Separating Children from Their Parents (Domestically)

[ndrosen]

Lenore Skenazy had an item in Reason the other day about CPS basically kidnapping a baby on groundless suspicions. There are some cases where children are better off being rescued from their parents and raised by foster parents, or by wolves. Unfortunately, intervention by social workers is not limited to cases of real and severe abuse, or even to cases where there are real grounds to suspect severe abuse.

I don’t have a perfect solution, but it might help if families victimized by bogus seizures of their children were entitled to compensation out of the CPS budget, and social workers were held personally responsible for extreme instances of professional misconduct.

Comments

[kk1raven]

My cousin's daughter was taken from the hospital by CPS right after she was born. My understanding of the reasoning was that her grandfather told CPS that his daughter wasn't fit to be a mother. They didn't even give her and my cousin a chance to try being parents. They just swooped in and took their daughter. Then they held a hearing about what they'd done. My sister and I were there at the time, so we went to the hearing, along with a bunch of other family members to make it very clear that my cousin and the mother of his child had a lot of family support. CPS placed the baby with one of my other cousins and eventually gave her back to her parents so everything was eventually okay. The fact that CPS has absolutely no evidence that the parents had or would do anything wrong really ticked me off though. What they needed was some support and parenting classes, not to have their baby snatched away.