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The Bad Mother

November 25, 2011 permalink

Group home staffer Dave Warren criticizes fixcas:

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From:
David Warren [daveewan at rogers.com]
To:
"rtmq@fixcas.com" [rtmq at fixcas.com]
Subject:
it's not always in the child's best interest to be sent home
Date sent:
Wed, 23 Nov 2011 06:43:27 -0800 (PST)

Good morning,

I worked in a group home for boys age 12-18 and I have at least 2 cases I can show you where the child's best interest was not in being sent back home.  In the first, the boy's mom is an admitted drug user.  She smokes up in the presences of her children; as she has more than one, but I only had direct contact with him.  She openly admitted to drug use but that she could handle it.  She refused to follow court orders or only paid lip service to them and she never followed through on any agreements she made with the CAS.  On his last home visit before being sent home, he returned to our house with a black eye that he received from his brother.  What did the mother do?  Where was she when this happened?  She was in the house and was unable to stop it.  So is a parent with a drug problem and the inability to protect one of her children from another deserving to have her children?  If this boy ends up dead, in the hospital or jail due to being returned to his family... what then...  Oh and by the way every time this boy returned back to the group home he was sullen, depressed and underfed.  Come on buddy not all people who can pro create should be allowed to raise children.

thank you
Dave Warren

Let's see, "she never followed through on any agreements she made with the CAS". How unusual. We have interviewed hundreds of parents, and a large proportion report hearing CAS workers say: "If you want your kids back do ...". The parents almost always do the thing demanded, but we have yet to hear of a case where CAS returned the child in accord with the promise. Maybe the mother was just learning from social workers.

"She smokes up [drugs] in the presences of her children". So? The mother has faults. Who doesn't? Counting by researchers has shown that parents with faults, even serious ones, provide better child care than fosters or group homes. [1] [2] [3 pdf].

"Every time this boy returned back to the group home he was sullen, depressed and underfed". You don't say whether he was depressed by his mother's maltreatment, or homesick for her. And underfed? Did your service ever think of providing food for the family, instead of stealing the boy?

"If this boy ends up dead, in the hospital or jail due to being returned to his family... what then?" Then he will be in all the newspapers. Child protectors love to tell us about deaths after foster care. Unlike deaths in their own care, which they do their best to conceal, social services want us to know about deaths after returning kids to parents. Read about the current Ohio case of DeMarcus Jackson in the expand block below or the Campione case in Barrie of five years ago. Fixcas does not usually report these cases, because the outcome is the same as it would have been without any child protection system. Or maybe not. Sometimes intervention drives a parent to the breaking point, killing a child he could have raised otherwise. [1] [2] [3]. The number of filicides after foster care is small, dozens at most in a year over the US and Canada. You cannot use these small numbers to justify taking hundreds of thousands of kids from mom and dad.

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Damarcus Jackson laid to rest

DeMarcus Jackson
DeMarcus Jackson

CINCINNATI, OH (FOX19) -

As Antrone Smith and Latricia Jackson stand accused in the murder of their son, Damarcus Jackson, remaining loved ones, including the boy's foster family, said their final goodbyes on Monday.

Damarcus died Oct. 21 after police and Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters say the boy was beaten so severely, internal bleeding took his life. Family members of Antrone Smith, who had just regained custody of the boy and his siblings a few months earlier, say the father is innocent and would never have hurt his son. However, Deters is seeking the death penalty against Smith.

"It's hard to comfort people in the midst of this kind of tragedy. A child with so much future ahead of him, so much potential, loses their life in such a tragic way," said Pastor Damon Lynch III. "So what we'll try to do is find words from scripture, from the life of Christ, from the Gospels, to speak to the family, to speak to the community to bring comfort, but also try to speak words of justice. Sometimes the system seems to let us down and I think in this case it let DeMarcus down."

An independent review of Hamilton County's Department of Job & Family Services will be done at the request of County Commissioners.

Pastor Lynch has used his pulpit to preach to those who are responsible for raising children.

"We talked about a generation of young men who've grown up and all they know is how to hit. They were hit as kids and they think that works. It doesn't work for children. If you hit a child in the stomach, they don't stop crying, they stop breathing," he said.

He also told FOX19 that if the community truly wants a way to help change the cycle of violence, that a parents' respite facility is one thing the city could use.

"We need places of respite," he said. "A respite is a place where a mom who's just tired can bring her child for a couple of hours while she goes to maybe get her hair done or just go take a nap. And we've tried to start one here and we'll probably try it again. I've talked about it for 21 years now – that's how important that is to me."

Joe and Latasha Tye, longtime foster parents who have been recognized by the city of Cincinnati for their outstanding work with foster children, have helped make the funeral arrangements for the boy they loved as if he were their own, having raised DeMarcus since he was 8 days old. Latasha Tye's aunt, Shona Harris, told FOX19 earlier in the week that her family would have done anything to keep the boy safe. Now, they are grieving a life that was ended too soon.

Jackson's funeral services were held at Rockdale Baptist Church.

Source: FOX19 Cincinnati

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