● Mike Hixenbaugh of NBC News has done a series of
outstanding reports about some so-called “child abuse pediatricians” whose
blindness to other explanations for childhood injuries or illnesses can wreak
havoc in families. But what happens when
the person everyone turns to as the child abuse expert doesn’t even have the
credentials to be a child abuse pediatrician in the first place? That’s
what’s happening in Washington State.
● What happens when
hospitals drug test pregnant women and rush to turn them in to child protective
services? Pretty much what you’d expect, writes
Charissa Huntzinger of the Texas Public Policy Foundation:
Women have described efforts to minimize the risk of arrest or punishment through social isolation, withholding relevant medical information, avoiding prenatal care, skipping treatment appointments, or avoiding treatment all together. This means our efforts to protect children are actually placing them and their parents at greater risk of harm.
● If the Orwellian
predictive analytics algorithm in Pittsburgh is really so great, why does the
director of the county human services agency have to obfuscate so much about
what it is and how it really works? I
have a blog post about the selling of “Hello Baby.”
And there are several
interesting stories about kinship foster care:
● The
Chronicle of Social Change
reports that still another study shows still another benefit of placing
children with relatives instead of strangers: The children are less likely to
ultimately be moved into the worst form of “care” group homes and institutions.
One possible reason: Relatives are less likely to give up on their own relatives
when those children have behavior problems.
(Similarly, other
data show that children living in kinship foster care are less likely to be
forced to take potent, sometimes dangerous psychiatric medication.) Another finding from the study: Children are
more likely to be institutionalized if they’re Black.
● Also in the Chronicle former foster youth Georgette
Todd writes
about what she discovered only after she “aged out” and started looking for
family on her own:
When my aunt picked up the phone, we caught up with our lives but then she said something that truly stunned me and still has a deep impact on me to this day. She said, “Georgette, I never knew you were in foster care. No one notified me … had I known, I would have taken both you and your sister in.
Todd argues that,
with modern technology, there’s no excuse for failing to find relatives.
● But the problems
aren’t always technological. Sometimes the problem is the bias some child
welfare systems still have against extended families. That bias can be seen in the absurd
requirements some states impose before a relative can become licensed to be a
foster parent. As this story from Chris Serres of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune makes clear, Minnesota
is a case in point.
● The hostility to
kinship foster care is just one aspect of a bigger problem in Minnesota: The
state’s sky-high rate of tearing apart families, and one of the worst records
in the nation for racial bias. KSTP-TV
has a story about a hearing that dealt with these issues. And NCCPR has additional context here.
