I was a foster kid for 11 years. My social worker and foster parents were likely the only reason I am still here. My social worker would visit his children weekly-- even on weekends and did whatever it took for us. Still, he was just one man. I still talk to him regularly. During one discussion, I asked him about the other kids that I remembered. There were only two of us left.
I think people forget about the trauma foster kids deal with. First, the reason kids went into care. Second, the separation of the kid from their families. My experiences showed me that this trauma, combined with an institutional care system does not equip most kids to function in society.
Yeah the trauma is really hard to quantify. My mom was a 3rd grade teacher for years. One of the kids was a foster child. He was a good kids, a good heart, but had self control realated issues.
On the last day of the school they were drawing pictures of what they'd do that summer. His photo was of him being sad. He told her.
"Some of us are sad because of summer vacation because we don't want to be at home every day."
Just brutal to hear.... some kids have the deck stacked so far against them....
my wife is school teacher, when the pandemic hit and schools closed some of her kids were taken into CPS and some just flat out vanished. Elementary schools are basically social safety nets for some kids. I think that's why many governors were quick to re-open and very slow to close them down again.
to some degree a social safety net, but surely also a daycare in the most literal sense for a single parent who can't take their kid to work. Having school closed can be disastrous for people who are barely hanging on with joe jobs, fickle employers, and a rent to pay. Tough problem, because it shifts a lot of burden onto teachers to proxy as parents/wardens as well, which must undermine the mission of education.
> we realize that adults give COVID to kids but kids don't tend to give it to other kids or adults
This statement does not match available evidence. What can be accurately said is that children seldom have severe disease and often asymptomatic or have unremarkable symptoms, making the extent of Covid among children hard to measure (in general, asymptomatic people have their cases discovered and tracked at a dramatically lower rate than people with serious symptoms).
There has been overall very poor data gathering (testing, contact tracing, symptom tracking, ...) among children in most parts of the world, and in particular in the USA. All other age groups are tested and tracked at much higher frequency.
Due to the combination of this lack of solid research plus extreme political/social pressure, many people have argued (some based more or less on wishful thinking / confirmation bias, others disingenuously) that kids are not a spread risk and should therefore be allowed to mingle.
In many places where this has been tried, it was followed by notable outbreaks in schools (which then spread to the broader community), leading to schools shutting back down. In analyses of the effects of various public health interventions, school closures had one of the largest effects on the reproductive number of the epidemic.
My wife (teacher) got covid from small kids. Brought it home as a gift for the whole family.
School closed again after maybe 5-10% had already been diagnosed.
You can tell yourself whatever you want, but this kind of thinking has become pervasive throughout the culture as of late and it is a very concerning development. You cannot see a virus and you cannot prove one way or the other where you acquired the viral load necessary to come down with an infection.
I am doing well for myself now. How I got here is pretty complicated. I can only attribute my ability to overcome these experiences to those who genuinely cared. These are the people who cared enough to help me succeed but also let me fail and deal with the consequences. In high school, I was a low C to D student. I slept in class. I refused to do homework. I thought the schools were only temporary, so therefore they did not matter. I only passed classes because I excelled at test taking and understood the material. I felt like it was all a game-- people, school, relationships. None of it mattered and all I had to do was find the right way to play. After foster care, I had a free ride (I was still in care), but failed out of college because I didn't see a point. I joined the military. This forced structure and discipline actually helped me. I understood this game and excelled. I used my experience in the military to get an entry level job in IT and continue to grow.
There are residual effects that I will always deal with. I have huge gaps in memory from when I was a kid- I don't remember much before age 11. I compartmentalize things too easily. I can be impatient with people. I dislike and distrust bureaucracies. I don't have enough patience for incompetence. I could go on, but I'm sure that's not why you're here :)
Thanks again for sharing. I find your story very relatable, from the gaps in memory (which is common after trauma) to rebelling and failing in the school system.
I wish there was a community just for people in tech who've overcome messy childhoods.
This is amazing insight actually, thanks for sharing your story. In civilian life, how are you giving yourself structure and holding yourself accountable? I ask because I find creating structure for myself as an adult really helps me do things I wouldn't make time for
Kids who went through foster care frequently fail to remember entire years of their life, schools they attended, and families they lived with. There are multiple reasons for this, from trauma causing decreased working memory and formation of longterm memory during childhood to social factors such as lack of the same stability of and reminders of their life that a child who goes to one school for years and then has photos of themselves from that time to cement the memory will have. Most people do remember their life before 11 - the vast majority can name their school and neighborhood from back then without thinking, could tell you if they had a bike, if they liked school, etc. Some of these memories are indeed formed retroactively through stories, but they still exist.
I believe this is very understated, and collectively we tend to throw up our hands at the issue as though nothing could be improved. Even children growing up without a father figure or having divorced parents can have some developmental issues, I can't imagine how being separated from family must be.
It results in what is referred to as "Attachment Disorder" and is generally considered the worst possible psychological state. Especially where it is "Reactive" (ie. the problem started because of CPS involvement, because of being separated from figures the child was attached to), the worst possible option.
Reality is that, certainly on average, CPS is worse than neglect, worse than abuse. Reality seems to be that what parent figures provide for children is simply a predictable, stable environment. It does not matter if said environment has violence (especially if it doesn't directly harm the child). If the child is well provided for (ie. even poverty or neglect to the point of irregular availability of food). The vast majority of cases, by the way, are neglect, which means in practice the child being left alone for longer periods of time (hours, not days). Needless to say, this is not going to seriously damage any child over the age of 3 or 4.
The same even with violence against a child. The not-so-common-but-considered-typical image of a father who gets drunk on fridays and then yells or even hits a child with flimsy excuses, but otherwise cares for them is just not going to do the damage even a single CPS placement does.
Just to be clear: none of those things are good for a child. But they do not prevent the formation of a stable adult. CPS and child placement (and especially re-placing them on average 14 times before they grow up) prevents the formation of a stable adult in something like 45-60% of cases.
I guess CPS just feels they "need to do something". The result of that need is tens of thousands of destroyed lives per year. But nobody can be blamed for doing nothing ...
Attachment disorders are a fairly controversial subject and many former foster youth and advocate groups believe that they are largely garbage diagnoses for kids who are understandably angry, distrustful and unwilling to for a relationship with strange new carers.
Among other things, actually diagnosing RAD requires that it show up before five years old, because it is in those few early years that a child develops their ability to attach to a caregiver.
As for experience in CPS care - 50% of kids return to their parents, and (not exactly the same) 50% are in care for a year or less. The average number of placements is maybe 2 - are you perhaps thinking of the average number among children who never leave care?
As for the idea that "even a single CPS placement" is worse than being left with violent parents - I've never seen anything supporting this but if you have some I'd love to read it.
> As for the idea that "even a single CPS placement" is worse than being left with violent parents - I've never seen anything supporting this but if you have some I'd love to read it.
Well, reactive attachment syndrome is the expected outcome for something like 60% of placements, and 80%+ of kids that are placed more than once. These multiple replacements are not exactly rare. Apparently there is a small group where the first placement remains stable for a long time which has reasonable results, and there is a large group that keep getting placed again and again where the outcomes are terrible.
The vast majority of parents aren't violent but neglectful. And even then, our standards of neglect have moved quite a bit. These days some interventions are done because of "bad" food in lunch boxes (think: mars bars, not sandwiches).
The long term consequences of neglect and violence that isn't random are "parentification. TLDR: kids start acting like adults at a very young age, and obviously with less than ideal success. Think 7 year olds that make sure the rent is paid and their little sister sees a doctor once a year, or when she's ill. These kids will fight for their independence, for obvious reasons, at a very young age. This can, and does, lead to depression and less than ideal school results (because in that situation the kids don't consider school very important and of course caring for others takes time that can't be spent on homework or hobbies or even actually going to class when there's a crisis). The worst outcomes are observed where the kid takes total control of the home situation and the KID abuses this power. But even that is nothing compared to even mild attachment syndrome.
The worse cases of reactive attachment disorder, well, from Wikipedia: "Actions that otherwise would be classified as conduct disorder, such as mutilating animals, harming siblings or other family, or harming themselves intentionally"
And of course, it is anecdotal and probably lacks validity but if you look up mass murderers, whilst diagnosis is missing their family background is really quite common and are the sort of circumstances that you'd expect to generate RAD. Obviously, that outcome is very rare, but does exist.
> Well, reactive attachment syndrome is the expected outcome for something like 60% of placements,
Absolutely, completely false. Also nonsensically false that "mars bars instead of sandwiches" would get any intervention.
You are very misinformed on this topic. Almost everything you have said is directly, easily contradicted simply by looking at the widely available data on foster care. Children arrive in foster care with attachment disorders - the majority of children don't even enter foster care until they are too old to develop an attachment disorder, according to the diagnostic criteria. Almost 50% of children who are taken into foster care in the US have only one placement (1). (Unsurprisingly, being diagnosed with RAD correlates very highly with having more placements. There's likely causality in both directions there.)
I don't know why you have such a strong opinion here, but it's not based on reality.
Non-permanent placements (most obviously crisis care), which by itself happens to 20-30% of children in care. A placement in a youth institution is a per-6-month assignment by a judge and therefore obviously very unstable in essentially all cases. Even when they are stable, because of the 6 month time limit, after which a decision the child has zero possibility to influence might change their environment 100%, do you really think this will be experienced as stability and is correctly classified as "no change"?
Additionally, in clinic or some forms of foster care one might even say that given the rate of changes in the group (and personnel) even if the child remains in the same location, everyone around them changes in something like 8 months, every 8 months (because 10 children per group, every one has 6 month placement, so you can expect some change every 2 weeks). On top of that, personnel changes are very common in all youth institutions. So even in the case of a stable placement a youth institution will not be experienced as anything remotely resembling stability by a child living there.
The viewpoint of the child is obviously what matters here.
Breakdowns of placements (ie. foster parents/institution requiring child to be removed immediately, without waiting for placement to end): 20% to 65% of children, depending on age and gender.
Is it really so controversial for you that multiple changes of caregivers and environment are experienced by almost all children in state care? And that constant large changes of environment are experienced by a large subset of these children?
I did not say the worst possible form of reactive attachment disorder is the expected outcome in 60% of cases, some form of attachment disorder is expected in 60% of cases. And granted, you can certainly make a valid argument that this is at least partially because every DSM revision loosens the definition of attachment disorder, which is also seen in other diagnoses and results in absurd levels of comorbidity.
The real problem that everyone does agree on is that reactive attachment disorder sharply rises when social services intervene in the lives of children, irrespective of the reason. Even abused children have sharply lower incidence of attachment problems than children in clinic or foster care.
This is controversial, that's certainly true. Why? Hmmm, let's ask ourselves ... why might a very good reason to avoid interference in families by social services that has historically been used to deny almost all interference (and with that came the consequence that it robbed many social workers of a job and greatly limited the size of the sector) be controversial? I wonder why that might happen...
> Also nonsensically false that "mars bars instead of sandwiches" would get any intervention.
This is seen as neglect and will most definitely cause intervention by social services. Hopefully placement is rare, but the issue is that if you attract the attention of social services, a child getting an out-of-home placement is greatly dependent on the child services investigator as the first linked study pointed out, not on the child, the parent, or what is actually going on. Just for that reason alone it will happen.
Actually, the major driver of pushback against these diagnoses in foster care in my experience is former foster children, who object to having been diagnosed with these conditions for what they feel was perfectly reasonable behavior. But yes, let's jump to a conspiracy theory about bad social workers instead.
It seems that you are attempting to argue something completely different to your original claims, and I'm not interested in trying to follow you and your goalposts.
> Actually, the major driver of pushback against these diagnoses in foster care in my experience is former foster children
I don't get it, you accuse me of conspiracy and then claim this is all because of a conspiracy by the children, the victims. And victims is the correct word because VERY few foster children had any hand in or possibility to influence their placement at all, and the vast majority, as the paper says too, are "marginal", meaning their placement was the choice of the social services investigator. I'm sure it's nevertheless all their fault and they deserve it, and the social workers who are totally financially dependent on robbing them of their home just don't have .
Besides, those are children have experienced firsthand the consequences of social workers' help, and really didn't want that help, don't want it now, and will never want it.
Who would know better than they do? Nobody would.
> let's jump to a conspiracy theory about bad social workers instead
You have met some social workers, right? Bad is the standard there. Even outright malevolence is not rare. Hidden agendas and lies are the norm in youth protection social workers, because if they told the truth to children, it'd be comical: "do you want my help? We can take everything from you, friends, parents, school, ... everything, declare you sick with 20 diagnoses and if we start now we can have you in prison before you're 20. Yes almost all foster children become criminals. So do you want our help?". Children will be running in tears to abusers begging them to take them back ...
>My experiences showed me that this trauma, combined with an institutional care system does not equip most kids to function in society.
Can you elaborate on this? It abstractly makes sense, but what does this look like in practice? What kinds of situations come up whereupon a foster-kid-turned-adult wouldn't be "equipped"? What is it they wouldn't know to do? Or, what would they mistakenly think was an appropriate response?
Depends largely on how stable the foster family is, and how much effort the kid's social worker can (or wants) to put in.
I've known children who left unstructured, chaotic situations and were placed in... unstructured, chaotic foster homes. Many foster homes are like warehouses with upward of 6-8 children at a time. Fostering children is a paycheck for some foster parents.
I've also known a foster child who was placed in a home wherein the foster family had biological children in the house. The biological children were treated better and more lovingly than the foster child. The foster child left an abusive situation, only to find inequitable treatment. The foster child never had anyone model a loving, supportive relationship. So they bounced around from abusive, drug-addicted partner to abusive, drug-addicted partner until they got tired of being around abusive people and drugs.
Without a role model, it's hard to be equipped once you're legally an adult and don't have someone making decisions for you. Being an adult is a big responsibility, and a lot of these children weren't prepared to make healthy decisions. And they don't have health coping mechanisms.
Hmm. This is definitely interesting, and I appreciate the details, but I don't feel like I have a better understanding of what the maladaptive behavior looks like. I think you're describing the causes of being "not equipped", but I'm interested in how "not equipped" manifests itself in practice. That is: what is the actual behavior we see on the outside?
The story about the foster kid who gravitates towards abusive relationships is closest to the level of analysis I was hoping for. In that specific case, what is still unclear to me is exactly how -- in the details -- a lack of a stable/loving home pushes one towards abusive relationships
Do you perhaps have some anecdotes about specific people behaving in ways that well-adjusted people wouldn't? Speaking for the rest of us, I think it's hard to grok this kind of stuff without a lot of detail.
I recognize that this is a hard question to answer, of course. It effectively asks you to become a novelist. I'm grateful for anything you can provide, but also don't want you to feel obligated.
What is the actual behavior we see? Higher incidence of domestic violence, drug abuse/dependency/violence. And much more.
It's hard to say definitive, concrete examples because trauma is so personal. The same things can cause two divergent reactions in other people. As a random example from a single friend, I had a friend whose dad died via suicide by cop after he became addicted to drugs he prescribed as a small town's ER doctor. She saw her dad murdered by her friend's father from her living room window. This friend said I had it worse than she. While I definitely have my own scars, I don't think they're anywhere close to what she experienced.
I'll share how I was ill-equipped for life. Please note that while I was never put in foster care myself, I likely should have been; the only thing that stopped me going into foster care is a terribly overburdened and underfunded Child Protective Services department. Every single one of the complaints alleged against my family (of which there were several) were true. The social workers and CPS department as a whole simply has too high a caseload and I fell through the cracks. For better or worse.
I never had anyone around me that modeled how to successfully handle stress and anger. So I constantly walked around in fight or flight mode for all of my teen years and most of my twenties. It led to more than a few of assaults (both as a profession--I bounced a bit--and otherwise). I also made many other impulsive decisions, because I only knew how to solve interpersonal problems one way.
It literally took me until I was in my early thirties and hospitalized with what I thought was a heart attack to figure out I had problems with anxiety, ultra-vigalence, and a hair-trigger temper with associated anti-social behaviors. That's how I was ill-equipped for life in normal society. And again I wasn't even in foster care like some of my closest friends and loved ones.
Just one of those times I let my fists do the talking for me could've led to someone geting knocked out, falling the wrong way, and dying after landing with their head against a curb. That's manslaughter (at best). It's blind, stupid luck that I eventually got my shit together and work at a FAANG rather than shooting you a kite from behind bars.
I have someone very close to me who did go into the foster care system, and was placed in what amounted to a juvenile jail. She had a 'bunkmate' who burned their entire house down in an attempt to kill her family. And then the bunkmate tried to burn others while in the foster care facility. Now my friend has troubles sleeping; especially in areas around which she's unfamiliar (e.g. hotels) or around people she doesn't know well (e.g. B&Bs, friend's houses, etc.).
Thanks for this, it really helps give some perspective. It's incredibly difficult for those of us blessed with stable homes and happy childhoods to fully grasp the degree to which such things make us who we are. We can kind of intuit it, and it makes rational sense some of the time, but it's often hard to see the connection between e.g. "I had to pull my alcoholic mom out of a ditch" and "I'm fighting with people all the time". These two things feel disconnected, but it's clear from the literature and from stories like this one that they are not.
>It literally took me until I was in my early thirties and hospitalized with what I thought was a heart attack to figure out I had problems with anxiety, ultra-vigalence, and a hair-trigger temper with associated anti-social behaviors.
Out of curiosity, how does one get from this place to gainful employment in a FAANG company? I realize much of it has to do with luck, but surely there were a number of "stages" during this recovery/relearning process. Did you go to some sort of therapy? What were the major steps in becoming well-adjusted? For example, do you remember the first time you noticed your hair-trigger temper rising, and managed to get it under control?
>I bounced a bit
I actually did too! In my 20's I was very involved in my local MMA gym, and bouncing seemed like a 'cool' way to make some beer money.
All in all it was a pretty good gig for me because I actually had very little exposure to violence before then, and this was a way for me to confront a pretty severe aversion to conflict that I'd been carrying with me for some time. As a matter of fact, this was very much the reason I'd gotten into MMA to begin with, and bouncing was a way to move from an environment with highly-controlled violence (the ring) to a less controlled one (a bar where I had backup, and a technical advantage in a fight). I ultimately ended up in the military doing MOUT operations, but that's a different story, and I digress. My reason for bringing this up is that I remember being quite shocked and horrified at the unbridled violence in some of my colleagues. You basically had three types of bouncers:
1. Calm professionals looking to get the job done and go home
2. Cocky assholes looking to be the protagonist of a badass story, but nevertheless with some self-control
3. Tough-as-nails guys with zero self-control or ability to direct their violence usefully
I think I was mostly in the first category (though shamefully with about 30% of the second category ... I did have something to prove...). It was the third category that horrified me because it seemed like these people weren't even fixing to get into fights; they just couldn't prevent themselves from falling into a blind wrath at the slightest provocation. There's this idea in evolutionary psychology that the emotion of disgust relates to things that should be inside the body (blood, vomit, feces, saliva, etc) finding themselves outside the body. In that specific sense, I think I was disgusted by the third category of colleague -- this terrible, ugly rage that should have stayed inside was somehow spilling out. Quite a few of those guys ended up getting charged with battery over stuff they did on the job, and it all seemed so damn preventable and absurd.
I realize that I'm speaking with someone who may have been this third type of person, and I sincerely hope you don't feel judged. My reason for bringing it up is that I've never fully understood what was going on when these (otherwise super nice!) guys went off the rails. I always suspected there was something like what you described, but never managed to figure out when -- let alone why -- the switch would flip. It was truly terrifying stuff, even for someone who knows their way around a fight, because it all seemed so random and bestial. As an MMA fighter, I was used to clear rules about when the fight started and ended, but with these guys, I would worry that I'd gotten on their nerves without realizing it, and that I'd have a bottle broken over my head before I even knew the fight had begun.
In any case, I'm truly, honestly happy that you seem to be doing well, and I really appreciate this conversation.
> "Out of curiosity, how does one get from this place to gainful employment in a FAANG company"
I was blessed with an above average intelligence. But I didn't have any role models. So it was really about figuring out how intelligent I am and comparing myself to people.
One of my more stable jobs was working as a gas station clerk. The gas station I worked at was one of the few in a more affluent, medical-oriented district. Lots of doctors, nurses etc. Most of them treated me like crap. And just listening to the way they talked to me I was like... these people really aren't that smarter than me.
So I was like what do smart people do? I have 0 family connections--I was the first person in my family to graduate high school--so I figured I'd go to college. That's what smart people do, right?
Went to community college (my high school GPA wouldn't have gotten me into any school with any sort of selection), and succeeded. Graduated with honors, etc. Then transferred to my state's flagship university. Studied something not related to computers.
Got out of school during the Great Recession. Struggled to find a job. Had a couple of other shitty, albiet generally better-paying jobs. Met someone who worked at a FAANG. We were talking and having a reasonably intellectual conversation about what they do, networking and the like. Asked them where they went to school. They said they never went to college; they just taught themselves.
I was like, really? You can do that? If they can, I can. I have a degree from very selective public university. Graduated with multiple sorts of honors. If I learned one thing, it's how to learn.
So I just started teaching myself Linux. Then networking. Then a bit of coding. Got a job helping a start-up-ish company migrate onto AWS. I was underpaid, but underpaid in that world is twice the salary (at least) than either of my parents made in a year collectively. Learned every day. A year later, a recruiter from AWS reached out. That was a couple of years ago now.
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Your description of bouncing is spot-in. I was a mixture of 2&3. I learned to fight because I had no self-control. I had to learn it, eventually, out of self preservation. But my form of self-control was 'shut off your emotions until you feel dead inside. Then at least you're not a wrathful rage monster.' Not the most healthy strategy, but it's kept me out of trouble. I've gotten better, but still haven't shed a single tear in over 15 years.
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> '"I had to pull my alcoholic mom out of a ditch" and "I'm fighting with people all the time". These two things feel disconnected...'
Yeah. They're really, really not disconnected. Someone who grows up in that life has no stabilizing influence. They never learn how to deal with problems or actually plan.
Also, a neglectful parent means that you probably got abused. By your parent, an associate of your parent, or both. Predators are really effective at looking at a family and finding a situation into which they can insert you. Then you got to deal with that trauma.
You're also more than likely to grow up in poverty, which comes with it a whole different set of bad habits and impulses.
Some of the amateur research we’ve done points to the idea that it takes a surprisingly small number of emotionally stable adults to help kids get through chaotic circumstances. If you read the testimonies from children from the foster system like you, or from children with mentally unwell parents, the ones that made it out ok always have some sort of story about how one adult in their life took an interest and helped them get through it. From what I’ve seen, teachers and coaches are the most common adult to help. Not peer reviewed stuff obviously, but the pattern is striking.
Anyways, glad you made it out of such a tough spot doing ok.
> the ones that made it out ok always have some sort of story about how one adult in their life took an interest and helped them get through it.
How much time does that take of the person who is helping?
Also, from article, “Most of the $30 billion spent on child welfare annually is funneled into foster care or adoption services”, “Roughly 23,000 kids across the country are churned out of the system every year”.
That averages $100000 per child per year, assuming 300000 kids in care and all $30G spent on them.
On any given day there are over 400,000 kids in foster care, and each year more than 600,000 kids will be in care for some amount of time. https://www.acf.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/documents/cb/afc...
But when kids are adopted out of foster care, the majority will continue receiving some form of subsidy, including health insurance and often a monthly payment, so those kids are being covered by this spending as well.
> How much time does that take of the person who is helping?
It doesn't appear to be hours, although they help, but rather consistency over large periods of the child's life. In happier cases this is provided by parents and close family friends; teachers come and go and the family might move, but the parents provide emotional stability in the child's life. In less happy circumstances the issue is that some teachers and some foster parents might be great at what they do, but they only exist inside the child's life for a very short period of time.
> That averages $100000 per child per year, assuming 300000 kids in care and all $30G spent on them.
Yes, and you'll find nearly all of that money is spent on employees and organisations, mostly for locating abused (and "abused") children, with most services paid per-child (and of course ALL services have to catch a minimum amount of children or cease to exist).
In the best of countries (not the US) in 60% of foster placements something bad enough happens that the foster family requests their immediate removal (this is called a "break-down"). The US is much worse. Foster care does not offer stability, so every kid has to be found a new foster home on average every 8 months.
$800 per month per kid is very well paid for foster care. All the other money goes to government services. The child receives, at most, $250 per month (in cases where they care for themselves).
Studies point out that if you take outcomes, it would literally be better (children helped vs children harmed) if these services just outright did not exist. But I guess the problem would be much more visible.
None of the others she knew from foster care did well in life. All on drugs, homeless, many in prison, spent time there. Many are having kids that will soon be take away by the state, for good reasons.
Our own has done better, but was years of insane drama.
Knowing that bio family was out there hurt her immensely.
She finally had to spend time with them. Literally Pulling her drunk biological dad out of a ditch, to realize that they were dragging her down.
She does aight these days.
Foster kids can be helped, but you really need multiple strong families or support groups dedicated to the task. For a couple of decades, at least.
Sorry about the completely noob question, but in your mind, do you think it actually helps these kids to separate them from their bio families in the first place?
What are the most common situations that require a kid to be placed in foster care?
I can answer this, also fostered then adopted a teenager. It actually does not help the kid, its the worst thing that could happen to them except all of the alternatives. Being placed in a foster home is trauma. Getting separated from their bio family is trauma. Continuing to be physically abused (in their bio fam) is unacceptable trauma. Extended family was also a bust and resulted in more physical abuse.
To sort of hammer the point home in my brain, does the following summarize what you are saying?
In spite of all the trauma, you still think foster care is better than leaving kids with their family? E.g. the article says "more kids are removed for neglect than abuse" and only 35 percent of them finished high school. So, between the two evils (abusive family and foster care), do kids really fare better in the foster care system?
As someone who grew up outside of USA, but now live here, this is all rather shocking to me.
My brother had a tooth chipped and a broken arm. I have had an adult stand on my head and kick me around a room. I still had it much better than some of my peers. It isn't the best situation, but sometimes it is the only real option to protect the child.
The best thing to do, to help a child, is to help the family.
But the family is often very unattractive. Adults can be such reprobates: Drug addicted, "lazy", wasteful....
So the state tends to remove the child and inject them into what they know is at best a failing system and at worst a fertile training ground for child abusers.
Better to help the families, never mind that they will have lifestyles you disapprove of. It costs a lot of money. A huge amount.
But it is cheaper in the long run to put aside the moral panic about the behaviour of the grown us....
We should be helping all of society so that families have a low probability of getting into this state in the first place. I have seen communities with strong programs for kids, breakfast served at school, extended evening activities, free organized sports. All of this stuff helps shore up a problematic home life and gives points of contact for well functioning adults and kids to intersect with these kids lives.
Can you imagine being a child in a shitty home life, all you had before the pandemic was your school for being around people who didn't hate or at best were indifferent to you.
More than unattractive, they are often completely hopeless, beyond saving. So when resources are not infinite, better to focus on saving the kids, that has much better chances of succeeding.
Sometime all it takes is a mistep of a parent and kids are taken from them. There was a story in the UK, where single mom had to go to the job interview and agreed with a friend to come and babysit. On a day of the interview babysitter couldn't come in time, but promised to come a bit later, so mom decided to go for the job interview. Kid stood next to window, banged on a glass and cried as mom was leaving. Police was called and kid was taken from her and very quickly adopted by another family.
This is almost certainly a untrue, and propagating such garbage does wild disservice to social workers and foster parents everywhere.
While the UK might be more conservative with regards to child welfare, in the US you generally have to nearly kill a child or be in jail to have them removed.
So, we're talking about a woman with multiple violations of child care standards, culminating in an incident where her landlord was concerned and called the police, whom found her 22 month old alone and seemingly neglected for many hours... and then ongoing efforts to try and create a supervised reunion and return to the home failed?
I don't doubt she has her own story where she's the victim, but...
If look at facts, child was taken from her because:
- in the view of social care workers house condition were not suitable for a child. Interestingly landlord wasn't charged for renting "inhabitable" premises, so the conclusion is that it was actually habitable and possessed no risk to health of wellbeing of people living there. _Even_ if it was that inhabitable, and landlord knowing that called police nevertheless, then why it was put on a single mom to improve living condition, not on a landlord to fullfil his duty to maintain premises? Why council housing wasn't offered to her when council itself found that her living conditions are not up to standard?
- Child was left alone once(!!), peed and pooped itself. There was no evidence of harm caused to her at that moment.
- There are 2 more facts,which contributed decision: she was seen walking drunk on a street barefoot and night noise was reported once.
Looking at that, do you honestly think that separating child from her mother is justified? Do you honestly think that forced adoption was the only (as required by law) option left, council did everything they ought to do? How come giving child to sister (another daughter of Laila who was adult by then) or locating grandparents and allowing child to stay there wasn't considered first?
> Child was left alone once(!!), peed and pooped itself. There was no evidence of harm caused to her at that moment.
"On the wall beside the bed was a large area of damp in the wall and the wallpaper was coming away. There was a very strong and overpowering smell of urine and faeces in the room. I saw the child curled in an almost foetal position on the bed lying on a pillow. She sat up when we came into the room and she was holding an empty pink bottle. I went towards the child. She stood up and came towards me. I saw that her clothes were wet and that she was wearing a nappy that had fallen off between her legs. Once in a different room I could see the child's clothes were wet and she was shivering. The strong smell was coming from her and it was clear that she had not been changed or cleaned all day. I removed the child's nappy to find dried and fresh faeces. The nappy was so swollen with urine that the child was unable to walk properly. There was also dried faeces on the child's body and her skin was soaked in urine that had leaked from her nappy and gone through her clothes."
That's a bit more than having just soiled oneself. That's many, many hours of neglect.
> she was seen walking drunk on a street barefoot
Pushing the baby down the middle of the street at 1AM while severely intoxicated.
> There are 2 more facts,
No... then the child was removed a whole year and a half later after attempts at parenting classes, etc, but where the mom continued to have police contact and the child showed developmental delays that were strongly suspected to be from neglect.
There is extensive research on this question and the result is terrible: no, it does not help them. In fact getting taken into CPS is worse than almost every form of child abuse:
The result is that by every metric, from reading scores, to subjective and third-party assessment of happiness, to years of study, to taxes paid (which means how much money they earn as an adult), kids left in "abusive" homes do better than children helped by CPS. Other studies point out that this applies on every point on the spectrum, even when the children simply receive psychological help at school or other less invasive things.
A very significant group of them develop "Reactive Attachment Disorder". And ... well, just read:
This paper generally does not say what you are implying.
This is comparing abusive homes to marginal foster care children, which means children that were repeat care kids, meaning that the failure was not in foster care, but in the decision to reunify and then have them return to care. The success rates for children that are not intervened early or that are reunified are terrible, and research like this edge case for a PHD are the exact things that get kids reunified that should not be.
I seem to read it says the kids are marginal because the decision to intervene or not depends on the investigator, not on the kid, parents or any determination of abuse. They also point out that there is enormous variance in investigators so they say this covers almost all kids in care. That's what they say "marginal" means.
Also: if the success rates for these kids are so low, then why intervene at all? Surely not doing anything is better than what this paper describes in terms of outcome. Or I should say: that's exactly what this paper says: no intervention is definitely the better option for the kid. And given that these kids end up in prison, it is the better option for both the victims of the crime that lands them in prison and for society that has to pay for it. So why intervene at all?
From what I have heard from people involved, the things social service workers will look for is access to food, sanitarian home environment, clothes, and health. Kids who look malnourished, whose teeth is falling out because they never get brushed, school is noticing that the kid is always smelling and hair is dirty, and a general lack of basic clothes. If they then go on a surprise visit and find that there is no food in the house, several week old dishes laying around, then they will add up all the red flags. History of violence and drug addiction naturally adds to the story, and a history of failing to support previous kids.
If I had to guess what the most common flag is it would be a lack of food and clean clothes.
Of course it is. Just not within the parameters of how we've defined family and parenthood.
There's a reason societies used collective parenting for centuries and only recently with the push towards individualism that has stopped. There's still collective parenting in places of the world that don't have that same desire of individualism.
We've built our society and economy around the idea of 2 parents and some children. This is an arbitrary decision we've made and it wasn't how we came to this point. A push for accepting multi-node families would help nudge us in the right direction. Just changing the tax law to support and provide the same benefits to a union of multiple parents would be extremely useful.
We've codefied a single way of living. Maybe we should change that and allow for more dynamic family structures.
Anthropologist Jean Briggs [0] made baffling observations while studying Inuit [1] collective parenting [2] in the 60s https://text.npr.org/685533353
Briggs quickly realized something remarkable was going on in these families: The adults had an extraordinary ability to control their anger.
...
She was walking on a stony beach in the Arctic when she saw a young mother playing with her toddler — a little boy about 2 years old. The mom picked up a pebble and said, "'Hit me! Go on. Hit me harder,'" Briggs remembered.
The boy threw the rock at his mother, and she exclaimed, "Ooooww. That hurts!"
Briggs was completely befuddled. The mom seemed to be teaching the child the opposite of what parents want. And her actions seemed to contradict everything Briggs knew about Inuit culture.
"I thought, 'What is going on here?' " Briggs said in the radio interview.
Turns out, the mom was executing a powerful parenting tool to teach her child how to control his anger — and one of the most intriguing parenting strategies I've come across.
Could you provide more data here? The only information that I found was traditional families, where the grandparents and relatives take the responsibility for the education too.
I lived some years in South American, and I was impressed how many middle class families have their Nanny taking care of their kids (bringing to the school, cooking, controlling home work, taking care while they were sick, etc).. could be that be seem as "collective parenting" too?
> There's still collective parenting in places of the world that don't have that same desire of individualism.
Would provide more data here? I'm interested to see how they are doing.
At the same time, all kids go to school these days. That is a kind of collective parenting. All kids in a country learning the same stuff. Sure, most is about cognitive skill, but you also learn social conventions, manners. And if you have a good teacher, possibly some self esteem and discovery of your talents.
It's so normal, you don't think about it, but it is less than 200 years since every regular kid can attend school. Before that this was only available for the upper class.
'We' never did 'collective' parenting in the broader sense.
Both Asian and Western families were essentially nuclear, but multigenerational, and closer ties to extended family.
70 years ago, this was generally normative - and frankly often today - in that families were 2 parents + kids, but grandparents, uncles/aunts /cousins were part of the mix.
Obviously, more so in some places than others (particularly with parents living-in i.e. Asia, Italy)
Even today: 100% of my buddies who are married live within 2km of their mother-in-laws.
I think the term 'collective' is just a little bit too broad, and Romanticizes these quasi-aboriginal notions of truly more collective parenting, which frankly hasn't been part of the mix for a very long time (i.e. millennia) in most places.
The basic, communitarian concepts which we are mostly all familiar, which is to say 'quasi nuclear with strong extended family ties' will work just fine.
I think both neoliberalism and certain kinds of progressive social ideologies, without necessarily intending to move away from this, are effectively doing this, and pushing us into the 'hyper nuclear' (i.e. 1 or 2 parents only) scnenarios, which I think is less than ideal.
Having grown up in a single parent situation, and then two parents later on, it took me 30 years of reflection to realize how much single parenting is a massive disadvantage. Surprisingly, there is reluctance among many progressive circles to recognize this, whereupon the notion of 'single motherhood' is contemplated on equal footing with 2 parent families. (Though I think this is usually derived from concerns over the fact that single parent households are often the result of abuse etc.)
This odd paradox can be seen within the African American community whereupon well over 50% of kids grow up without having much of a relationship with their fathers. To some, this is an abomination, and a 'root cause of malaise' (and I'm not pointing fingers here, there are lot of men in jail that don't need to be), but surprisingly among many, they just don't see it as a problem for a variety of triggering reasons.
The nuclear+extended and obviously - community participation (i.e. teachers, role models) I think will work just fine so long as we recognize it.
And any parents who adopt foster children are straight up heroes, of that there is no doubt.
> Even today: 100% of my buddies who are married live within 2km of their mother-in-laws.
Assuming your buddies are male, you make an interesting observation: mothers support their daughters in raising kids more than they support theirs sons with it.
Biological bonding with baby is recorded to happen after 80% of births at first sight. The bonding is so strong that parents will literally lay down their lives to protect a child.
I highly doubt that this type of bonding forms for people who aren't the biological parent of the baby. When choosing their own lives or the baby's life, most unrelated people will choose their own life. Therefore under "collective parenting" it is likely that the other "parents" function more as "caretakers" and are tertiary to the parents that formed the biological bond.
Foster care is largely comprised of tertiary care that is missing the primary care of the nuclear biological mother and father. So foster care is essentially the same as collective parenting just without the actual biological parents. This is the causative factor and the essential missing link:
Foster care doesn't have enough people who are willing to invest the same amount of blood, sweat and tears as actual biological parents.
That is why I said such support services are unsustainable. People don't have enough energy, resources or will-power to spare for a stranger that is not their own biological progeny.
You also need to consider the evolutionary logic behind this type of behavior. Does it make sense for a biological entity to maximize Darwinian fitness by caring for children that have less genetic relation to them? No. Obviously there will be an evolutionary imperative for parents to spend the most resources on the child that is most genetically related to them.
The 2 parent system exists as a primary biological component rather than some "idea" because a child can only have 2 biological parents.
> There's still collective parenting in places of the world that don't have that same desire of individualism.
> societies used collective parenting for centuries
I see these claims made regularly in discussions about kids, families, etc, but I never see a clear example. Which parts of the world have collective parenting? How do you even define that? During which periods did we have collective parenting? What forms did it take? I would be really interested in seeing real examples I can look into to understand better how they could potentially be used as inspiration.
It would be cheaper than prison. We do so little to support foster families that I don't know how we know that it's not sustainable... we just haven't tried. It's a cliche but if we spent 10% of of what we spend on Nukes or drug enforcement on this it would be a game changer.
> It's a cliche but if we spent 10% of of what we spend on Nukes or drug enforcement on this it would be a game changer.
I think people that say things like this overestimate how much we spend on things like this and underestimate social spending. About 50% of US government spending is health and social services. So even cutting everything else to zero is only a doubling of health and social services. A doubling isn't nothing, but a game changer? And not all (or even most) of that other 50% will be spending you feel is frivolous, so it would be much less than doubling.
> It's a cliche but if we spent 10% of of what we spend on Nukes or drug enforcement on this it would be a game changer.
> > I think people that say things like this overestimate how much we spend on things like this and underestimate social spending.
These caught my attention because they both made claims for which the quantitative basis can somewhat easily be established, partly because the parent was making a relatively specific claim as these things go.
Here's what I was able to find with ~20min of searching for federal spending in these three categories:
Foster care: $22 billion (2017) [1]
Drug control: $25 billion (2015) [2]
Nuclear arms: $35 billion (2019) [3]
I was surprised that these three areas received roughly equivalent amounts of money - support for your statement that people tend to underestimate social spending.
As to the parent comment: while it does seem likely that taking 10% of the budget from nuclear arms or drug enforcement would indeed make a qualitative difference to foster service provision, my hunch is that the 10-20% increase that implies wouldn't be a "game changer" as the parent asserted even if the claims in [1] that the program needs to be entirely reconfigured are warranted.
EDIT: The parent comment also asserts that a better-funded foster care system would be "cheaper than prison" - another question which could probably be answered with some quantitative basis. Anyone else want to take a shot at it?
Almost 60% of projected spending is not on all health and social services, but only 3 specific programs, 2 of which primarily benefit the elderly.
It can still be true that if a program to support the success of foster children increased by 10% of the budget from somewhere else, the program would be significantly more successful in helping children.
But doesn't a large majority of 'social services' spending go to retirement incomes? Obviously that is important, but discretionary spending on, for example, taking care of children, is much smaller.
For what it's worth, there's a difference between pro-drugs and pro-legalization. I personally think that legalization is our best hope for reducing drug use.
> I get that many techies are pro-drugs. But a lot of people waste away on them.
Yah, but prohibition doesn't work very well, either. Not to mention that there are lots of responsible users of alcohol and other intoxicating substances.
Some people neglect their kids because of video games or TV, too.
Yes of course doubling would be a game changer! Think of the huge amount of good stuff already covered in healthcare and social services, even a 10% increase in budget could do a massive amount of good.
The central bank is doing far more than doubling with little to show for. The amount isn't important, only the effectiveness. An effective program can end up reducing spending and give better outcomes at the same time.
More generally, prisons all over the world serve much more often as a place to put people that society has failed than vice versa. It’s a sad truth that gets very little recognition since these people have no lobby. The American prison situation is certainly particularly awful due to privatization. But it doesn’t stop there. We’re doing terrible things in Europe as well.
Do we have something to compare this number to? Don't we expect most crimes to not go to trial, if the convicted person agrees that they committed the crime?
France trial are not "jury of your peer" trial. If I'm not mistaken, only the "Cour d'assises" has jurors. "Being judged by your peer" is not an enshrined Right in Europe.
Do they agree that they committed the crime or are they just making a tradeoff of a definite 5 years vs. a probable 25 years or something similar due to plea bargains?
From what I am reading, especially in drug cases this the tradeoff a lot of people are making. Add to this being poor and lacking legal education this is a rational choice.
It's true that most American prisoners are not "nonviolent drug user" inmates. However, around 250,000 of them are [1]. That's still a huge chunk of human life.
As a side note, I think HN readers may get a lot out of reading [1], which is a pretty concise look at the American prison system and some of the facts and myths around it.
People seem to forget how devastating drugs are to communities. We see it right now with meth and poor whites. It was (is?) true about African Americans and crack cocaine. There is no “legalize it” solution with these drugs. If you want to rehab low level offenders, fine. But high level offenders, the people running the operations, deserve their sentences.
I think you're missing the fact that illegalization is pushing these substances and their users into the black market, deep in the margins of society, and essentially leaving the rest of us powerless. If we were to own up and legalize it, we would be in a better position to treat it and to apply preventive measures. Plus we wouldn't be financing the underworld. As far as I can tell, facing the hard issues, like working with the most disadvantaged people, is the only thing that makes a difference, while illegalization is about rejecting them.
That's comically untrue. The drug war is a policy coined and handed down by the Nixon and subsequent White House administrations on the rest of the West, and in the US it does have strong racist undertones (see minimum sentences for crack cocaine compared to powdered cocaine).
Not even sure what you mean by laws coming from local communities. To someone involved in the drug industry illegalization is a conundrum. On the one hand, you might get punished. On the other hand, you're incentivized to do it, because you'll make a lot of money filling the supply vacuum left by the formal economy. Add bad socioeconomic conditions into the mix and poverty becomes much scarier than criminal prosecution.
Criminalization doesn't work. We have known this for decades. Destroying people's lives perpetuates the problem. Treat drug addiction as a public health issue and it needs to go hand-in-hand with poverty reduction.
It's not a scare quote. It's how reasonable people approach novel turns of phrase so that they don't become part of our culturally accepted common knowledge without any basis in fact.
1/5 or 20% of people currently incarcerated are for non-violent drug use. This article tries to downplay it by reversing the statistic saying 4/5's aren't non-violent drug offenders. So about ~450k are incarcerated for non-violent drug possession in any given day.
Did you bother actually looking up the data? Because intentional homicide in the US is indeed more than 6x greater than it is in places like Austria and Switzerland.
There is no country in western Europe with anywhere near the violent crime rate as the US.
Yes I did. US has 3 times more murder then average EU. That is not the same as 6 times more. And some of surplus is one person killing more people, so you then have one person being in prison instead of multiple.
And murder clearance rates are low anyway, so that on itself can't be reason for disparity.
I am inclined to believe that criminal inclination is a human universal. I am also inclined to believe that the American system catches and punishes more criminals (as a percentage) than the European systems. But some disparity does seem to exist.
One of the few unchecked powers of the US president is the pardon. I never understood why Obama (now Trump) didnt just pardon all federal non violent drug offenders on the last day of his 2nd term...
I doubt he prioritized that over the political baggage it would create for his successors or his personal life. I wish he had been inspired by carter, but politically I think this must seem riskier than those pardons. The rhetoric around why prisoners shouldn't vote seem to underly a lot of the same thinking, but I wish we knew their rationale.
Private prisons are a problem, but they are also sort of an overemphasized canard. They house under 10% of the prison population, and for several of the larger states it's none at all.
American state run prisons and their surrounding ecosystem of courts, municipal govts, vendors, etc have much of the perverse incentives and a far larger overall footprint
> American state run prisons and their surrounding ecosystem of courts, municipal govts, vendors, etc have much of the perverse incentives
Why do these institutions have perverse incentives? Is it because the voters reward high imprisonment rates because it creates the impression of safety?
Just to pick on one player, California prison workers’ union have immense political power. They have many members, and their self-interest is more prisons and more prisoners.
To go further, when you warehouse a bunch of people who can’t vote in a geographical area, you create a situation where few voters get to wield disproportionate power at all levels.
I took a quick look at campaign financing laws in some other countries (UK, Germany, Canada, and Japan) and it seemed that the U.S. was the exception in allowing trade unions and industry associations to give money to politicians, along with unrestricted corporate contributions to political causes.
What would be considered bribery in many other countries is still legal in the U.S.
It is. The history as most voters perceive it is: crime was high and rising fast in the 70s and 80s, until we got "tough on crime" in the late 80s and early 90s, and crime finally started declining once all the criminals knew we'd be tough. So they conclude that the modern American justice system is what's causing crime to decline, and are concerned that being "soft on crime" would make crime start spiking again.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not a fan of mass incarceration, but you can see where the skepticism of reform comes from. It's impossible to overstate how bad things were perceived to be in the 90s.
Other commenter has good points too, but I primarily meant that there are still many many people (and entire rural towns!) making and dependent on the money involved. Even if the running of the prisons is "public".
I've done ok as a foster child, so I thought I would share why. This is a throw-away account because I'd rather not be identified.
First, my foster home cared for me. Somehow there is this idea out there that you shouldn't form an attachment to your foster kids, but I think that advice is plain wrong. I know because years later I attended foster-parenting orientation out of personal curiosity, and this is more or less what they told prospective foster parents. For me, that change made a massive difference. My foster home parent made sure my teacher, my school principals, my coaches...etc knew of my situation. They even went as far as letting me stay in my school district despite living outside of it.
Second, because of this community-awareness, I had allies at every turn. Teachers spent extra time getting me caught up during tutoring hours. My school counselor sent me email reminders about college application due dates. My AP & SAT tests were paid for. My school lunch were covered...etc.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, I wasn't a pay-check to my foster parent. I think that somewhat ties back to my first point, but you'd be surprised at how many folks do this for the money (at least in the state were I was based).
How to fix the foster system:
This is a really tough one, but I think more emphasis should be placed on putting foster kids inside existing families, if possible. Maybe more outreach is needed to find such folks, and maybe the economic incentive of it should be held back until a kid has been successfully placed for more than a. year inside a family. Furthermore, the whole notion that no attachment should exist is flawed. Lastly, getting the community involved. It really does takes a village to raise a foster kid.
The do not get attached climate is really a recent manifestation of welfare policy coming out of California and Oregon in the last 20 years or so. It is rooted in the family preservation and reunification first policies, vice the children permanency first policies. These policies are sold as evidence based and are generally just what was measured based, and the research is usually conducted by the largest social services companies in the given states.
I was trained in North Carolina and our trainers explained that don't-attach was a traditional method that is now widely disproven. Encouraging attachment is now strongly recommended even though reunification is still Plan A.
Thanks for the insight. I have heard similar comments from varying states at the national events. The policy and literature around child welfare is surely in a state of change in the US right now.
I'm not a historian but you're clearly turning this into a political issue (by talking about CA/OR as the origin). Instead, let's focus on the policies.
I was in Florida (mostly GOP ran) and they had similar training. These policies (to not be attached) sounds very wrong, especially when numerous studies support attachment parenting as the best way to nurture child development.
Let's focus on the a mutually agreed problem (shit training) and work towards a better solution through better policies that either experiment with attachment or outright support it.
I was simply referencing the origin of the authors of the policies that were then moved to the federal level and tied to funding, which was passed by a GOP congress.
The problem has nothing to do with training, and all to do with legal policy regrading termination of parental rights.
The training is a result of appellate risk for TPR with regards to state effort for reunification.
> How to fix the foster system: This is a really tough one, but I think more emphasis should be placed on putting foster kids inside existing families, if possible.
I currently have three bio-kids. The wife and I have been talking about fostering or running an orphanage. Hmmm. I've never really considered how much it would benefit the foster children to experience a healthy home.
I was told by my Aunt that fostering kids that they weren't supposed to 'get attached' but I never realized this as apart of the process b/c she always broke the rule, lol.
Caring and attachment is extremely important. IMHO, this training (to not grow attached) is the source of the problem. There is numerous research studies about the importance of healthy attachment to nurture the development of a human into the next stage of their life.
This is a good time to remind people that there's a huge backlog of stable, middle-class Americans desperate to adopt. This persists primarily because of huge regulatory and legal burdens placed on the adoption process.
The most despicable of which is a constellation of bigoted state-by-state policies on "racial matching". The end result is that black foster kids on average spend twice as long in the system as their white counterparts.[1]
Georgia was sued a decade ago and lost for letting children languish in care, because of racial matching "rules" in certain counties.
This resulted in a hugely disproportionate number of specifically african american children never finding adoptive homes due to a lack of racial matched adoptive resources.
There are now reporting requirements for this specific issue in the egregious counties Fulton and Dekalb.
We had a sibling pair for a year and were on the verge of adopting them. DFCS was more than a year late than was legally required to file TPR and at the last minute moved them to yet another home, this time based on skin color. These kids are pawns of a harmful ideology.
I think most people prefer to adopt very young children, without issues, rather than older ones that come from problem homes. The latter will be much harder to manage.
Also, racial matching is not just about parents wanting white kids because of "racism", it's usually easier for the children to fit in and feel integrated into their new environment if they look more or less similar to their family.
My wife and I adopted two older boys (10 and 12). Most of the families trying to adopt are looking for babies but we were looking for older kids. It still took almost 2 years to get our first kid placed with us because I think the social workers weren’t sure if my wife and I really knew what we were getting into. But once we got the first kid I think they realized we were good. Then a year later they called us out of the blue about a second kid.
Babies are easier because they don't start off bad. Teens have had years of abuse behind them. Read the reports of others here and you will see it is rare and hard to fix the kids after that trauma.
Sure, babies don't start out with years of trauma. So what? People are willing to take classes and things and learn, are they not? It just isn't the same as babies.
And to be fair, you aren't "fixing" a baby: You are doing the same thing - providing a loving home, trying to give another person the things they need. You just have a head start on some of the problems you'll be facing with a teenager - the sort of thing that blindsides parents of babies if it happens.
I'm not sure why it is an issue that "things are hard".
> Sure, babies don't start out with years of trauma. So what?
I think that you should look up what trauma and dysfunctional early setup does with kids. Because it can be very hard on caregiver and test all their abilities including self control. The adoption agencies themselves are quite open about these issues - they do not want people to adopt and then be unable to handle things.
Which are all euphemisms mind you. Basically, there are issues with violence, inability to create relationship or even inability that relationship can be "true". Which causes whole other bunch of behavioral problems. Like, the eagerness to "test" caregiver by really going out of way to create trouble. And if caregiver fails, result is basically abuse. And the kid can't help itself, but adults should.
And adults when they see they don't have time and resources and patience to deal with above, do better to adopt baby.
> People are willing to take classes and things and learn, are they not? It just isn't the same as babies.
If you adopt, or give birth to, a baby, chances are very good that there will be no particular issues. If you adopt an older kid through social services, you're all but guaranteed to have a lot more problems than the average parent. Not to mention that the kid will not be as attached to you, making it doubly difficult.
Folks attempting to adopt older kids have a higher 'return' rate than when adopting babies. E.g. If an older kid decides to physically fight you for control, many parents will quickly run out of options, emotional reserves etc. It is undesirable to rush through an adoption in that case, years are warranted. (first hand experience w/ multiple foster/adopted teenagers + failed adoptions).
Adopting baby is significantly easier then older kids, because older kids are affected by their previous experiences, abandonment, massively dysfunctional familly, death of parents and so on.
My basic understanding is the U.S. replaced mental health asylums and orphanages with homelessness and prisons. What do other countries do? Does it work?
>My basic understanding is the U.S. replaced mental health asylums and orphanages with homelessness and prisons.
To be clear, that was not the motivation. There were lots of reasons why things changed and institutionalization fell out of favor (and not just in the US, but across the West). For example, right now, in most states, you couldn't forcibly institutionalize, say, a schizophrenic homeless individual legally, even if the request came from the individual's family. And if you try, municipal and state governments, bolstered by activists and rights organizations will fight you.
I’m pretty sure the changes to the law that replaced mental health care and orphanages with homelessness and prison were written with those outcomes in mind. If not, it’s been 40 years, and the law would have been reverted by now.
Ignoring that, what other motivation do the people denying health care to the mentally ill supposedly have?
They throw the mentally ill in prison to avoid providing care, so any argument that it’s for the welfare of the mentally ill is a hard sell.
The people I’ve met working to help these people universally express dismay at the fact that the law sets them up for failure.
Some institutionalized patients still behaved unacceptably. It was just kept out of your sight.
Some institutionalized patients stabilized not because they had prescriptions or therapy appointments, but because they were coerced to actually take the meds and show up at the therapy appointments. Subject to lights-out at a reasonable hour. Denied access to alcohol and recreational drugs. Etc.
Either way, our current understanding is that these were gross violations of medical ethics and human rights. We locked people up who had not been convicted of any crime. We confined people indefinitely who had only been convicted of nuisance crimes. We took people who had the capacity to understand the medical care they were being offered, and we didn't care what they had to say about it.
It doesn't matter how expedient any of this was for society or for the patients, it was wrong. We are as likely to walk this back as we are to re-normalize sexual harassment or slavery or something.
>It doesn't matter how expedient any of this was for society or for the patients, it was wrong
It was wrong to provide a place, staffed by clinical professionals, providing professional healthcare, and regulated by government agencies? Uh huh.
Well, I'm glad you feel all that was 'wrong', because apparently what replaced it, mentally ill people living in squalor, exposed to the elements and diseases, in makeshift shanty-towns ... that's been a real improvement. A homeless individual suffering from schizophrenia and unable to make rational decisions, I'm sure he appreciates you fighting for his right to live in squalor.
Unbelievable.
> It was just kept out of your sight.
That's what we have now. Homeless, and homeless encampments are so normal in progressives cities, it's like background noise. You'll literally step-over a sleeping homeless on your way to work without a second thought (and I can guarantee you do that every day, if you live in one of those cities). Sorry ... I forgot, we're protecting their rights to not receive institutional care.
One of my family members was murdered because we didn't institutionalize somebody. The mother of the murderer had wanted him institutionalized, but oh no that would violate his rights. He was a fully expected hazard. So now an innocent person is dead.
>I’m pretty sure the changes to the law that replaced mental health care and orphanages with homelessness and prison were written with those outcomes in mind.
"Pretty sure"? That's a some standard of evidence. Care to expand on that .. maybe with with something other than "I thought about it real hard and I can't think of anything else it could be"?
The comment you responded to never made an attribution of intent. The comment itself is an accurate reflection of reality. America largely abandons the mentally ill, orphaned, and military veterans to prison, homelessness, and addiction. We (conservatives, to be accurate) even abandoned the 9/11 responders as soon as we (conservatives) realized that they were catching cancer from their rescues on 9/11.
Adding to what others mentioned: the US is a terrible country to be poor in. Other countries (even in the 3rd world) have safety nets where the poor can find support for very basic needs (food and healthcare) before resorting to crime.
Poor people have to be blamed for their poverty and deserve it, else the people who refuse to allow the government to help them couldn’t be think of themselves as moral people.
It's not so fundamentally different up here in Canada. It's just different scope and scale. Our foster kids are also in a pipeline to poverty and criminality, and it's rife with abuse. Our poverty and criminality are just a bit milder on average, perhaps? The broken families at the core of it all are just as painful.
Follow the money but it's not just private corporations. In California the prison guard union is one of the stronger lobbies and have pushed to pass some pretty bad bills over the decades.
Those old systems were full of abuse. There are bad foster parents, but overall it is better. Until someone thinks up something better the current system is what we have.
My Dad fosters what seems like an unending stream of kids. The parents have a drug problem and end up losing their kids. Once the parents get their shit together again they get the kids back.
Form the kids perspective they are either dealing with temporary guardians or with a parent that provides next to no super vision.
The state can’t parent children, but foster care is in a real way keeping children off the street.
I had an employee adopt a foster child around 10-11yrs old. Quite an eye opener for me. Employee missed a huge amount of time (which I allowed with no questions) because the child just could not function. When they put the child in school, the police were called a couple times a week (I am not exaggerating). Finally, the child accused one of new parents of child abuse because they were not allowed to do something. Child services took the child back in custody but no charges were pressed because everyone involved knew what was going on and what happened. My employee that adopted this child was heart broken and talked to them everyday even a year later. Truly a terrible situation.
Bottom line: young children can be broken severely at a very young age and it is extremely hard to fix then going forward.
I did youth work with a family who fostered then adopted 4 half brothers from the same mother. She was a heroin addict. Every other year she'd have a baby, malnourished, underweight, in withdrawal, neglected taken away. 4 kids: 2 had adhd, 1 was developmentally delayed, 1 autistic, 1 had ADD, plus all were smaller and weaker than their comparative age peers.
After taking the forth one, they were too over stretched to take anymore. Lovely kids. It was amazing watching them socialise gradually. So sad what happened to them really.
"I did youth work with a family who fostered then adopted 4 half brothers from the same mother. She was a heroin addict. Every other year she'd have a baby, malnourished, underweight, in withdrawal, neglected taken away."
That's truly tragic. You've been a blessing to those children, and that's beautiful.
Given the harshness of this reality, I understand why past generations looked to forced sterilization. There's really no winning with that, but after 4 kids (to date) with that fate, it's a legitimate moral debate (not an easy one, nor should it be) as to the relative good. I guess it's a sibling to the abortion debate.
I'm a brit, around the same time a US based charity set up here that paid drug using women to get (temporary but long term) Birth Control. I thought it was a good idea but it was (is) very controversial. They started after a similar experience.
The kids I worked with were so lucky to get a nice loving family, a very strong community to support them, lots of opportunities for socialisation and education etc.
God knows what happens if you're not that lucky.
Edit: I have to be honest, I enjoyed the work. I wouldn't have done it otherwise. :) the kids had their moments but mostly they were really excited to do anything and getting male attention was a big draw for them (one they got over the fear of men they all arrived with).
>Texas lawmakers recognized the existence of a possible foster-care-to-prison pipeline several years ago.
The 'foster-care-to-prison pipeline' metaphor is such a misnomer and completely unfair. Nobody is moving these kids into the prison system. Traditional parenting can provide personalized rearing and still have that child end-up in prison. We also know that a single-parent household, even with a dedicated loving parent, will have challenges rearing children. How is the state supposed to do it? Worse, the kids who end up in foster-care, more often than not, will already have significant trauma and behaviour or mental issues.
So to summarize, you have the State dealing with two major issues that individually create an immense challenge, but together make it even harder:
1) The state can never scale resources to match typical parental rearing.
2) The state has to deal with a population of kids who are already suffering from behavioral or mental issues, drugs, or trauma. An affluent two-parent household with dedicated support workers would have trouble raising kids like that. How is the State supposed to do this?
I'm not sure what the right approach is here but it's clear as day that there is no easy answer here.
The early and permanent intervention would be to somehow convince (or forbid?) parents who are likely to raise such a child from having a child, but this opens up a giant can of ethical worms e.g. eugenics.
Better education around sex and children, as well as easy access to birth control would go a long way.
No my comment is simply to advocate for the development of the child over the second chances for the parent.
Permanency is a child welfare term regarding a permanent placement for the child, not some grotesques parent sterilization program as you are implying.
You are operating under the incorrect assumption that I somehow think the parents are at fault, my argument is that the children should not be the ones that pay for the learning process of the parents.
Also implying that I am a Nazi/eugenics promoter is a red hearing and you should be ashamed of yourself.
"The state, however, has since returned to high-level dysfunction, including a recent case in which foster kids were being transported in handcuffs and leg shackles — a practice that has now been prohibited"
I wonder what the sequence of events was where nobody said anything about putting shackles on kids that aren't prisoners or being arrested.
Don’t underestimate how unruly, disobedient, and oftentimes violent these children are.
In the best case, these children have been traumatized by their removal from a family, however dysfunctional. In the worst cases, they’ve suffered abuses that make people support the death penalty. While none of those scars is written on a person, they do manifest in sudden outbursts of screaming, hitting, stealing, and scores more destructive behaviors. For a neglected child, negative attention is preferable to not existing, and if acting out is the only way to make your existence register to the outside world, so be it.
Many of those people who placed said children in shackles aren’t practiced in methods to manage traumatized children or understanding of their past, and identify them as ‘problematic’, not ‘traumatized’.
I'm surprised that nobody balked just for self-preservation reasons. I'd certainly be concerned about the legalities of shackling someone. Sounds like kidnapping to me.
>I wonder what the sequence of events was where nobody said anything about putting shackles on kids that aren't prisoners or being arrested.
I also wonder, because the default position is to not shackle kids obviously. Social workers really are good people who try their best in real hard situations (and dealing with 'at-risk' foster kids is one of the hardest areas of social work). It may be the case that this bad solution came out of solving something, like kids running away, or physically hurting themselves, other kids, or social workers - during transport. It's not totally fair to impugn motives, as others in this thread are, without at least understanding what it is they were trying to solve.
Again .. I'm not justifying or excusing this policy, but I do want to understand why this policy exists in context with realities on the ground encountered by good people doing really hard social work.
> because the default position is to not shackle kids
Being home schooled I've only seen the way kids in public school are treated from a distance and from the stories I've been told from people who are now adults. Based on what I've heard this sounds pretty consistent with the general attitude of public employees tasked with caring for children.
Let me rephrase that, but without the inflammatory assumptions: Given that social workers are good people who do very hard (thankless and low-paid) work - has anyone checked what the reasons were for instituting this policy.
We're all in agreement that the agency needs to explain why this policy was put in place (which has since been prohibited), because it isn't normal to shackle kids and potentially someone needs to be held accountable. But maybe we can do that without impugning social workers as bigots - don't you think?
I just want to point out that much of the things that supposedly justify sending kids to foster care, actually happen just as much (if not more) in said care of the state. There are major issues with lack of oversight of foster parents. I just didn't see this mentioned thus far and thought it relevant.
As a relatively new parent, this is particularly heartbreaking. It just seems so hopeless - why can't we as a society solve this, whether through better resources for kids or for their parents?
The sad truth is that some people are so broken by their upbringing that nothing can be done to “fix” them. And you don’t know ahead of time if somebody is an impossible case or not.
My SO works with foster kids. Her job is to find foster families, work with the kids, and try (if possible) to heal the family and put them back together. She loves and is good at her job.
Most folks have no concept of the types of trauma many of these children go through. Sadly, by the time the state has to step in, it's no easy journey forward. People watch movies and TV dramas about these kinds of things. It does not prepare anybody involved for the reality of the problems. I've heard second-hand stories I wish I could forget.
It's obscene how we have this foster system that pays these parents for kid's hit-or-miss experiences rotating between families, when adoption, a generally better solution, costs over $10k in fees after proving via background checks that you're an angel. The system is so broken.
Not to be obtuse, but some would say you're reversing cause and effect -- that the $10k and exhaustive background checks are the reasons that adoption has better success rates. I couldn't be less of an expert, but it's hard for me to imagine that the solution is as simple as "adoption is always better."
It does absolutely seem like there are many wonderful homes out there who aren't able to adopt because they aren't quite well-off enough, or the couple is gay, or some other factor that a reasonable person could look at and say "this shouldn't disqualify you from adopting."
Agreed that success rates are irrelevant to this conversation and it's certainly not true that adoption is always better. I think that most people would agree that the relative stability of having permanent parents would be, on average, better than being in the awkward foster system for ages. The foster system is meant to be temporary until a child can be placed in a permanent home [1] but 29% of children placed in the foster care system are stuck for at least 3 years [2].
Most states spend a fraction of their budget dollars on family preservation efforts, even though more kids are removed for neglect than abuse.
The best solution to this kind of problem is making a more family-friendly society so we end up with fewer kids in foster care.
I don't know how we get there from here. The past decade has really taken its toll on my faith in humanity and the past year has put the world at large through the wringer and trying to focus on doing something positive seems overwhelmingly hard and entirely pointless.
America doesn't actually value having a functional society. It values "heroics" and that fact means we don't want to actually take care of our citizens simply for existing. We only want to do something after it's so bad, they need a hero to fix something and then good luck with that. It's too far gone to ever really be functional again.
We need housing solutions. We need healthcare. We need to stop enriching the billionaires and giving money to charity while not taking care of ordinary citizens and no one wants to do that.
Some people want to provide UBI -- which I think will not take care of people -- or they want to claim that people who aren't making it are just lazy or something.
Bezos gave about a billion dollars to his workers in 2020 as either Covid relief in, I think, June or as Christmas bonuses. It amounted to as little as $150 twice for part-time workers.
Then he was lauded for giving $10 billion to charity.
He could have given $10 billion to the people who helped make him obscenely wealthy, thereby providing a total of $3000 to his least paid workers and more for others and still given a billion dollars to charity.
Why do we need so much charity? In part because we don't bother to take care of our people unless they are "charity cases" and then we still don't really take care of them. (Yes, I know, he gave money to climate change. Irrelevant to my point.)
We actively turn our people into charity cases and then blame them when their lives don't work and punish them and no amount of virtue is enough to make your life work for far too many Americans.
I highly recommend watching the video interview (5 min.) embedded in the article, titled "Taken into foster care, through the eyes of a child".
It is not far from the beginning of the article. Here is the written caption:
"Before she was an inmate, Michelle Voorhees was a kid in foster care. Painting a vivid picture, Voorhees asks you to imagine the harrowing, disconcerting experience of being removed from your own home."
Search-in-page any part of the caption and it should be easy to spot.
There is a lot of injustice in social care. Forced adoption is a thing some countries like UK, where children taken from families even if parents committed no crime or no actual harm done to child. Ruling is often based on a social carer opinion and prediction of a possible harm.
I have a friend who has tried to foster parent during COVID but the shifting goalposts, school openings and closings demanding childcare availability instantly (both parents work) and lack of timely reimbursements from the state combine to make it a nearly impossible endeavor. Last I heard the child had made some unfortunate choices after going back to the birth family and might be headed to institutionalization
So the big reality disconnect is that the courts are totally in love with the child "protection" agencies and hang on every word they say in the delusion that they are saving the child by putting them them into foster care, when in fact they are just putting fodder into the prison system.
Do you have a lot of personal experience with foster children? Are you speaking from experience?
From my experience, they try to place children with immediate family if at all possible. But I’ve also seen children come from appalling circumstances - with mothers who literally sell or give them to convicted pedophiles, or who witnessed their father attempt to murder their mother in full view of their children. I’m far from thinking the foster care system is perfect, but I’ve seen more than enough to doubt the idea most children should stay with in their homes. I’ve never seen a social worker treat the decision to remove a child from a home flippantly.
I don't have any personal experience with foster children yet.
My partner and I are planning to become foster parents, so I've spent the last two years or so reading a lot about fostering, and we also took a course to prepare us.
My impression is that many cases aren't quite as clear, and it's often hard to say if removing the kids was really the best course of action. I don't think social workers are careless, but they do have to make decisions based on limited information, and they often don't have sufficient alternatives to taking kids away.
But of course, I'm just a random dude commenting on the internet, and maybe I'm wrong. I also live in Austria, so maybe the situation is totally different to the US (the system does work differently). I've also tried to find statistics about foster kids, and it's surprisingly hard to find them.
>The problem is that most children shouldn't be taken away in the first place.
Sure. To be clear though, the state doesn't really take children away for no reason. I'm sure there are isolated incidences, but in general, the kids who end up in the foster care, did not land there because they came from loving stable environments.
Everything that I've learned about foster care tells me that removing children from their surroundings is a traumatic event, and should be only a last resort. In many cases, there are a lot of things that can be done instead of just taking kids away.
If there's any research that shows I'm wrong, and that taking troubled kids away from their families is actually the best thing for their development, I'm eager to hear about it.
In many/most jurisdictions, "just taking kids away" is the last straw. If the situation can be remedied with support, periodic social worker visits, and parenting classes, everyone prefers that outcome.
And then the second preferred outcome is finding a caregiver in the extended family.
Obviously comparisons are hard since we dismantled the orphanages in the 50s/early 60s but the best comparisons show orphanages performing favorably. I think people got caught up too much shows and plays about this stuff.
“A nation’s greatness is measured by how it treats its weakest members.” ~ Mahatma Ghandi
I think that says it all. Despite all the propaganda/cultural brainwashing, convincing many Americans that their country/culture is somehow better than others.
Do we know if these kids would have been better off in their own homes? I don't have any statistics here, but one wonders if we can measure the outcomes here. ie, is abusive stability better than what the foster system produces?
Recent research has swung the state child welfare policy pendulum back toward this thesis in my state (Oregon) and a few others I'm aware of., e.g. if the situation isn't totally irredeemable, bio fam is the best in terms of average outcome.
50ish percent of all reunified children in the state of Georgia are back in care in less than a year.
There is no data available for total recidivism, but I would more than guess that the vast majority of the negative outcome foster stats come primarily from multi-cycle children. Meaning they go in to care, get reunified, then go back in care, and wash and repeat. Tada we are at 16 years and the trauma fruit of "family preservation" policy is ripe for the picking.
"Family preservation" is the pervert uncle of a mantra that is the anchor that has dragged foster care outcomes down for decades. Supported by the "evidence based policy" con that has been propagated by services companies.
I have not had a child in my home that was not the victim of the family preservation cult. In case you don't know, let me explain the toxic buck passing shit storm of terrible that family preservation programs are.
This practice is the plan of taking child neglect cases and not removing children, but assigning a social worker to write a safe plan, such as parent can have no contact and child must live with grand parent that lives in the same house as the parent. Then when that fails 90 day later(80%), we do it again and wait 90 days, and then we wait 90 days, and then maybe we remove the children from the then child cruelty or child endangerment case. Then the charges, which have no impact on the permanency case for the child are usually dropped.
We then reunify the children after 12-18 months, and then start the 270 day safe plan again after 6 months or so, and then place the children in care, and then reunify after 12-18 months and then start all over. So all of the people that are telling the kids that they are there to help just keep placing children back with the parent that has demonstrated over 2.5 years at first reunification, their in ability to provide for the child.
This legal/policy structure allows for children to exist in a grossly traumatic cycle of permeant psychological and physical damage. This is a legal problem and not a foster care problem.
So much of the entire legal system is structured around 'reunify at all cost' that children simply pay all the risk cost of the second chances that bio parents are given. For this type of "justice" that is propagated by people that have no experience or non-"academic" knowledge of long term trauma in children.
Children should at least have the right to speedy permanency, and should not be forced to dole out second chances to bio parents that they can never get back. You only get one chance to by 5 or 4 or 3 or 2.
There is also a lot to be said for separating child welfare laws from family laws. I mention that because in many states we end up with divorce law that bleeds into welfare cases, specifically regarding visitation of children with parents, even physically or sexually abusive ones out of fear that a TPR may be overturned.
Instead we see how people go onto Facebook to get inseminated by strangers. People would literally rather be injected with somebody else's semen, go through 9 months of crazy hormones and multiple hours of the worst pain in their lives, than take care of an existing child.
If people did something to actually help children instead of voting for pro-surveillance laws or "against those people I don't like", maybe kids would get some help.
No it doesn't. People have children because having a genetic connection is important to them. That's not a 'society-thing'. That's just humanity. There are exception to this, and that's why foster parents should be applauded because fostering and adopting is great moral act. But I wouldn't impugn the rest of society because most people don't adopt, but instead choose to have biological children.
"Of the inmates who took the survey, 1 in 4 said they were the product of foster care."
I really wish people understood the long term effects of childhood trauma, and I hope parents can be considarate, prepared, loving and financially stable before having children.
Life isn't really that nice and tidy. It would be nice if it were, but generally people are mostly good and sometimes unplanned things happen. Intact families need to be a societal goal.
My parents were definitely not financially stable. I grew up in the equivalent of what the US would call "the projects" but a key difference was that it was a community. There was a rec center, a school, groceries, health care all within a couple of enclosed city blocks. Average income was poverty level. All of the services reduced burdens on the parents who often worked two jobs. My mom had two jobs, my dad had two jobs.
If you use an iPhone, you are using my code. If you played a Wii game in the last decade, you're using my code. Many more examples. That's how far I came and most of my friends went as far if not farther. One of us manages a global tech organization now.
Most kids I know who didn't do well or treaded water were the product of contentious divorces as this was the time when "rah rah women's liberation" was at its height and many men were kicked out of their family. I still remember my friend lamenting to me that the only time he can see is father is during school lunches. That friend did better than he would have because he basically lived at my house as a result of his family situation.
Surprisingly, in this area, there were fewer such divorces than the general population. I have looked up the stats.
Raising kids is not hard but somehow we went from village to complete independence. We need to go back to a village mindset. We are all in it together or we will all feel the pain one day.
Breakdown of family and community seems to be the big trend of the past few decades. I'm saddened to say that I don't see a real solution, and I expect some kind of cultural collapse to occur as a result. We're already seeing some of the effects of this today.
It was a deliberate choice Americans made as a society. In Bangladesh, we have strong norms in favor of marriage and strong taboos against divorce. There is a whole social infrastructure for helping people enter marriage with realistic notions and expectations, and counseling couples through rough patches. It's not perfect by any means, but strong family and community bonds make life tolerable in a desperately poor country. And of course, unlike the United States, we can't afford to just throw government money at the problems created by out-of-wedlock births, marriages dissolving over solvable problems, etc.
It's truly not clear to me that the choice we made in America is the correct one. My wife's family is full of wonderful and loving people, they are suffering from our country's social dissolution (which has hit non-college educated people outside major metro areas especially hard). Nearly everyone is divorced, often several times over. Grandparents raise their grandchildren. Fathers are in some cases are absent entirely. Children grow up without stability. And now folks are getting close to retirement age with divorces having devastated their finances.
In Ireland, there were strong norms in favor of marriage and strong taboos against divorce, and all those other things.
There was also a semi-hidden system of forced labour for those women that did have children out of wedlock. The "mother and baby" homes. The amount of abuse involved was horrific and the country is still untangling and confronting it decades later.
Be wary of changing a system where the abuse is borne silently because there is no way out for one that makes it visible and thinking that is worse because just now you can see it.
Divorce rates are on their way down in the West. The transition period is definitely rough, but eventually the cultural norms adapt.
I would be interested to see if you canvas the views of Bangladeshi women on the comparative systems.
> Divorce rates are on their way down in the West. The transition period is definitely rough, but eventually the cultural norms adapt.
Divorce rates are down, but so are marriage and birth rates. The "cultural norms" are "adapting," but don't appear to be adapting in a direction that combines modernity with population stability in a steady state.
Much of "the west" is now dependent on people from more traditional cultures (in Europe, Muslims, in the United States, Latinos). That's not an anti-immigration rant (I'm a Bangladeshi immigrant to the United States). My point is that anything we call a "successful culture" should probably be self-sustaining in the steady state. If divorce rates in the west are declining mainly because nobody is getting married (and nobody is having kids) then you don't actually have a successful culture. It might be great for all the freedoms it provides, but on its own it will cease to exist eventually.
In a way it's a sort of arbitrage. If everyone in the world acted like Germans, it would be nice for a while, but humanity would cease to exist. There is an illusion of sustainability that is being provided by people from traditional cultures--with their traditional views on marriage and child-rearing, etc.
There has been a sustained, multi-decade governmental, social, and cultural effort to reduce birth rates to deal with overpopulation. It's a very strong foot on the brake. (My dad was closely involved in this effort in Bangladesh as a public health expert.)
Population stability at current level would be bad, it's higly unsustainable.
To make matters worse, we now have instability in the wrong direction: population is predicted to grow for 50-100 years still, peaking at 11 billion.
The other variable is resource consumption per capita, both will need to go down after the current spurt to counter severe overpopulation problems globally.
> I also approach this problem as a regional economist specializing in migration, so I also think of the American population issue through the lens of population density comparisons.
This makes no sense. "Strong norms in favor of marriage and strong taboos against divorce" do not fix these issues.
I grew up with my parents married. They were married before I was born and are still married now. That didn't and doesn't stop the abuse, the mistreatment, the violent rages, the substance abuse, the mental illness, or the cruelty. I wished every day State authorities would come take us away because the alternative couldn't possibly be worse than this. They never came and I never had the courage to tell anyone. I just had to suffer.
The system failed me badly, but it would have failed me worse if the authorities did come and said "well your parents are married and you have food to eat and a bed to sleep in. Looks good."
Eh, I sort of disagree. Like, I am fully convinced many marriages are not healthy and the appropriate thing for the partners is to end it. But I've seen people end marriages that were probably perfectly salvageable, without even trying to really save it. One bump in the road and they're calling for a separation.
We've entered a transactional phase where your partner is supposed to show up perfect, well-adjusted and no work on your part for a healthy relationship is required. Not working? Ditch 'em and try again. That's the other extreme, sort of the exact opposite of staying due to social pressure with someone you hate and makes you unhappy, and it's also unhealthy.
I've never usually been able to tell if a relationship was salvageable or not, from both being in one and observing someone else's. It's almost always come down to some "to be, or not to be" moment where someone has to make a fuzzy decision.
Do you feel like there's a good way of measuring whether a relationship is worth saving or not?
> Do you feel like there's a good way of measuring whether a relationship is worth saving or not?
kinda depends on what you're looking for in a relationship. all relationships take some level of effort and compromise to maintain. however you measure the "value" of a relationship, it has to at least be better than being single to be worth the trouble. I'd say a relationship is worth saving if a) both partners agree it is better than being single and b) both are willing to take on a roughly symmetrical share of the effort and compromise.
Step one is understanding what the problem is. Most people in a relationship have been arguing about the same inane shit for years that they can't take a step back and look at the big-picture perspective of the problem in their relationship. They might see it as "My wife doesn't want to move to another city I got a fantastic job offer in" but the real problem might be something like "my wife values her social connections in this city" or "my wife doesn't want to interrupt her own career because that provides her a sense of security". Some of these underlying issues can be resolved or negotiated, some can't. If you're dealing with a meta-problem like "my husband is unwilling to compromise on anything" or "my wife has contempt for me", it's quite unlikely that you can fix that and impossible that you can just come to an agreement on that.
There used to be pro-familly policies in USA that basically assumed that is male is in the house, the male is responsible to be breadwinner. That meant that if there was make, woman would not get social support money on her nor on kid.
They were even quicker to kick unemployed male out due to that - his presence meant they risk support. It sucked, imo.
> This makes no sense. "Strong norms in favor of marriage and strong taboos against divorce" do not fix these issues.
Kids end up in foster care for many reasons, and its not necessarily because their parents are violent and abusive. The ubiquity of single parenthood, for example, dramatically increases the risk that a child will end up in foster care if anything happens to the remaining parent. Likewise, in a society where divorce and single parenthood are ubiquitous, other members of the family are much less likely to be in a position to take in a child when something happens to his or her parents.
I'm not suggesting we do away with social workers who can check in on kids in abusive situations. To the contrary, if social workers weren't overwhelmed taking care of a large number of kids who are in challenging circumstances simply because their dad doesn't feel like being a dad, or for other mundane, solvable reasons, they would have far more attention and resources to devote to kids suffering from alcoholism, physical and sexual abuse, etc., in their families.
> It was a deliberate choice Americans made as a society. In Bangladesh, we have strong norms in favor of marriage and strong taboos against divorce
The argument about shame based "norms" keeping people together aside, it was in many places, quite literally the law that forced women to stay with their husbands.
Up until the 70s and later, in many US states it was:
* Legal to rape your spouse
* Legal to restrict a woman's access to contraceptives
* Illegal for a woman to abort an unwanted pregnancy, even due to rape or incest (the previous two combined with the first essentially stripping a women's autonomy to decide when and how many children to have)
* Illegal for women to work in certain careers/legal to discriminate on whether a woman was pregnant or had children
* Legal to prevent a woman from opening a bank account or line of credit without their husband's consent
This was more the case in some places vs others, but talk to an older women in the US what the culture was like for women then. The women's liberation movement happened in reaction to severe oppression and we absolutely should not consider reverting to a society before then.
EDIT: Yikes. I was curious about the norms in Bangladesh. I don't think Bangladesh should be held as an example for anything related to marriage.
> 59% of girls in Bangladesh are married before their 18th birthday and 22% are married before the age of 15.
> Bangladesh has the third highest prevalence of child marriage in the world, and the second highest absolute number of women married or in a union before the age of 18 globally – 4,382,000.
> The argument about shame based "norms" keeping people together aside, it was in many places, quite literally the law that forced women to stay with their husbands.
So you wave aside my actual argument, about norms, then proceed to refute a straw man? Let’s posit that laws against spousal rape and gender discrimination are good things. Are those the only things that have changed in our culture and in the laws? Can we have laws allowing people to escape abusive marriages, while discouraging the vastly larger number of divorces that don’t involve those things?
More than half of Americans, including over 40% of Democrats, disagree with the proposition that “changing gender roles have made it easier for women to live satisfying lives.” https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2017/10/18/wide-partisan-gap.... By contrast, just 10% think that contraceptives should be banned. There is clearly a significant number of people who think the changes you list are good things, while disagreeing that all of the social changes that have happened are good.
There is in fact widespread discontentment about the status quo among women. Women report wanting more kids than they end up having. Women report wanting to get married but being unable to do so. Many women aren’t super thrilled about a culture where people call them “crazy” for wanting normal things like a marriage and kids at the biologically normal ages (20s) for having those things. (This is completely unsurprising, because women disproportionately bear the burdens of our social changes that have freed men from the responsibilities of fatherhood.)
As to Bangladesh—it’s a poor agrarian society that suffers from the problems endemic to poor agrarian societies. In particular, strong economic incentives to marry off girls. My dad, in fact, works on public health programs to discourage child marriage in Bangladesh. But there’s a pretty big gap between child marriage (something most Bangladeshis agree we should eradicate) on one hand, and normalizing and enabling pervasive divorce and out of wedlock childbirth on the other.
But on the flip side of all that, Bangladeshi society is at least somewhat functional despite crushing poverty. What would Bangladeshi villages be like if men could decide, like in America, that they don’t want the responsibilities of fatherhood and it was socially acceptable for them to abandon their families? The society would break down completely. Death and calamity would result, because unlike in America the government can’t afford to throw money at the social ills that would result.
Another thing that changed is that American women are less likely to be murdered by their partners - as in proportion of those murders went down. That is while murders went down. Ability to leave verbally abusive partner that is like that in private without being reduced to powerty is a big thing. It is possible to prove violence, but super hard to prove verbal abuse. And verbal abuse can be even worse.
As of Bangladeshi, look up their domestic violence reports and juvenile deliquency reports. The domestic violence is basically normal and accepted part of life. And we are taking about pretty severe stuff - murders, acid attacks, serious beatings. Juvenile deliquency is huge problem.
Death and calamity are Bangladeshi life pretty often, in particular if you are woman. And kids get to watch all that and are affected by all of that, creating cycle of trauma and violence.
It is not better for children to be with violent parent nor is ot good for them to see one parent attack the other. Yes, out of wedlock or divorce is better for them then domestic violence situation.
The homicide rate in Bangladesh is half of what it is in the US, and not far off from wealthy countries with gun control, like Canada or Belgium. Yes, there are a lot of bad things that happen in Bangladesh--it's a very poor country, with limited law and order, political unrest, and significant problems with organized crime and gangs. One wonders what things would be like if--on top of all of that--more than a quarter of kids were growing up fatherless like in the US.
The impact of single parenthood is much lower then you assume.
American crime rates went down considerably. So did juvenile violence rates, drug taking and alcoholism. And teenage pregnancies went down too. All the while divorces went up. Stop demonizing kids of single parents and for that matter Americans.
Also, American domestic violence rates went down. While the reporting of it went up as women can get actual help nowdays, so there is a point in doing it. These would not even count as crimes in many of "harmonious" families with taboo around divorce.
Also, in Americans crime statistics, murders are higher relative to other crimes, because of prevalence of guns. America is not perfect, but it's youth is way better then you make them be due to your strong bias against kids who had divorced parents.
I'm not "demonizing" anyone. But it's important to look at social changes not only with an eye to how they affect individuals, but how they affect everyone. We can't just sympathize with the kids of single parents, but must find the sympathy and kindness to ask whether there are more such kids than there should be and whether there is anything we can do about that.
(As to “bias against Americans.” On the issues of marriage and family, a lot of the things that are “normal” in America are deemed at best highly regrettable where I’m from. Now I’m as much of a flag waver as the next immigrant. But in this particular area I’m not convinced that Americans are on the right track.)
What would Bangladeshi villages be like if men could decide, like in America, that they don’t want the responsibilities of fatherhood and it was socially acceptable for them to abandon their families? The society would break down completely. Death and calamity would result, because unlike in America the government can’t afford to throw money at the social ills that would result.
And that’s exactly what we see in places like Chicago, but nobody who is allowed to speak can put 2 and 2 together. Except when Barack Obama mentioned it that one time, which was promptly forgotten.
> So you wave aside my actual argument, about norms, then proceed to refute a straw man?
He eviscerated your actual argument that Bangladeshi marriage norms are something to aspire, considering how they treat 60% of their under age 18 girls (but 4% of their boys).
It seems there could be a middle way where marriage is strongly supported by society with provisions to protect against abuse. Our current extreme is no better as it destroys the lives of many children.
Are you sure that Bangladesh juvenile deliquency rates are all that much better then the ones in USA? Because looking at Bangladesh, they have pretty serious social problems in that area.
Strong norms in favor of marriage and strong taboos against divorce also however go with larger rates of domestic violence rates and no way out. That the perpetrators of those don't end up in jail does not make such society better behaved or less criminal/violent. Just tolerant of violence toward some people.
The War on Drugs is a big factor on this. Basically an attempt to reinstate slavery via the criminal justice system created a whole generation of absent fathers.
The historic reason many religions/societies looked down on divorce is that it left the woman worse off - the man would be able to work and fend for himself but the woman would have few options.
The fact that in out modern world many women (in heterosexual relationships) are the ones who desire to leave, and can reasonably fend for themselves, is pretty novel, and we haven't figured out how to adjust the rest of our social structures to account for it. It is a good thing that women can leave relationships where they're being mistreated and be better off on their own, but it means we need to rethink designs elsewhere in society that were based on the assumption that they wouldn't.
I agree with you about the village mindset, and it's kind of the most robust option. Even ignoring divorce, a parent can be emotionally incompetent at caring for children, and certainly can be called to work (or fight) elsewhere, can get sick and/or die, etc. We should be ensuring children have multiple backup options if their own parents are unavailable for whatever reason.
Many of the laws and rules of societies in the past and most in the present, have always been about domination and control of women. Even women would join in on this, in order to subjugate younger females to societal order. It can be explained to survive hard times and trials, but is also mostly about injustice and inequality for different traits.
Though the females are regarded as assets, they're not allowed agency, freedom and inherent value. This is the history and hurt that is behind most of feminism of today, and there are still remnants in Western societies. Not because the laws and rules today are inherently discriminatory, but the cultural expression still inhibits life for half the population in many cases.
I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader what this may mean for BLM.
> Raising kids is not hard but somehow we went from village to complete independence. We need to go back to a village mindset.
Raising kids IS hard in modern America. Agreed that it doesn't have to be, and that the disintegration of societal structures is a huge part of why. Unfortunately, all signs point to it getting worse, not better.
I bring up his research a lot it seems, but Robert Putnam published Bowling Alone, which is about the utter collapse of American Civil Society and social ties, in 2000. The statistics were daunting then, and I doubt many people would disagree that we're worse off today than we were 20 years ago.
I'm old enough that I remember living in a US that still had plentiful communities. I worry about the children being raised in our modern transactional society. I take comfort in knowing old men have worried about these things since the dawn of civilization though.
I think the important thing to take out of this situation isn't so much, "Every family needs to have a father," as it is, "Every community needs to be able to respond to the realities of its constituent family situations." Women's liberation ends with a net positive for a modern economy, but whenever norms are roiled, you have people caught in the confusion who fall through the cracks. I was a victim of a similar situation, where the leadership and curriculum of my major at my alma mater was in "transition" while I was attending; this meant spending entire courses on outdated technology or learning current standards from older professors who barey understood them themselves. There was nothing wrong with the new paradigms, but getting caught between the old and new was what squandered the potential of a lot of us.
Ideally, you forecast these shifts and make preparations, rather than being dragged into the future, as seems to be what happens with institutions responding to these civil rights social movements.
But I agree that support systems, rather than "grit" or "personal agency", are almost always the most important aspect of healthy development, in pretty much any arena. Teaching, job training, child rearing, legislation development, entrepreneurship, on an on, the failures happen when people decide or are expected to go it alone.
Social technologies like monogamy, marriage, church, community, family, and even things we think of as "negative", like shame, were developed to combat much of this.
Now we're running around tearing down Chesterton's fence every time we see it, without bothering to ask why it was erected in the first place.
As an atheist, it's becoming increasingly evident that atheism has done great damage to society at large. We're foolish to think that social technology that has worked for thousands of years was only built (and replicated independently across hundreds of disparate societies) because we were too stupid/evil/backward to see real enlightenment.
> Social technologies like monogamy, marriage, church, community, and even things we think of as "negative", like shame, were developed to combat much of this.
You may want to look at the long history of severe abuse perpetrated by the Church in their pursuit to "combat this".
We've just seen the Irish Laundry report released and it's fucking horrific.
I don't want to minimize those abuses, but we have to be cognizant of the destructive effects of hyper-focusing on negative impacts on a small minority. Our outrage at the mistreatment of the few drives us to tear down institutions and social structures that might be serving critical functions for the many.
20% of kids ages 10-15 in 1900 were working. Many in horrible conditions and many probably died young as a result. That's a lot more than the foster system nowadays. Sending societies marginal people to an early death after extracting some productivity out of them was the historical solution to these problems as I see it.
Looking at the past with rose colored glasses is dangerous.
Plus, violence rates and juvenile deliquency rates at the time were not all that great. These debates always assume that kids now are somehow bad generation, but they actually statistically behave very well.
It can and should be improved, but that does not mean we have to pretend that part was all that better.
Not to mention the large portion of young men from each generation who, from the beginning of human society up until ~1950 in the developed world, were killed in wars.
I've come around to the conclusion that the "cognitive elite" (for want of a better term) underestimate the degree of social support and collective reinforcement normal people need to make good life decisions. They themselves continue to raise their kids in two-person households, etc. See: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/12/04/education-a.... But they've helped chip away at the culture around monogamy, marriage, churchgoing, etc., because they themselves don't need those things to help them make good decisions.
It's like being overweight. Everyone knows what they should do. Most people can't do it, however, and there isn't much social support for it. In Asian culture, we have all of this social reinforcement about our weight and eating habits. (Though south asians differ quite dramatically from east asians with respect to what they consider fat.) In the U.S., you're left to fend for yourself. Some people go to the gym regularly and eat healthy despite all of the cultural forces working against those good decisions. But most people don't. They just get fat.
Do you have evidence that the foster care system was less fucked up when religious institutions were stronger? Or alternatively could you point to studies comparing religious foster care vs nonreligious foster care?
Genuinely asking, because it never struck me that the foster care system was ever not horrible in America.
Also good to keep in mind that as bad as things are in the US, things are much worse elsewhere. For example the massive orphanages in the old soviet countries where children are confined to little cribs all day, or in India where many orphans roam the streets.
Not religious, but a friend of mine was in an award winning state orphanage in the 1930s. (I haven't heard,but i suppose he is dead now) They would beat kids with a wire chineny brush if they slept with their heads in the pillow, which is how they won those awards for how neat the beds were.
There isn't a good answer to the problem of kids when the parents don't care for them.
Or some of these customs, traditions and institutions evolved to combat it through unconscious group selection. The tribes/towns/cities/countries/groups that had superior civic norms (superior defined as those norms which promote harmony, prosperity, in-group cooperation, etc) tended to attract immigrants, be capable of dominating geo-politically, etc, and thus those cultural values become dominant through this process of selection.
Also, while I think that explains things to a certain extent, it's just part of the picture. Culture also come from (i) self-interest, (ii) power asymmetries, and (iii) an unintended by-product of our evolutionary psychology/emotions/personalty traits such as jealousy/disgust sensitivity among others. For example jealousy mediating a desire for taxation (this has been studied by psychologists, it is one of the three common motives), or disgust sensitivity mediating a desire for borders and authoritarian leaders.
Is it this or would these kids simply have been sent off to child labor sweatshops, coal mines or the streets in the past? Early death would mean they'd never see prison. Same with many other social issues that in the past would have simply been solved by letting someone die.
All of those "social technologies" except one have nothing to do with atheism. And the Church does not exactly have a squeaky clean track record when it comes to orphans.
Add to the fact, often the most impoverished countries tend to be more religious. You're not finding a strong correlation to your point.
> Add to the fact, often the most impoverished countries tend to be more religious.
Which way does that correlation run? Maybe impoverished countries are especially in need of the social organization provided by religion because, unlike rich countries, they can't afford to "f--k around?" They can't just spend government funds to deal with the negative social consequences of out-of-wedlock births, divorces, etc.
My SO and I are foster parents. I, too, wish more people were trauma informed. We live in a "just suck it up" society, but kiddos in care, because of the trauma they've experienced, have brains that have developed physically different to kiddos who've grown up in a nurturing and caring environment. They can't "just suck it up".
I think we have to be careful when we say "be financially stable before having kids" though. Not that we shouldn't be, but we can't just let certain classes of people have kids. Also, those who are stable now are one accident or emergency or job loss, etc. away from being unstable.
Edit: I think what I said might be unclear. IOW, having kids should NOT be dependent on your financial state.
Almost everyone is just one job loss away from being unstable. If you have kids then it's 10x more likely. What you're suggesting is just impractical.
Even the professional classes have instability issues. E.g. just look at how stable a high flying banking executive was in 2008. Or tech workers in the 2000s.
We should make it cheaper to have kids, rather than expecting people to wait until they're millionaires.
Agree wholeheartedly. In addition, young parents have lots of advantages over older ones which we miss if we wait until career 100% sorted. The sleep deprivation alone would have been much easier in my 20s!
Well spoken. I agree with your assesment about what I said regarding having 'finances in order'. Love and care is much more important than money. Parents need enough money to not have stress (which can affect children).
having kids should NOT be dependent on your financial state.
Why not? Choosing to have kids one can't feed and making decisions that will require taking resources from others by force is the definition of neglect.
You're not wrong, not feeding a child is neglect and we've had cases like that.
However, once we say, as a society, that someone is not allowed to have a child because they don't make <threshold> amount of money, that will lead us down a slope I don't think we want to be on.
The big-ticket items are labor (either paid childcare or a parent skipping an income, and then when they get older, extracurriculars, since just messing around unsupervised is so frowned upon) and safety stuff like car seats.
>making decisions that will require taking resources from others by force is the definition of neglect
I'm gona walk right past the 'taxation is theft' dog whistle.
You can talk about 'personal responsibility' all you want, but at the end of the day, the urge to have kids is probably our second strongest drive as a species. Babies are gona happen. When they do, they should be fully supported as much as necessary to make sure parents and children get what they need at a base level. I don't mind my taxes paying for baby formula and diapers. We should probably fund daycare too. This is that 'equality of opportunity' conservatives are so fond of in place of 'equality of outcomes'. Well, if that's true, at the very least we need to make sure that everyone gets the bare essentials to properly raise a child.
"Dog whistle" is a term that needs to die. You are responding to a made up argument using words I never even said.
There is a huge difference between fait accompli past events and future planning. Feeding and supporting and loving children who exist does not at all preclude planning to reduce the percentage of future children born into unfavorable circumstances.
There are ample means to avoid having kids until one is ready, at every stage of the process. We kind of know what causes childbirth by now. It is wantonly irresponsible for a couple to choose to have children, or for people to engage in activities that produce them, without taking measures to prevent the creation of more children before they are ready to support them.
If everyone just decides to sleep around without availing themselves of the means to avoid pregnancy and thus have unfed children, where is the food going to come from? Has society completely given up on the ideas of family planning and personal responsibility?
I've adopted two special needs orphans from another country.. and the childhood trauma is by and far the worst thing for a child. I could ramble on for a long time about this!
What we need are more caring people to adopt, and put their words to action, and give these kids good home. The problem is everyone says it's a problem but not enough people want to do it because it would be an inconvenience to their daily lives or some other excuse.
It is easily doable for all the worlds orphans to be adopted by good families, if only we could get people to see the good they could be doing
My personal response is that it seems like raising your own biological offspring, even with all of the lizard-brain this-will-eventually-pass-on-my-genes bonus, is already hard for a lot of people --- look at all of the internet threads asking if people regret having kids --- so subtracting off the biological offspring bonus and adopting seems like it would be very difficult. Add in the trauma already experienced by children in the foster system, and it gets even harder. Then I wonder if I'm the kind of person who can love a difficult child, and I wonder how good it is for a child to grow up with a parent who deep-down sees them as an object of responsibility rather than love. Of course, strong bonds between adopted parents and children are certainly possible, but it is in the end harder, right?
I admire your pragmatic embrace of working on this problem; I also think chalking up the cost of adoption as "an inconvenience to...daily lives" is...underselling it?
loving a difficult child is hard! but there are varying degree's of difficult, violent difficult i can understand that is an immense challenge and i definitely don't recommend people to take that on unless they are prepared and sometimes you don't know, yes this situation really sucks!
I don't know what there is to regret about having kids, yep its difficult but everything worth doing is difficult! Adoption is definitely very difficult, especially the kind I did, international adoption of special needs children. My family didn't understand, many people in the public don't understand, and if they somewhat do they ask why I didn't adopt an american child, to me a child is a child.
I will say any ounce of love you can give these kids is better than what they have, seriously, the things I've seen.. picture your life from age 1 - 16, tied to a crib, malnourished, not educated, treated like a feral animal weighing under 100 lbs now, and all kinds of spine issues because you were not ever allowed to walk! Or if you are lucky enough to be in a place you can develop a bit, but then you are molested and abused but still have the intellect of a feral animal.
Many of these kids don't know what bonds of love are, but they can still form even tiny bits of it, and there will be times you think ..why the hell did i do this, but there are times when you think i am so happy i did this, you push through those hard times, get support from friends etc and the life of that kid will be a million times better than the life they would have had.
I think people don't give themselves enough credit, and somewhere inside i know they could do it, I never thought I could do it. One thing I do know is, if we all sit around questioning what we can't do we never will know what we could do and in the meantime children are suffering. I'm actually internally battling the want to adopt a third child vs being at limit!
Oh also adopting is an expensive venture, i went into debts to do this so i recommend to anyone get familiar with the community of adoptive parents and let them help fund raise.
But yes overall I think it's a huge problem that gets little attention, and once and awhile you will see a super sad advertisement on TV and hear everyone whine about how bad it made them feel and how they shouldn't show those kinds of ads. Big disappointment to me when i hear that, I feel like its more rug sweeping under
We need reform in the system, though. I know two heterosexual couples in different states with decent jobs, good finances, deep desire to adopt, commitment. (I mention heterosexual only because there has long been stigma against same-sex couples adopting, and this is a stigma these folks don't face.) They've gone through the foster training, the adoption training, the social worker meetings, the enormous legal fees. They've both been working to adopt for over four years. One couple, I think matches have fallen through three times? They were trying to adopt an older kid through the foster system and were willing to take siblings, so you think they'd be home free. But no. Match, courts change their mind; match, courts change their mind, etc. The other has had only one match fall through -- it was a baby and they got the clothes, got the crib ready, and mom changed her mind.
Something is wrong with the system in America when I've got a child who can now write their name and that took less time from beginning to present than getting a single adoption from the foster system accomplished. Those matches that failed? Those kids are still in foster care.
> What we need are more caring people to adopt, and put their words to action, and give these kids good home.
We do need this, but we also need loving, caring people to foster. We've been fostering for over 6 years and every one of our kids have gone home to family. That should be the goal. People like to think, "oh I'd be able to provide for this kid much better than their family." Maybe that's true financially. But family is family and if there's ANY way to reunite the family, that should be the way forward.
Sure if they can get back to family that is fine, but that is a small fraction of the issue, most of my work is in international adoption with special needs kids that rot tied to a crib with the occasional porridge in a bottle shoved down their throat.. honestly leaving them like this is for sure a human atrocity, I have to ask myself quite often if most are better off dying than sitting for years slowly dying. Those are the types of kids I'm advocating for that people pick up the ball and do what you can, obviously i support any sort of adoption or fostering! The reality is, any ounce of love anyone can give is better than what they get, bring them home, feed them 3 times a day clean them! that's like heaven for these kids
I also really wish people understood that it's time society stops shrugging its collective shoulders and saying "not my problem" when it comes to stuff like that. I don't have any solutions, but there is a dire need for more institutional compassion.
> I hope parents can be considerate, prepared, loving and financially stable before having children.
That's neither ethical, nor is it possible since reproduction is such a strong biological drive. However, what is possible, is having the government rethink social support, making sure that each member of society has a safety
net, and doesnt need to worry about getting his basic needs met (food, water, shelter etc). Basic income seems to be the best fit here.
This won't completely solve the problem, because food, shelter will not heal the attachment problems of some people (people also need companionship), but it will provide a stable base, that is a radical improvement on today's
status quo.
The problem here is confounding. Do we think there are no causes of fatherlessness that are also causes of poorer life outcomes (hint: there are plenty). Given this it's very hard to see clearly how much impact this makes, all the personal anecdotes here notwithstanding.
I think you might be mistaking correlation with causation. Are men raised by lesbians entering the prison system at the same rate as men raised by single mothers? I doubt it.
My understanding, from a long-ago report which I cannot find, was that the children of lesbian couples do better than average: higher college admission rates, lower prison rates. It was thought that the relative difficulty of having children as a lesbian couple (including, in the case of adoption, which is understandably more prevalent among such couples, state approval) means that they're better prepared for child-rearing.
In all the talk about privilege assigned to race or wealth, the reality is that the most beneficial privilege one can enjoy is the love, guidance, and support that comes from a two-parent home.
There will always be parents who aren't, for whatever reason. Apart from all the usual reasons you'd think of - you can get a sudden illness and die. You can be a victim of a major crime. A novel coronavirus combined with incompetent government response can wreck your job prospects (unlikely as that may be). Your employer can go bankrupt, or the markets can crash and take your savings with it. A natural disaster can destroy your house and everything in it. You could be drafted. "Financially stable" is a pretty temporary state for the vast majority of the world.
The realistic question is - what is the considerate, prepared, and loving response of a financially stable society when these things inevitably happen?
as a parent i can tell you that _NOONE_ is prepared before having children and that there will be times when your consideration and love leave you alone and you gonna fuck up.
but dont read this too negative, kids are the best there is!
and while a lot of the hn audience may think like:
> I hope parents can be considarate, prepared, loving and financially stable before having children.
if you wait til everyting is "perfect", you loose to the despicable retards that dont care.
While I agree with the core of your argument, we don't need terms like "despicable retards" here. It cheapens the debate and makes it harder for people to agree with you.
Problem is that children suck up all the time. So I would pretty much wait until I want to spend time on children and not on my stuff or my partners stuff.
I'd probably have children when I'm retired, whatever age that be.
There's never time unless we prioritize. Plenty of people are great parents despite being busy.
My rabbi has ten kids. Ten. And he is still able to run the congregation which is probably not less demanding than whatever you do (statistically speaking). This kind of thing is common in certain communities.
So it's possible just a question of what's important to you. If kids fall behind brunch and posting on HN then yes we are too busy :)
I did say exactly that. Currently I want to spend time on my stuff and my partner's stuff. I do not want to pause that and spend all the time on my children. I'm enjoying life so much, the traveling, personal hobbies, that I do not want to ruin it with children.
I'm pretty sure that I wouldn't be able to spend months travelling every year, or a week cutoff from the rest of the world, doing my own projects, every couple of months, if I had children.
I'm also sure the rabbi has a massive support circle. I, on the other hand, am alone with my partner.
Families with many kids do less well tho statistically - boys have more behavioral problems and girls do less good in school. There is simply less time for parents to be able to give the kids individual attention. It is possible that rabbis congregation leaves enough time to give individual attention to kids.
But I bet his wife is the one who does overwhelming majority of leading kids and care. Because with standard 40 hours and 6 kids he would already be impossibly stretched.
while the argument about time/kid holds some truth, an opposing truth is that single kids often lack a sense of humility in regards to attention by others and a lack of sociability because they never really needed it.
sometime it feels that way, but another way of putting it is investment in something that succeeds you and your partner. how is that not "my stuff or my partners stuff"?
A lot of stuff can succeed me. I'd prefer to have a free choice in what to do with my time than to restrict it heavily with a child.
I know what my parents sacrificed having me and my siblings. The world today is not build for nuclear families and the world before was nothing close to nuclear families. My parents had to relocate and had no support. They really cared about us and had no life outside of their children. I couldn't do that.
There is a significant loss of freedom and time when one has children today.
Yes, I know that a significant number of parents are horrible people or have children in horrible conditions but I do not think that should require me to have children.
That is literal survivorship bias there. I know multiple stories of deeply unhappy/unstable foster children, no matter how much stability, love & care they were given ( I knew some of those foster parents ).
Yes...but he's not making the claim that "100% of foster kids who get (some small number of adults caring about them) will be successful", he's saying that "the minimum I've observed for foster kids to be successful is (some small number of adults caring about them)".
The latter claim is perfectly valid to make when 100% of survivors have trait X; you are correct in implying that it would be invalid to say having trait X will guarantee a survivor.
> it takes a surprisingly small number of emotionally stable adults to help kids get through chaotic circumstances
The "surprising" modifier here makes the object something that needs extra context, what's surprising here is that the number is small and not large. If bio mom and bio dad and foster mom and foster dad and all the extended family and most of their teachers are distant, but their track coach is emotionally invested (thanks, Buzz), that's, surprisingly, sometimes all that it takes.
Yes, if no one's invested, that's not enough, as you'd expect. It does leave the possibility that everyone is invested and it's still not enough.
Consider the idiom it takes two to tango. Now, one of the two could be a quadriplegic, or a dog, or maybe they both come from a severe religious cult which has forbidden dancing and just can't bring themselves to do it.
That's fine; the meaning is that two are necessary, not that two are sufficient.
Saying "It takes surprisingly little time to do!" isn't trying to give a lower bound on how much time it takes. Obviously not completely unambiguous, but the "sufficient" reading is completely natural English.
It's not setting a bound at all. It -is- saying that the amount of time is "surprisingly little".
But to the topic at hand, the logical implication is that "to do it" => "takes surprisingly little time" (that is, doing it implies you took surprisingly little time)
Not "taking surprisingly little time" => "to do it" (that is, taking surprisingly little time implies you do it; after all, you might have taken surprisingly little time to do -something else-).
Same as the above; the implication is that "success" implies "(at least) a surprisingly small number of adults were involved", not that "(at least) a surprisingly small number of adults were involved" implies "success".
I find it helpful to use formal logic to explain stuff like this. If I make a statement that p => q (that is, p implies q), and that statement is true, it does NOT necessarily follow that q => p (that is, q implies p) is true (it may or may not be; it is independent from a formal logic perspective). It is necessary to evaluate q => p separately, in which case we may find it to be true, OR we may find q =/> p to be true (that is, q does not imply p; or put another way, the fact q is true tells us nothing about whether p is).
As an example, "My shoes are wet because it is raining", p = it is raining, and q = my shoes are wet. p => q means if it is raining (p), my shoes are wet (q). But it does not also follow from that that q => p; that is, just because my shoes are wet (q) it does not mean it must be raining (p; I might have, after all, been out watering the lawn). Thus, q =/> p.
For the tango example, p = a tango is possible, q = there are two people. p => q, but q =/> q (that is, two people does not imply a tango is possible).
In this case, p = foster child is successful, and q = a number of adults (sometimes a surprisingly small number) were involved with them. p => q, but q =/> p.
You're way overthinking this. If I say "it's takes surprisingly little" it's because I'm emphasizing that it does not take a lot and instead a small amount is sufficient.
Saying "it takes a surprisingly small number of emotionally stable adults to help kids " is emphasizing that it does not require a large number of stable adults and therefore a small number is sufficient. How many does it take? Surprisingly few. A few suffice. How else can you read this? You're surprised that a necessary number is small? But it's always necessary to have at least 0 stable adults and that's as small as possible - you can't get surprised that it's small! Instead you must be surprised that the sufficient number is small.
I'm not making any comment on the number of adults; I'm just responding to the original argument that "well, I know foster kids who haven't been successful, who had supportive adults", and the ensuing argument, to further explain why that isn't a negation.
The meaning of this expression has been extended to include any situation in which the two partners are by definition understood to be essential (...).
since you keep saying that you are not a native speaker, consider believing the interpretations native speakers share. stuff simply means what it means. you can believe it or not.
more generally, when someone says something you find incredulous, consider processing that internally, and then decide if saying "huh, now i know" is not a better reaction to "no way, maybe you're wrong."
I'm completely on the-dude's side on the reading of the original quote (not the tango quote) and I'm a native speaker. Moreover I find your (and the GP post) tone extremely condescending. There's no way to read the-dude's writing as "arguing". He states his readings of quotes simply without argument and clearly marking them as his personal reading (saying "to me" and "sounds"). By posting it here he's obviously inviting someone to explain why he's wrong - but the responses here are instead choosing to declare their authority on the matter and to belittle him.
And to the original point - he's not wrong. Of course from life experience we all know that there are exceptions to every rule, but the rule as written was that just a few stable adults suffices. Saying "it takes surprisingly few to tango" is completely different meaning from "it takes two to tango", so the comparison to that is not relevant (and the-dude does mistake that phrase, which is specifically used to call out that one is not enough). How many does it take? It takes surprisingly few. You have enough even if you only have a few.
I knew two kids adopted as infants who were born addicted to drugs.
The family that adopted them was wealthy. They poured enormous amounts of time and resources into raising those kids. One turned it all around and works for Google, the other ram away and hasn’t been heard from in 20 years.
Same birth mother, born two years apart, she was an addict.
I adopted three kids from the same biological mother. Two of them are making more then me at Amazon and for the Department of Defense. Sadly my younger son passed from Bone Cancer.
They were drug impacted, but its weird how research goes in cycles. Crack babies were going to ruin America's capacity for caring for all these children. Then it was said that Alcohol is the only drug that effects babies in the womb. It was called the "Crack Baby Myth" but now things are changing again.
I think it is a fairly safe assumption that raising children has aspects of a chaotic system. Small changes to upbringing can cause large impact on the result. Of course not all "inputs" have this chaotic nature, and there are lots of inputs that aren't under direct control of the parents. There are just so many variables that it is hard to tease out patterns.
Fair, but as far as controlled experiments are possible in this kind of thing, it doesn't get much better than two kids with a shared birth parent and the same adoptive parents/environment.
No, it doesn't get much better than that scenario. But something as simple as which other kids are sat next to them in school can completely change their childhood. Observations like these are the best we have, and should not be ignored, but there are just so many variables that can never bet (ethically) controlled.
100% agree. I think because it’s hard enough to discern between what I would call first order (dna caused personality traits) and second order (immediate family and early childhood experiences) contributions to personality and what experiences a child had, that most people ignore third order, friends, bad luck, basically everything else. Then, you throw in luck ...I mean who knows why anyone does anything bad or good.
I’m not religious, but the saying often attributed to Christ saying, “forgive them, they know not what they do,” is probably totally, 100% accurate. I would add we don’t really know why they do what they do either. Christians want that to mean specifically about the crucifixion, but I believe whoever wrote that down was trying to say something more general about human experience.
I know from personal experience, just how much which kids you sit next to from 1st-5th grade, as they are often the same in the US, can influence your life in extreme ways.
All this says to me, we should probably go easier on everyone, even the “worst” of us...
Even within organisms starting with identical “first order” characteristics the opportunity for variation is fascinating. Here is a podcast on the topic I found illuminating, it is with the author of a recent book The Hidden Half
> Fair, but as far as controlled experiments are possible in this kind of thing, it doesn't get much better than two kids
Actually, controlled experiments
on this could be a lot better than N = 2, and the small-N problem dwarfs the positive features of the experiment here.
The amount of variation in the human condition would completely negate any conclusions from a sample size of two, however close the conditions.
It's also really easy to explain how one kid does well and the other doesn't, look at any life situation. One kid falls in with bad friends, one does not, one has a hobby that takes them somewhere, one does not, one gets a DUI the other does not, one has an amazing Hockey coach, the other does not, one takes a risk and wants to be a rock start, the other does not etc. etc..
A family friend is single and infertile. She's spent a lot of money on some sort of adopt-a-chinese scheme. Someone in her family did the same, and the kid had various medical issues. I honestly think she'd have been better off with a surrogate and a sperm donor.
I definitely respect people who adopt, but they risk of just adopting someone else's problem is too high for me.
If you adopt a health foreign baby it is because the baby was kidnapped from his loving parents and then a corrupt judge signed off on it.
The above isn't always true, but if you didn't investigate the agency deeply you should assume it is. This is why international adoptions are so hard, many counties have caught on and given up on giving the few kids who do need real homes help.
Did you know that UNICEF defines "orphan" as a child with at least one dead parent? Globally there are estimated to be about 15 million "double orphans", and 90% of them live with extended family. Of those that don't, frequently there is extended family or at least known families of their own culture/ethnicity/country who could take them in if given financial support - which is not only cheaper than adopting them from the US, but doesn't cut their ties to home.
Aside from that, more than 90% are over the age of 5. Almost none are actually babies, and of course children orphaned at birth may have inherited AIDS or have other health issues due to whatever killed their parents. Adopting a healthy foreign baby from the US is more likely than not to involve some form of human rights violation just to make them available to you.
https://www.soschildrensvillages.ca/orphan-crisis-sub-sahara...
That is a bizarre and incorrect assumption, but if you weren't trying to start a fight then you might have made the reasonable assumption that I think there are problems with the way adoptions work in the US as well, and if you want to adopt within the US you should still be prepared to put a lot of work in to identifying the ethical way to do so. Start with the assumption that you should absolutely not be planning to move the child to a different country or even state as soon as you've adopted.
The difference between us is that you are making an effort to jump to the stupidest possible claim you can think of, like here where you have managed to read "should not plan to" and twisted it into "should be prohibited from".
When you say that people need to be ethical, and then give your only example and say that they “absolutely should not...” I think it’s fair to say your claim is that it should not be done.
A relative adopted a child and the social worker advised against international adoptions for this problem.
Eventually they adopted a 100% healthy local child after 5-6 years of legal nightmare as it's pretty complex navigate through all requirements plus wait your turn.
While success and IQ are almost certainly correlated, it is not possible to make a statement like that.
You can just as well say that success comes down to height, or country of birth, or combined wealth of uncles.
There are so many other factors at play.
I think it arguably more likely that acceptance into the education system comes down to IQ due to antiquated practices in attempting to derive intelligence. Being within the education system is the sunny uplands to networking and generally better opportunities.
Its possible that almost every child has the potential of a "good enough" IQ and that nurture reigns supreme over the supporting cast of genetics. To separate the two within nurture there remains environmental factors such as an interpreted narrative of favouritism which can lead to downward spirals.
I was far from stable and far from happy. It wasn't until later that I realized the benefits that the people around me provided. With that said-- with some exceptions of course-- none of the kids want to be foster children. Especially those that understand that they are disposable. Kids are smart and know when they will just be shuffled around or placed in a group home. When I was fortunate enough to placed with my brother, we would act out -- looking back it was almost as a way to confirm that nobody really cared. It's easier to shit on everyone around you when you think everything is a temporary situation.
That’s what my adopted daughter and her older sibling would do. They were taken young. But older sibling started crap every place they got sent. Not the sort of stuff that can be ignored.
Finally they were separated in the system.
At first we were like “that’s horrible”
Now. We just wish it had been done a lot sooner.
Some people are hell bent on self destruction, and will take everyone down with them.
It took 7 years for our adopted daughter to finally realize and know we actually do love her.
Every successful foster child has a stable adult in their life != every foster child with a stable adult in their life is successful.
The first sentence is saying that a stable adult is one necessary component. The second sentence is saying that the stable adult is the only necessary component. They are totally different claims with very similar wording.
I'm not sure that's survivorship bias, since you can measure when dependents (or emancipated dependents) drop off from their support systems. The measure isn't just those that report back "I'm doing fine" but those that are tracked. There are a number of organizations that track these statistics, although I feel like the nordic countries seem to follow the strictest rigour. It's a null hypothesis to show that foster children (who are more likely to have mental disorders - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3922948/, et al) do better with caring parental figures. They can only degenerate without stability.
Just because you have an anecdote that illustrates something doesn't negate the broader conclusion.
Frankly, the original statement that 'it only takes one or two' should be rather obvious, it's called 'parenting' and it usually implies a couple of people who have a bond with a child.
That said, we all know every kind of person from every walk of life who ended up being in every kind of scenario.
There's a lot of randomness in humans.
That doesn't take away from the fact that a couple of 'good parents' and a decent community + school is almost assuredly the best path.
Child care and elderly care one of the harder problems to solve. I hope some smart people decide to tackle it. Lots of potential for abuse and neglect. At one point I used to plan about combining an old age home and orphanage together. It could help with some emotional needs.
These problems do appear inextricably linked. Individualism in american culture is, IMO, the root. In many other cultures, family is huge -- folks are connected to their parents, grandparents, siblings, cousins... grandparents help out with the kids until they can't, and the skills of parenting are naturally passed from generation to generation. Funny to see a comment on another that "no one" is prepared to raise a kid... that's because individualism is bad at retaining wisdom.
The problem with your mixed old folks' home / orphanage is that individualistic old people don't wanna live there until they're too old to help out.
Is this really a surprise to anyone? The US is second only to the USSR in incarceration rate. The disenfranchised, e.g. foster children, will certainly suffer disproportionately under such a system. The lack of social safety nets, mental health services, etc. certainly play a role, but the larger issue is the authoritarian nature of the US regime.
While we do incarcerate too much, I don't think the solution is necessarily "incarcerate less" as much as it is "Nurture families more and create stable environments for children to grow up in so that they feel wanted."
I don't think anyone would disagree that a better home environment is fundamental. But do you think that, in general, the longer sentences and higher rates of incarceration (especially for non-violent crime) in the US compared with other developed nations are beneficial?
Publishing names and mugshots of arrestees prior to convictions, the existence of the sex offender registry, rampant human rights abuses in prisons, loss of voting rights for felons, and the explicit allowance of slavery as punishment do not make it seem like the US "justice system" even approximates the humanist notion of justice that other developed nations apparently aim for.
Does it surprise anyone that more foster kids go to jail than attend college?
What is the inevitable outcome of how our society is structured?
Our values come from television, which exists to serve advertising.
Advertising works by appealing to selfishness, hedonism, and self-doubt.
Who is going provide the time, thought, care, attention and funding to give these unfortunate kids, alone in this world, the confidence, skills, endurance, and self-belief to navigate the education system and a society that’s based on connection for advancement?
The government? We’re told that’s a “swamp” that can’t do anything as efficiently as private enterprise.
Private enterprise? There’s no profit in running foster homes.
