Diane Baird labeled her method for assessing families the “Kempe Protocol” after the renowned University of Colorado institute where she worked for decades. The school has yet to publicly disavow it.
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It went on and on like this. Baird acknowledged that her entire basis for recommending that the foster parents keep the baby girl was a single less-than-two-hour observation and interview that she’d conducted with them — her clients. She’d never met the baby girl’s biological grandmother, whom the county child services department had been actively planning for the girl to be placed with, according to internal department emails. Nor had she even read any case documents.
A fundamental goal of foster care, under federal law, is for it to be temporary: to reunify children with their birth parents if it is safe to do so or, second best, to place them with other kin. Extensive social science research has found that kids who grow up with their own families experience less long-term separation trauma, fewer mental health and behavioral problems as adolescents and more of an ultimate sense of belonging to their culture of origin.
But a ProPublica investigation co-published with The New Yorker in October revealed that there is a growing national trend of foster parents undermining the foster system’s premise by “intervening” in family court cases as a way to adopt children. As intervenors, they can file motions and call witnesses to argue that they’ve become too attached to a child for the child to be reunited with their birth family, even if officials have identified a biological family member who is suitable for a safe placement.
A key element of the intervenor strategy, ProPublica found, is hiring an attachment expert like Baird to argue that rupturing the child’s current attachment with his or her foster parents could cause lifelong psychological damage — even though Baird admitted in her deposition that attachment is a nearly inevitable aspect of the foster care model. (Transitions of children back to their birth families are not just possible, they happen every day in the child welfare system.)
Obviously some analysis is going to be subjective, but you can’t just half ass evaluations. If you are doing an eval for someone to take in a child and doesn’t eval the “someone” themselves, probably an issue there.
Re:Foster families intervening: Sometimes that is best as it can be way more stable for the child. There are a lot of factors that need to be weighed in matters like this and it should involve testimony from the foster family as well as many other factors and people. Sometimes the foster agency is not doing their best at their job. End of the day should be to put the child first. Not the biological or foster parents or someones reputation.
I can definitely see a place for intervention, but it needs to be looked at with a skeptical eye, and reunification needs to remain the goal, in part to encourage families in trouble to let fostering occur when it is needed, and also to discourage people who think that fostering is an end run around private adoption. In the article, the bio parents were going above and beyond to prove they’d got their act together, and it basically turned out the county was doing a solid for a family that had fostered several kids, couldn’t have bio kids of their own, and REALLY wanted to keep this baby. It’s made clear that the “expert” would recommend any child doing halfway well with an intervening foster should be adopted by them, regardless of how well the bio family could provide, because her entire guiding
griftprinciple is that upsetting the current attachment is never ever good for the child. She basically believes that parenting while poor is a one-strike-and-you’re out scenario.And pushing that ideology/religion as established/tested/validated science should be a criminal-offense.
Falsely representing oneself as something is criminal-fraud, in some jurisdictions…
Being the US, of course, there’s little hope for integrity to win any case…