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Comment by treeman79 | Hacker News Reader

Adopted a teenager out of foster care.

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.

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Sorry about the completely noob question, but in your mind, do you think it actually helps these kids to separate them from their bio families in the first place?

What are the most common situations that require a kid to be placed in foster care?

Separating from their families is never a great option. But sometimes it is the least-bad option. Enter, foster care.

Kids are only separated from their families when things are really bad.

The best thing to do, to help a child, is to help the family.

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....

We should be helping all of society so that families have a low probability of getting into this state in the first place. I have seen communities with strong programs for kids, breakfast served at school, extended evening activities, free organized sports. All of this stuff helps shore up a problematic home life and gives points of contact for well functioning adults and kids to intersect with these kids lives.

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.

New social structures are responsible for a lot of the problems.

Those are commercial structures that prey upon the vacuum left by old structures disappearing.

Did you mean Facebook or something in real life? (Then what, if i may ask)

> But the family is often very unattractive

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.

I can answer this, also fostered then adopted a teenager. It actually does not help the kid, its the worst thing that could happen to them except all of the alternatives. Being placed in a foster home is trauma. Getting separated from their bio family is trauma. Continuing to be physically abused (in their bio fam) is unacceptable trauma. Extended family was also a bust and resulted in more physical abuse.

Thanks for answering this.

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.

My brother had a tooth chipped and a broken arm. I have had an adult stand on my head and kick me around a room. I still had it much better than some of my peers. It isn't the best situation, but sometimes it is the only real option to protect the child.

That does sound horrible.

Personal opinion. I think a lot of kids are separated 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.

Sometime all it takes is a mistep of a parent and kids are taken from them. There was a story in the UK, where single mom had to go to the job interview and agreed with a friend to come and babysit. On a day of the interview babysitter couldn't come in time, but promised to come a bit later, so mom decided to go for the job interview. Kid stood next to window, banged on a glass and cried as mom was leaving. Police was called and kid was taken from her and very quickly adopted by another family.

This is almost certainly a untrue, and propagating such garbage does wild disservice to social workers and foster parents everywhere.

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.

You can write her personally and tell her she imagined all that https://lailabrice.wordpress.com/

So, we're talking about a woman with multiple violations of child care standards, culminating in an incident where her landlord was concerned and called the police, whom found her 22 month old alone and seemingly neglected for many hours... and then ongoing efforts to try and create a supervised reunion and return to the home failed?

I don't doubt she has her own story where she's the victim, but...

Good summary of the case is given in final appeal court judgement here: http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWCA/Civ/2013/476.html

If look at facts, child was taken from her because:

- in the view of social care workers house condition were not suitable for a child. Interestingly landlord wasn't charged for renting "inhabitable" premises, so the conclusion is that it was actually habitable and possessed no risk to health of wellbeing of people living there. _Even_ if it was that inhabitable, and landlord knowing that called police nevertheless, then why it was put on a single mom to improve living condition, not on a landlord to fullfil his duty to maintain premises? Why council housing wasn't offered to her when council itself found that her living conditions are not up to standard?

- Child was left alone once(!!), peed and pooped itself. There was no evidence of harm caused to her at that moment.

- There are 2 more facts,which contributed decision: she was seen walking drunk on a street barefoot and night noise was reported once.

Looking at that, do you honestly think that separating child from her mother is justified? Do you honestly think that forced adoption was the only (as required by law) option left, council did everything they ought to do? How come giving child to sister (another daughter of Laila who was adult by then) or locating grandparents and allowing child to stay there wasn't considered first?

> Child was left alone once(!!), peed and pooped itself. There was no evidence of harm caused to her at that moment.

"On the wall beside the bed was a large area of damp in the wall and the wallpaper was coming away. There was a very strong and overpowering smell of urine and faeces in the room. I saw the child curled in an almost foetal position on the bed lying on a pillow. She sat up when we came into the room and she was holding an empty pink bottle. I went towards the child. She stood up and came towards me. I saw that her clothes were wet and that she was wearing a nappy that had fallen off between her legs. Once in a different room I could see the child's clothes were wet and she was shivering. The strong smell was coming from her and it was clear that she had not been changed or cleaned all day. I removed the child's nappy to find dried and fresh faeces. The nappy was so swollen with urine that the child was unable to walk properly. There was also dried faeces on the child's body and her skin was soaked in urine that had leaked from her nappy and gone through her clothes."

That's a bit more than having just soiled oneself. That's many, many hours of neglect.

> she was seen walking drunk on a street barefoot

Pushing the baby down the middle of the street at 1AM while severely intoxicated.

> There are 2 more facts,

No... then the child was removed a whole year and a half later after attempts at parenting classes, etc, but where the mom continued to have police contact and the child showed developmental delays that were strongly suspected to be from neglect.

There is extensive research on this question and the result is terrible: no, it does not help them. In fact getting taken into CPS is worse than almost every form of child abuse:

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:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactive_attachment_disorder

This paper generally does not say what you are implying.

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.

I seem to read it says the kids are marginal because the decision to intervene or not depends on the investigator, not on the kid, parents or any determination of abuse. They also point out that there is enormous variance in investigators so they say this covers almost all kids in care. That's what they say "marginal" means.

Also: if the success rates for these kids are so low, then why intervene at all? Surely not doing anything is better than what this paper describes in terms of outcome. Or I should say: that's exactly what this paper says: no intervention is definitely the better option for the kid. And given that these kids end up in prison, it is the better option for both the victims of the crime that lands them in prison and for society that has to pay for it. So why intervene at all?

From what I have heard from people involved, the things social service workers will look for is access to food, sanitarian home environment, clothes, and health. Kids who look malnourished, whose teeth is falling out because they never get brushed, school is noticing that the kid is always smelling and hair is dirty, and a general lack of basic clothes. If they then go on a surprise visit and find that there is no food in the house, several week old dishes laying around, then they will add up all the red flags. History of violence and drug addiction naturally adds to the story, and a history of failing to support previous kids.

If I had to guess what the most common flag is it would be a lack of food and clean clothes.

>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.

It's sad but I don't think that this is sustainable.

It would be cheaper than prison. We do so little to support foster families that I don't know how we know that it's not sustainable... we just haven't tried. It's a cliche but if we spent 10% of of what we spend on Nukes or drug enforcement on this it would be a game changer.

This is a question of priorities.

> It's a cliche but if we spent 10% of of what we spend on Nukes or drug enforcement on this it would be a game changer.

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.

Almost 60% of projected spending is not on all health and social services, but only 3 specific programs, 2 of which primarily benefit the elderly.

It can still be true that if a program to support the success of foster children increased by 10% of the budget from somewhere else, the program would be significantly more successful in helping children.

Yes of course doubling would be a game changer! Think of the huge amount of good stuff already covered in healthcare and social services, even a 10% increase in budget could do a massive amount of good.

Prices would double.

Some people can spend an unlimited amount of money and accomplish little.

The central bank is doing far more than doubling with little to show for. The amount isn't important, only the effectiveness. An effective program can end up reducing spending and give better outcomes at the same time.

She went into foster care, because bio parents just sat around getting stoned constantly.

Often forgetting to pick up kids from school.

I get that many techies are pro-drugs. But a lot of people waste away on them.

For what it's worth, there's a difference between pro-drugs and pro-legalization. I personally think that legalization is our best hope for reducing drug use.

> I get that many techies are pro-drugs. But a lot of people waste away on them.

Yah, but prohibition doesn't work very well, either. Not to mention that there are lots of responsible users of alcohol and other intoxicating substances.

Some people neglect their kids because of video games or TV, too.

But doesn't a large majority of 'social services' spending go to retirement incomes? Obviously that is important, but discretionary spending on, for example, taking care of children, is much smaller.

> It's a cliche but if we spent 10% of of what we spend on Nukes or drug enforcement on this it would be a game changer.

> > I think people that say things like this overestimate how much we spend on things like this and underestimate social spending.

These caught my attention because they both made claims for which the quantitative basis can somewhat easily be established, partly because the parent was making a relatively specific claim as these things go.

Here's what I was able to find with ~20min of searching for federal spending in these three categories:

Foster care: $22 billion (2017) [1]

Drug control: $25 billion (2015) [2]

Nuclear arms: $35 billion (2019) [3]

I was surprised that these three areas received roughly equivalent amounts of money - support for your statement that people tend to underestimate social spending.

As to the parent comment: while it does seem likely that taking 10% of the budget from nuclear arms or drug enforcement would indeed make a qualitative difference to foster service provision, my hunch is that the 10-20% increase that implies wouldn't be a "game changer" as the parent asserted even if the claims in [1] that the program needs to be entirely reconfigured are warranted.

EDIT: The parent comment also asserts that a better-funded foster care system would be "cheaper than prison" - another question which could probably be answered with some quantitative basis. Anyone else want to take a shot at it?

[1] https://abcnews.go.com/Primetime/FosterCare/story?id=2017991...

[2] https://drugpolicy.org/sites/default/files/DPA_Fact_sheet_Dr...

[3] https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/14/us/nuclear-weapons-spending-t...

Of course it is. Just not within the parameters of how we've defined family and parenthood.

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.

> collective parenting for centuries

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.

I couldn't agree with you more including tax law as part of the problem.

> 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?

> There's still collective parenting in places of the world that don't have that same desire of individualism.

> 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.

There are three different sibling comments here asking for "data", "reseach", and "examples" supporting aaomidi's point about collective parenting.

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...

That is not collective parenting at all. That is extended familly. And as bonus, Brooks idealize past to fit point he wants to make.

The Anthropology of Childhood [0] has circulated in the blogosphere. These notes on LessWrong were interesting [1].

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Anthropology-Childhood-Cherubs-Chatte...

[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vwM7hnT9ysE3suwfk/notes-on-t...

Anthropologist Jean Briggs [0] made baffling observations while studying Inuit [1] collective parenting [2] in the 60s https://text.npr.org/685533353

Briggs quickly realized something remarkable was going on in these families: The adults had an extraordinary ability to control their anger.

...

She was walking on a stony beach in the Arctic when she saw a young mother playing with her toddler — a little boy about 2 years old. The mom picked up a pebble and said, "'Hit me! Go on. Hit me harder,'" Briggs remembered.

The boy threw the rock at his mother, and she exclaimed, "Ooooww. That hurts!"

Briggs was completely befuddled. The mom seemed to be teaching the child the opposite of what parents want. And her actions seemed to contradict everything Briggs knew about Inuit culture.

"I thought, 'What is going on here?' " Briggs said in the radio interview.

Turns out, the mom was executing a powerful parenting tool to teach her child how to control his anger — and one of the most intriguing parenting strategies I've come across.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Briggs

[1] Never in Anger: Portrait of an Eskimo Family http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674608283

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuit#Gender_roles,_marriage,_...

I think this is possibly misleading.

'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.

> Even today: 100% of my buddies who are married live within 2km of their mother-in-laws.

Assuming your buddies are male, you make an interesting observation: mothers support their daughters in raising kids more than they support theirs sons with it.

Coming to think of it, that's an interesting observation I noticed in my family too.

I don't think this is an idea, I think the 2 parent system is biology and collective parenting is the "idea" built on top of it.

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.

Collective parenting in nearly every society that practices it is still built around the biological parents as the basic unit.

At the same time, all kids go to school these days. That is a kind of collective parenting. All kids in a country learning the same stuff. Sure, most is about cognitive skill, but you also learn social conventions, manners. And if you have a good teacher, possibly some self esteem and discovery of your talents.

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.

Look on the bright side: it is speculative, and doesn't consider counterfactuals, etc.

Luckily, fine folks like aaomidi walk among us. Not many of them, but some.

> aight

allright (US english, colloquial)

As I had to look it up

People do use "aight" as slang, but I think this way probably a typo.

Thanks, this confused me, I assumed it was aught/zero and couldn't parse it.

Weird, that's the first time I've ever seen it spelled with 2 L's. But it does make more sense than one L.

Uh oh, all right, alright, so I learned two things here today :-)

Thanks!

https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/all-right-or-a...

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