Regarding the
ProPublica article, I think that the two options for mentally ill parents,
either getting to keep their children in their full custody (if they are deemed
sufficiently mentally healthy) or having their children fully adopted away into
other families (if they are not deemed adequately mentally healthy) are
inadequate to deal with the variety and individuality of cases that go through
the system on a regular basis. I think there are many people who fall in between
being able to take care of children on their own and being downright dangerous
to children (which is what should be required if the state is to prevent
biological parents who want to see their children from seeing them). For example,
a person with mild to moderate mental development issues might not be able to
hold down a steady job to support a child nor be able to understand and satisfy
all of the needs of a child, but that person is unlikely to be dangerous to a
child with appropriate provisions and under supervision. Because of this, there
is no reason to completely take a child away from many mentally ill and
developmentally challenged people, but appropriate steps must be taken to
ensure that a child is being cared for adequately.
Therefore, I would propose a system in which people with
mild to moderate mental health issues who might be denied their children in the
status quo take parenting classes and are able to see their children on a
regular basis. The classes might involve, depending on the needs of each
individual parent, basic life skills training, tips on how to respond
appropriately to the various needs of children, and therapy to alleviate
emotional stress. While parents go through the process of learning how to care
for children, they would get to visit their children regularly in loosely
supervised visits (a child services specialist might be placed in the room of
the parents with their children, but not hovering over parents’ shoulders). The
children would live full-time in stable foster homes (in that they would not be
moved around from home to home because they would have to stay in the same
vicinity as their biological parents). Then, depending on the capabilities of
individual parents after they completed classes satisfactorily, parents would
be either reunited with their children on a full-time basis with the
expectation that the parents care for children fully or they would continue to
see their children regularly while the children resided in a stable foster
home. If parents were deemed fully competent to care for their children, they
would be reevaluated regularly to ensure that every child received adequate
care.
This solution, contrary to the status quo, allows parents
to receive the emotional satisfaction of seeing, caring for, and loving their
children without jeopardizing the health or well-being of children. Right now,
the rights and welfare of both parents and children are being ignored (as parents
are being prevented from seeing their children and children are being bounced
around from foster home to foster home with no stable adult figures). This
proposal seems to fill the gaps in the system. Thoughts?
I agree that it is impossible to divide parents into the two categories of capable of raising their children and not capable. Because although, some parents may have certain mental or psychological problems this does not necessarily make them dangerous to child’s well being and it certainly does not mean they are incapable of caring for the child. The main problem, I see with parental licensing is that it can be very easily abused. Parents who abuse their children seem to be a smaller proportion of the population of the entire population of parents. Thus, subjecting all parents to these assessments I feel will take children away from parents who have certain problems(e.g. mentally or psychological) but who nevertheless are not considered “bad” parents, which would obviously be detrimental to both the parent’s and child’s welfare and rights. I agree that the current system does not take into account parent’s and child’s welfare and rights. If children are removed from their parents , the parents are denied custody and visits completely. It is also true that the status quo, has some detrimental effects as having children go from foster home to foster home and inclusively sometimes gives children away to the wrong hands. For example, foster homes are not free of abuse either. There have been cases of foster parents abusing their foster children, individuals receiving children to sell, or exploit in some way. I believe that parental licensing would only increase these kinds of errors and failures of the current status quo. I think that a more effective manner of preventing child abuse, would just be to intervene whenever there are reports of a parent who is not adequately caring for a child, verify those reports, and protect the child while offering classes or help to the parent if they wish to maintain the child in order to ensure that the parent learns to adequately care for the child. I also agree that these parents should be evaluated or supervised regularly. However, I think that parental licensing should be extended to assess every parent but rather every parent who has been reported to abuse their child or inadequately care for the child in a manner that poses great harm to that child.
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