A closer look at the practice of billing parents for their child's foster care [NPR.org]

So glad you posted this, Jane.

I heard the story yesterday and was stunned by it; meant to post. Glad you did.

This is a heartbreaking and infuriating story. It details a most regressive way of allegedly doing something to help families. What is outlined is anything BUT something to help.

We’ve heard it thousands of times but “child protective services” is often anything but protective and anything but a service.

To separate a child from his or her parents, when the parents have done everything they can but don’t have the funds to “pay for the services” of having their children living in foster care, is a debtors’ prison hell scape that sounds like some Dark Ages servitude.

Whom does this serve?

I don’t know about the Johnson’s respective childhoods. But I do know that many parents reared in chaos often don’t know another way to rear their own children.

A universal solution and preventative? Begin to teach what a sane and loving home life looks like. We could do this by starting, in pre-K, with age-appropriate lessons on brain science, positive and adverse childhood experiences, early childhood development, healthy relationships and boundaries, life skills.

We wouldn’t dare call this “parenting” as that is way too incendiary. But some of the information from the wonderful Dibble Institute and the equally as effective and applicable Community Resiliency Model, to give children an idea of how worthy of respect and protection the brain is, how important it is to make wise choices about healthy relationships, what children can and cannot be expected to do, and then how to self-regulate and process stress, would go a long way toward, in a generation, helping to prevent child maltreatment. Children learning about this all through school would have an idea of what healthy relationships look like. (The Dibble Institute has statistics on how their relationship courses for teens help prevent teenage pregnancy.) I believe children learning the science and skills would be less likely to fall back on abusive parenting styles — those family heirlooms that keep on hurting until somebody says, “Stop!” because they’ve learned a better way.

Again, I am glad you posted this, Jane. The courts in NC are in the process of becoming an “ACEs-Informed” court system.  It is too bad for the Johnson family, and their sons, that this process wasn’t started earlier, and that the “Safe Baby Courts” protocols we see in Florida, where parents receive wrap-around services to help them with parenting and life, and 99% of of the cases require no further action, were not in practice. The lifelong consequences of a child being in the foster care system are painful and costly as a high percentage of those children land in jail.  

These are complicated problems and I don’t mean to oversimplify. But it does seem as though the idea of “first, do no harm” sometimes gets soundly chucked out the window.

Carey