How not to win your case by exploiting your child to drum up sympathy for your cause

The following video was recently posted to Facebook.  I'm sure many of you have already seen it.

My heart goes out to this child.  It's disgusting what he has to go through, the poor little guy.

Under the original video, which has been shared to multiple groups, pages and walls on Facebook you will see lots of comments from CPS victims whose hearts are broken, or who couldn't watch it without crying.  You can see them being reminded of similar occurrences in their own cases.  You see them crying out that CPS needs to be stopped.  Their poor emotional hearts are being ripped out of their chests over this.  "Oh my God it's only a poor helpless CPS victim child!!!  How can they do this to him?  It is absolutely devastating!.

Now I'm not saying that CPS is right here, nor am I claiming to know any of the details of this case such as what happened 5 minutes before or after the video or why CPS was in her life in the first place, but I do know how CPS operates because I've been studying this mess for years.  Do you know what CPS will see when they view this?  CPS will see this mother exploiting her child to drum up sympathy for her cause.  I'm sorry but it's true.  This will not help her case.  Nor will it help to fix this problem of CPS abuse of power which will only be fixed through legislation and enforcement and improvement of current laws.  The video may win the hearts of one or two bleeding heart legislators but they will quickly be put in their place by the special interests or rather the System Suck constituents who want to protect their meal tickets.  Ultimately it will hurt her case.  It will lead to a poor little boy who needs his mother to spending a longer stint in foster care.

I'm sorry but I'm calling bullshit on this one and will strongly suggest that if you have CPS up your ass that you DO NOT make video's like this.  Why?  Because I know how CPS thinks.  I can totally see how CPS will use this video against the mother who, BTW, could have handled it much better. She could have added a line like, "but I love you and will see you real soon," or "everything will be okay."  She could have have done something... anything to comfort this child who SHE was CLEARLY upsetting.  She could have given him a hug, for example, but no.  Instead The mother is leading him on while trying to capture the drama on camera. She's upsetting him by telling him that they're going to take him away again and filming it when she should be enjoying the little time she has with him and reassuring him that it will all work out. She could have offered him some strength, some reassurance, some love.  She offers him no comfort at all and instead continues playing into it, "they're going to come whether I want them to or not.  You know this."  It's like she knew how he was going to react so she staged the whole thing and for nothing but the dramatic effect.

What I would much rather see is a video of the child kicking and screaming and grasping onto the mothers leg while the caseworker dragged him away while the mother offers him some love and support.  There will be plenty of time to let it all out after.

Now I know why this video was posted and I can sympathize with that.  It was put there to tug on your heart strings.  It was created to piss you off, to make you cry, to somehow motivate you to take some action against CPS because how could they do this to poor helpless children?  Of course what this video will lead to is a lot of pissing and moaning on Facebook, perhaps the cutting off of the mothers visits, who knows.  Maybe you could all get together, stand on the steps of your state capital and have a good cry.  Then when you're done, maybe you can learn some facts and numbers and actually offer some solutions to the problem which don't include traumatizing children.  You could, for example, demand that your US Senators support and pass the Family First Act which would free up federal funding that is specifically designated for foster care so that CPS can help keep families together by providing needed services in the home rather than removing the child and creating whole new sets of problems all the way up to an adoption bonus.  That is just one simple thing that we can all do that takes nothing more than a phone call.  Then when you learn what's in it and learn what it's all about perhaps you can come up with solutions and legislation to put forth in your own state.

Come on people, you all need to be smarter about this.  Stop the drama because emotional people can't come up with good solutions.  And crying about it isn't going to do a damn thing.