In response to my post about Sunday’s LA Times stories telling of the two adolescents who died in the care (if you can call it that) of LA County’s Department of Children and Family Services, Richard Wexler, the
Executive Director National Coalition for Child Protection Reform wrote me an email that was both informative and disturbing.
Wexler commented in particular on the case of Miguel Padilla, the boy who was bounced around from place to place after his mother abandoned him and his father neglected him. He was raised for a while by his elderly great grand mother, who until finally he hung himself in a stand of trees outside the group home where he was placed at the end. His body was not discovered for nine days—and only then, by accident. No one had bothered to search for the kid.
Here are the questions Wexler asked:
A little boy [Miguel] is placed with his great grandmother. There is no indication that she does not love the child, but every indication that she is too old to keep up with him, supervise him properly or get him help with mental health problems.
But why does the Los Angeles Times assume, in its story Sunday about such a boy, that the only alternative is to take him away and place him with strangers?
Why didn’t anyone think to ask if DCFS should have poured help IN to that home, instead of asking only why they didn’t take the boy out?
Apparently because the Times never asked anyone who would raise that option.
When Miguel Padilla first was placed, keeping him safely with his great-grandmother would have been relatively simple: An Intensive Family Preservation Services intervention to start with, followed by linking the great grandmother to less intensive help. Even without hindsight, the odds of Miguel succeeding, not to mention surviving, would have been far greater — and, it would have cost county taxpayers far less.
Now I don’t blame the LA Times reporters for asking those questions. Looking at the surface facts of the case, I too thought Miguel Padilla’s grandmother was too old and ill equipped to care for him. Ditto Lazhanae Harris, the 13-year-old girl whose terrible story the Times also told.
But Wexler insists that this is far from true, that if the parents are not abusive, intelligent family preservation is much, much cheaper and much more likely to have a good outcome, than dumping a kid into “the system,” as those whom I know who have had personal dealings with DCFS call foster care.
To illustrate, Wexler directed me to a video of a speech by one of his colleagues, Karl Dennis, a family preservation specialist who is also the visionary founder and longtime director of Kaleidoscope, a non-profit community-based childcare agency in Chicago.
Just a bit before the video’s halfway mark, Dennis tells a compelling about a kid who, like Miguel, had no place to go because his family couldn’t or wouldn’t take him. But Dennis and his group provided the wrap-around services necessary to return the kid to his very reluctant mother (again, for less money than a slot in the foster care system—and certainly less than incarcerating him, which was clearly where the kid was headed). It worked. According to Dennis, the difficult kid finished school and got a good paying job and now has a life.
According to Wexler, with any luck at all the same might have been true for Miguel and
Lazhanae —if the emphasis at DCFS was on family preservation.
It seems, unfortunately, that it is not. So, all too often it appears that the LA County agency that is supposed to rescue children from abuse and neglect, instead has systematized it.
Surely we can do better.
Thank you for this follow-up to your blog yesterday. Richard Wexler and Karl Dennis are correct: The misguided (and far more expensive) mission of DCFS is to take children and run – whether for legitimate concerns about abuse or neglect, or because of false suspicions, over-zealous or ignorant case workers, or because of a culture that believes punitive approaches to families in crisis are more palatable than offering true help to a family in need of services to help preserve it.
For those people who feel better hearing or daydreaming about punishing struggling parents, consider another truth Wexler has brought to light: “You can’t take a swing at parents without the blow landing squarely on the child.” That’s because children need – and – like it or not – love their own homes and families. Even in situations where there are serious problems at home, children are safer and will fare better within their own homes than to be forcibly displaced like refugees – made to be orphans by the state.
So aside from some need angry people tend to harbor for cathartic revenge on troubled families, liberals and conservatives alike should be in agreement on this: Choosing INTENSIVE WRAPAROUND services tailored to fit the individual family’s needs will not only help save children, it will be CHEAPER for the state than either foster care or juvenile justice system – and these realities don’t even take into consideration the longer term ramifications to children, families, and communities. For when children either succeed or fail, the effects of either will have repercussions that will be felt by us all in so many ways.
Celeste, do you want to trust an entire nation’s health and welfare on government, which doesn’t seem to do much of anything right?
While I haven’t read enough on the subject of the post to offer “solutions,” I’m sure that any that would come to mind might work but would be immediately rejected by liberals, because there would be a measure of personal responsibility and consequences in there for the parents.
Follow-up comment / clarification:
I want to be sure I’m clear on one point (before people latch onto one of my comments and choose to blow it up to a degree that is diverting of my primary point):
There ARE times when abused and neglected children must be removed from their homes to keep them safe. There ARE parents and families who are either too dangerous or dysfunctional, even with help, to ensure the safety of a child. But when DCFS is so busy removing children as a first reaction, rather than working primarily to preserve families as a first reaction, the system not only causes children to suffer what Richard Wexler has referred to as a traumatizing experience akin to a kidnapping, but families are torn apart needlessly with serious aftershocks that last years.
When a system spends its time and resources (our tax money) removing children from homes who should never be removed, the real cases of abuse and neglect are missed. Thus perpetuates a dysfunctional cycle of tragic headline after tragic headline, followed by reactionary systems to continue doing things the very same way with no progressive end in sight.
(1 & 2 – Another pair of comments passing in the night. That’s what happens when you take phone calls in the middle of writing a comment,)
M W-S: “You can’t take a swing at parents without the blow landing squarely on the child.â€
I guess she answered me: “would be immediately rejected by liberals, because there would be a measure of personal responsibility and consequences….
So, should we not force absent fathers to pay child support?
Why is it that taxpayers always have to pay for the failures and blatant disregard for responsibility by individuals? Nothing is perfect and sometimes kids might, (again “might”) be inconvenienced by punishing parents, but no one gets a life equal to others, and it might prevent people from walking away from “problems” that they brought into the world.
One thing on which I can count is that government will claim to have an answer to this, just like they did when it created DCFS, and then find out that it doesn’t work, so then a “new answer” comes up, and we’ll find that it doesn’t work either.
Liberals can go on feeling good about trying, but I never felt good when I lost a game even though I tried. It’s time for winning results, so maybe consider what conservatives have to say rather than be defensive.
(3 & 4 crossed, too. Another phone call.)