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Comment by tooltower | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

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

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