who adopt, but they risk of just adopting someone else's problem is too high for me.
The above isn't always true, but if you didn't investigate the agency deeply you should assume it is. This is why international adoptions are so hard, many counties have caught on and given up on giving the few kids who do need real homes help.
You have to be kidding me. Do you know how many kids are literal orphans in sub-saharan Africa?
Eventually they adopted a 100% healthy local child after 5-6 years of legal nightmare as it's pretty complex navigate through all requirements plus wait your turn.
2. Same mother doesn't mean same fathers. Success comes down to IQ. One kid could have been lucky while the other drew the short stick.
You can just as well say that success comes down to height, or country of birth, or combined wealth of uncles. There are so many other factors at play.
I think it arguably more likely that acceptance into the education system comes down to IQ due to antiquated practices in attempting to derive intelligence. Being within the education system is the sunny uplands to networking and generally better opportunities.
Its possible that almost every child has the potential of a "good enough" IQ and that nurture reigns supreme over the supporting cast of genetics. To separate the two within nurture there remains environmental factors such as an interpreted narrative of favouritism which can lead to downward spirals.
Finally they were separated in the system.
At first we were like “that’s horrible”
Now. We just wish it had been done a lot sooner.
Some people are hell bent on self destruction, and will take everyone down with them.
It took 7 years for our adopted daughter to finally realize and know we actually do love her.
The first sentence is saying that a stable adult is one necessary component. The second sentence is saying that the stable adult is the only necessary component. They are totally different claims with very similar wording.
Frankly, the original statement that 'it only takes one or two' should be rather obvious, it's called 'parenting' and it usually implies a couple of people who have a bond with a child.
That said, we all know every kind of person from every walk of life who ended up being in every kind of scenario.
There's a lot of randomness in humans.
That doesn't take away from the fact that a couple of 'good parents' and a decent community + school is almost assuredly the best path.
The problem with your mixed old folks' home / orphanage is that individualistic old people don't wanna live there until they're too old to help out.
Publishing names and mugshots of arrestees prior to convictions, the existence of the sex offender registry, rampant human rights abuses in prisons, loss of voting rights for felons, and the explicit allowance of slavery as punishment do not make it seem like the US "justice system" even approximates the humanist notion of justice that other developed nations apparently aim for.
What is the inevitable outcome of how our society is structured?
Our values come from television, which exists to serve advertising.
Advertising works by appealing to selfishness, hedonism, and self-doubt.
Who is going provide the time, thought, care, attention and funding to give these unfortunate kids, alone in this world, the confidence, skills, endurance, and self-belief to navigate the education system and a society that’s based on connection for advancement?
The government? We’re told that’s a “swamp” that can’t do anything as efficiently as private enterprise.
Private enterprise? There’s no profit in running foster homes.
The prison system? There’s profit in that!