Aibu to think that my kids aren’t coming back?

[SeaOfDespair]

I had my girls removed last month and it’s been a very traumatic experience. My family are so far away, my friends have dwindled away and I’m stuck looking at these 4 walls.

I’m seeing a private child psychologist and doing some work with him. He understands how harsh the system can be. I’m doing 2 different parenting courses online. I’m paying for all of this myself and has been a bit of a struggle recently.

My solicitor just tells me to go along with whatever they want. I’ve ticked one thing off the list, but they’re not forthcoming with starting their own assessments. Social worker is either sick, or can’t be bothered.

My youngest has arrived to contact with bruising to her face 4 times. She is cruising, but never managed to be bruised within my care. My elder one seems sort of happy, but is having a lot of tantrums and isn’t able to communicate with me.

From them wanting to keep them at home on an order, their original intentions until the court hearing, to pretending I don’t exist. They didn’t even turn up to the meeting last week. No apology given. No notification of cancellation.

From a case of closing ranks to keeping the case open, it never did surprise me that they applied for a court order. My social worker’s reasoning? I don’t agree with their concerns, so there needs to be a care order.

Am I being unreasonable to think I don’t stand a chance in hell of getting them back, if they’re not willing to even bother working with me?

@anothernamejeeves I think you'll find that the apology letter and the guardians statement which also says that they should never of did what they did is proof that I'm not unable to see anything or admit to it :/ you sound lie a social worker with your post. So youre bound stick up for the local authority. But believe me. Here. The threshold is not high. And possible risk of future emotional harm is bullshit. It's just a stupid way of causing a family so much distress.

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I think the problem with social workers not having their own children and being in particular being young is that they might have unrealistic expectations and don’t appreciate the normal mistakes parents make. I remember thinking how messy my friends house was until I had three kids of my own.

@stairway 100℅ this.
They can't truly know until they do it themselves. They shouldn't be able to make choices when they don't know what its like.

stairway
Except a group of qualified professionals don't remove children for small parenting mistakes or having a little bit of mess around the house.

No I'm not a social worker but I work with children and have daily dealings with children's services.

Social workers have a good deal of education and training. They are not a bunch of gormless, naive 18 year olds trying to change the world, all let loose on society making judgement calls based on their own impressions.

Additionally, there are procedures to follow, and every case of removal of children involves the input of many (trained and qualified) individuals.

The system is still not foolproof, but insinuations that SWs are people who rock up to a SS office daily with only their own judgey pants to work with is not accurate.

The recommendation for removal is made by the social worker, backed by a manage and then presented to the judge. It's piss easy to get the removal, but hard for a parent to prove that their speculations are wrong.

And a lot of social workers in my area are young naive people who's expectations are ridiculous. Again I was abused as a child. They then said id turn out to be an abuser and normalise that behaviour.. how is that ok? For someone with next to no experience, being able to make a decision that can potentially destroy a whole family?

It is a good deal more complex than that, SavannahXx.

www.gov.uk/if-your-child-is-taken-into-care/care-proceedings

www.gov.uk/if-your-child-is-taken-into-care/going-to-court

www.cafcass.gov.uk/grown-ups/parents-and-carers/care-proceedings/cafcass-role-care-proceedings/

It sounds like social workers are damned if they do & if they don’t. Either they are slack & letting abused/neglected children slip through the cracks, or they tighten up regulations resulting in an increase in kids being taken into care & then they are being too harsh & not understanding

You don’t have to be a parent to be able to be trained to professionally identify child abuse. There is no perfect system unfortunately. We still don’t know what the reasons are in the OP’s situation, as what was listed on documentation she would have presumably received.

If children are removed from care I do tend to believe there must be at least one if not a range of issues that have led to this happening.

Prawnsword
They are damned if they do and damned if they don't.
The other thing is on MN there's some really bizarre views on safeguarding too, so people will ask advice about concerns they have and some posters will pile on saying that they shouldn't consider reporting to social services because the parents have probably had a bad day/you have no idea what's going on in their life. There's posters who have been raging with schools for following appropriate safeguarding training and passing concerns through properly, saying the school are underhand, they should get back to their own jobs, they aren't qualified to decide (true, which is precisely why they follow safeguarding policy and pass to those who are qualified in social work), that the teacher should call the parent they have concerns in about and then talk them through their concerns before reporting etc.
There's a bizarre idea on a number of threads that there's "real safeguarding" where children walk in and disclose abuse and then anything else in terms of good practice (such as observing changes, smaller concerns, the need for each professional to report separately if they have concerns so the person in the middle who has the full picture can decide what to do next) is nothing more than sly bitching and judging people for normal life.

No it’s parents who are damn if they go and dammed if they don’t. I’m sick to death of reading threads where emotionally immature, unprepared parents are encouraged to go ahead with accidentally pregnancies. That results in children who will be neglected by societies standards today. Just 40 years ago babies were placed outside in the garden in the pram to sleep for hours, kids did play with pots and pans and had no plastic age appropriate shit to entertain them ... and these people grew up to be the social workers, the police, the teachers we have today. Clearly it was good enough for them.

Obviously abuse happened, still happens and needs stamping down hard. That’s where the real work needs doing and there seems to be huge reluctance to tackle that.

Yes lolasmiles.

I have also never seen anyone say ' my children were taken into care because I was neglecting them'

Everyone says ' the social workers were wrong, the system is corrupt etc'
And I can understand that. It is hard to admit to being in the wrong...it doesnt mean it is true though.

I have seen cases where safeguarding reports are being made daily for years before anything is properly done. Where the parents are given chance after chance.

I think the problem with social workers not having their own children and being in particular being young is that they might have unrealistic expectations
I 100% agree. DD last 2 resource teachers were older, possibly DC lots of practical help, her new resource teacher is a younger lady and thinks her work this year will cure DD's ODD.
She has crossed the line with me on more than one occassion, I say nothing, but I feel like she is critical and annoying.

You need to be a parent to be a social worker! 😂

You need to be a parent to be a social worker
Not a part but have life experience.
I don't blame the social worker most go into the job to help and support people. It is the system all the red tape.

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Not a parent.

You do need to have life experience and that used to be a requirement for social workers. It used to be impossible to be a social worker straight out of university as it is now.
But the job is incredibly hard and they had difficulty recruiting people, so they had to drop this.

Agree on the life experience. I am a foster carer and have brought up 5 children.
I care for a child with disabilities. When inexperienced Sw come and give me their expert advice I just nod politely.
I don’t think most SW have experience of children with asd/adhd. They sometimes think that the parent isn’t putting boundary’s in place or the child is missing milestones because of neglect.
I also know of children I have had placed who’s peers are in a much worse or similar situation and they and their families have not been picked up by SS.

@Bigearringsbigsmile I run a club for a hobby. There is a woman there who has had her children taken into care. She always says the teachers plotted against her. But when she talks about it I can see why they were taken into care. It is obvious she has an eating disorder, she talks about that woman who says she can live on air, and did admit that when SW came round she had no food in the house at all. I am sure she loved her kids, but also was not feeding them enough, although because of her own difficulties I am sure she thinks she was feeding them enough.

What is sad is how little role extended families play in many families these days. In my DPs family her Aunt was fairly neglectful in feeding and washing her kids, but other adult family members stepped in. So MIL used to cook for them. The kids were loved by their mother, and other family members made sure they were not neglected. They have all grown up fine, but without the extended family would have been very neglected.

Just to add my daughter is currently at university and wants to be a SW.
I would have complete confidence in her working with children in care or with neurodevelopment conditions as she has ‘ lived ‘ this for the last 10 years.
However she wants to go into youth offending and I think they’d eat her alive!

@Cassimin You're amazing.

The case with MP lucie Allen who sat on the foster care panel, who made decisions on cases, found herself on the opposite sides, after reading her family file she said it was worse than many of the cases she'd read. She realised maybe half those family's she voted against were falsified. She only had one case were the panel disagreed with the SW.
It was extremely rare to disbelieve or doubt the SW.
Thankfully she was in a position to hire a solid legal team to fight for her.
www.standard.co.uk/news/london/mother-branded-danger-to-her-son-by-a-psychiatrist-they-d-never-met-7636487.html

@Inliverpool1 I am 50. I can tell you that we did have age appropriate toys as kids such as jigsaws and lego. Yes I played with pots and pans, but we did have toys. And babies were placed outside to sleep in prams because they sleep better in the fresh air. This still happens in many countries. Babies do sleep much better in fresh air than in a stuffy centrally heated house.

They will eat her alive !
Another deeply concerning aspect to all this is the amount of bullying going on in SW departments. Keeping people on temporary contracts, making them take 5 cases when 4 is the agreed limit. SW are human like everyone else and with the enormous cuts to budget will come more mistakes

@stairway I have quite a few friends who are social workers and I have never been in a social workers house that is not messy. No one cares about normal mess.
What they care about is another woman I know who is a bit of a hoarder but thankfully has no kids. If you use the toilet in her flat you cannot get to the bath or sink because there are things piled up in front of it.