Bailie.com

Wednesday, March 07, 2007

Broken system yields broken children

OK, so the lawyer had bad news, really bad news, but I finally understood the legalities behind the bad news, in a way that none of the social workers could seem to explain it to me. [Aside: I was given information about how the legal proceedings would go, by various director-level officials from the Ministry of Children and Family Development, and all of it was wrong. The lawyer brushed it aside, saying that they don’t get the law, they always botch up the message in the transmission, and they do this all the time, so just don’t listen to anything they say about the law. Doing a check against my personal experience: she’s right.]

Given that children’s attachments are critical to healthy development, then it would make sense that preserving healthy attachments would be of the utmost importance to a child’s emotional growth. (If you look at the symptoms of attachment disorder , it’s no bloody wonder that our penal institutions are filled with kids who had shaky starts.) So there’s lots of evidence to show that children should stay with their “psychological” parents, not necessarily their biological parents. Taking a pre-verbal child and moving them, particularly when they can’t comprehend why this is happening, is definitely not in the best interest of the child.

So why isn’t the decision between a loving foster home, where a child has been since day 1, and a birth parent who comes forward when the child is a year old, based on the child’s best interest, but on the DNA factor? Well, generally, it would make sense to have a 1:1 comparison of environments to determine “best interest of the child.” But the entire foster system would collapse if you did that, because the idea is that parents are supposed to be able to give up their children voluntarily while they fix themselves during a rough spot, and know that they can get their kids back. But if you let kids stay with who they get attached to, the foster parents could apply to the courts, and in many cases, they would win because the children had become attached. So to keep the system intact, the courts decided that “for the greater good”, foster parents could never apply for custody or adoption of a child.

While this makes sense from a system point of view - you want to keep a system where parents won’t hide their children instead of putting them in care when necessary - it focuses on the system and the adults, but not on the children themselves. The only people who end up without a voice are the children themselves. So while the system stays intact, the children coming out of the system are coming out are scarred from having been there. This is a huge intractable problem that definitely needs fixing, and not in the usual “let’s have an inquiry” way, but in a Cognitive Edge way that really turns the problem inside out and looks at it through a completely different lense.