• @twice_twotimes
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    238 months ago

    The article says a lot more than the obvious, and really has very little to do with the topic of placing children in foster care. It’s not claiming infants shouldn’t be removed from unsafe homes or trusted to foster parents as long as those homes remain unsafe. It’s saying the foster system is being manipulated to the detriment of children, birth parents, and foster parents. The main family in this article is a shining example of when placing a child in foster care works perfectly, where the parents expediently turned things around and managed to bond with their child despite the tragic circumstances. The goal of foster care is to reunite families, and even in these ideal cases it’s easy to turn the system against its own goal.

    • @[email protected]
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      -138 months ago

      The argument will always be which household is better for the child. Bio parents are regularly found not to be the safest fit.

      • @[email protected]
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        148 months ago

        No, because that’s just an excuse to re-home children. The argument needs to be “is the bio-home safe for the child”? Not, which home is better. We must default to keeping the kids with the bio-home, even if another home is “better”, it’s not good enough.

        • @[email protected]
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          -118 months ago

          But that isn’t how it works in child welfare cases. They only care about which location is better for the child.

          • @[email protected]
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            138 months ago

            I was taken from my parents by CPS when I was a kid. The other commenter is correct, it’s “is their home safe” not “is their home safer”. The latter is waaaay to subjective when we’re dealing with people’s children.

          • @[email protected]
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            8 months ago

            That is exactly how child welfare cases work. Is the bio-home safe for the child is the base line litmus test for ‘which location is better’ because you absolutely-must-have equitable and fair standards that aren’t subjective under the whims of individual welfare case workers who are themselves human beings with their own flaws that may sway them towards biases that are unrelated to a child’s welfare.

            ‘Which location is better’ is an open ended subjective concept without a defined contextual standard. The biological home being safe is where that standard must begin and it is entirely reasonable for it to be weighed in favor of from the outset of such a consideration.

      • @[email protected]
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        48 months ago

        No. There is always a better household. That is ridiculous. Say we are good parents providing a safe home with only cheap food, sometimes having to skip meals to feed the kids. There’s a richer family who could do better. But if they get the kids, there’s a better off family with a psychologist mom who can do a better job. Oh, wait - there’s a household that can get them both cars when they are 16 and send them to a private school that gives them better opportunities.

        Where does it end? And who decides?

        There is always going to be a family who can financially provide more than the parents of any child. And often, having kids gets people motivated to make more money, go back to school, improve their lives. It would take all my fingers and some of my toes to count the families I know who had kids when they were poor and ended up getting better lives. Their kids see that struggle and learn it’s possible to get ahead. Their kids are great people.