Have you ever noticed how these foster dipsticks who mention this blog always claim that I am anti-adoption/foster care?
I'm not, at least in the cases where it is actually needed. The proper term is "Family Rights" but we can't expect them to get it right. It's in their best interest to label us.
The funny thing is that foster parents complain about DHS as much as we do!
ReplyDeleteThat was a big shock to me. Back when my kids were first in foster care, I couldn't understand WHY any moral person would assist in stealing my children. After all, foster parents are as necessary to DHS as guards were to Nazi death camps.
So, I googled for foster parent forums, and read what they had to say. They care about children. They've almost always been told (off the record) about how horrible the bioparents are, or at least given enough details to fuel their imagination. This lets them see themselves as saints who save poor abused children from monstrous bioparents. It's a bit of a mind trick though, because most of them also complain about DHS- the stupidity, the insanity, the inconsistency. Most of them convince themselves that while dealing with DHS gives them migraines, somehow the same agency is absolutely right about the bioparents.
Not all of them though. My kids' former foster mother was told what horrible people we were, and how she wouldn't be able to stand being in the same room with us. She didn't take their word for it. She looked through the family pictures I'd sent, saw the clothes I'd made for my kids, noticed their reactions to going to obviously-familiar places, like feeding geese down by the river, or spotting frogs in the pond at the nature center. She got to know me, and made up her own mind. She saw how our caseworker was dragging her feet about sending our kids home, while other kids who'd actually been abused got sent home fast.
Because of getting to know foster parents, I see a lot of common ground between us. We all are saddened and disgusted when a child dies because DHS left that child in the care of the wrong person. It doesn't matter if the abuser was a bioparent or a foster parent or an adoptive parent, the reaction to a child's death is the same.
Likewise, we all know that there are not an infinite number of good foster homes, and that if there are too many foster kids who really don't need to be there, then that means that that either there won't be anywhere to put children who really need to be placed, or that the standards for foster parents will be lowered. No one wants to see kids taken from loving parents and put in a bad foster home.
So, we agree on the important stuff: children should be kept safe, the system should make sense, and love should matter more than money. The rest is just details, so why do we argue?