protecting our children

[thekidsrule]

carry on please

I don't understand why people are so pessimistic over Toby's chance of being adopted. You've not met the child, not really even seen him properly on a TV program.

bunnybing because the statistics show that the older the child is and the longer they've been in care the harder they are to place for adoption .

i'm not at all negative about social workers. I think they generally do a fantastic job. And I think they did in this case. But I think the programme missed out lots of important stages that I hope happened. And I think people are deluding themselves if they think Toby will be successfully adopted- I hope I'm wrong, but adoptive parents willing and able to take on his complex needs are few and far between.

There was never going to be a happy ending for them all. The real shame of the care system is shuffling DCs back and forth to the birth parents as they try and cope, and fail and try again.
I think that Tiffany was doing the best for them by giving them up for adoption. I know 2 DCs, very like Toby,who were adopted age 4 yrs -it isn't impossible.

I don't think that we should assume that birth parents are the best choice. I wouldn't leave my DCs with Mike and Tiffany for an hour, so I'm not happy in leaving Toby for life-just because they gave birth. They were not meeting his needs.

It should have read basic needs-the ones that every DC has a right to.

Been reading with interest over the last couple of days.

I think the bed worked as a indication of the overall way the relationship between the parents and ss worked. The parents were unwilling/ unable to provide a place to sleep so ss provided one for them. They were then unable/ unwilling to do anything with that support (the bed) so it was left languishing, unused whilst Toby continued to suffer. The way the parents interacted with the child was more important than the bed issue, but how much more difficult is that to mend? I feel the focus was put on easy, simple things the parents could sort out first before more underlying issues could be dealt with. After all, how much easier is it to clean your house than deal with a lifetimes worth of psychological issues and learning difficulties?

I've also started to think about foster caring too. Our house is too small currently, but maybe in the future it's something my family would be able to do.

I don't think the outcome for Toby was rosy in either option and I would imagine most people watching the programme would feel the same. It is unlikely that Toby will be successfully adopted, however with luck he will be in long term foster care and at least with his mother having given him up for adoption he hopefully won't be shuttled between her and a series of foster carers and can have some stability.

Is that better for him than the chance that his mother, with a lot of input and guidance ( from services which are in short supply and likely to be cut) would be able to give him? Possibly, possibly not, it is perhaps a marginal call.

However the baby who has been adopted due to her age and the fact she has not been with less than adequate parents for the most formative period of her life almost certainly has a better chance in life than she would have if left with Tiffany.

So as the net result was to definitely make one childs life infinitely better and anothers potentially better, then the SWs made the right decision.

But what sort of parent needs to be told to talk to their child and play with him?

It is gobsmacking that an adult would not know that this is a fundamental aspect of being a parent. What is troubling about it is that these parents did not feel the natural urge to talk with or play with their child.

I have met complete strangers in supermarkets who talked to my children and played peek with them, smiled at them; babies and small children are appealing and attractive. To not do that with your own child to not feel the natural urge to do that is just mind-boggling.
This is what is really bothering my relative whose umc friend and her H haven't a clue, and seemingly haven't felt the natural instinct to interact with their DS (they live in the country in a lovely house with room for a pony).

Where do you even start to help parents like that? They are missing something basic inside themselves. My relative is wondering if they were raised by wolves.

I agree it would be nice to hear an update, but I think that just because we might not see Toby doing long multiplication at age 4 and impressing his teachers with his knowledge of the vocative case, living in a postcard cottage complete with attractive dog we should not conclude that removing him from Mike and Tiffany was the wrong decision. There are lots of outcomes in the foster/adoption route for Toby, and that is who matters here that are guaranteed to be better than the very predictable bad ones that would result from leaving him with Tiffany alone or with Mike and Tiffany.

A few years ago the number of children from Chinese orphanages adopted by American families reached 60,000 annually. The fact that these girls (mostly girls) had suffered similar neglect and that many exhibited similar behaviour and language development traits to those of Toby (I have my doubts about any hereditary SN) wasn't offputting to those families. There are families out there who are willing to take a chance and welcome a child.

• And the pity of it is with the people my relative knows, SS might be fobbed off by the fact that the kitchen cupboards are bursting with organic this and that and that the child has his own playroom, nice bed, clean carpet.

Is it really such a hard thing to adopt two young siblings together? :( I'm telling you, I will take both of them. Right now. This minute. And I haven't seen the program.

I know. I know that. :( But just thinking about it, me here with plenty of room and lots of stubborness patience, and two blocks away from our school, where I work in special ed and know the department and its preschool program inside and out... :(

Cheerful I am really hoping that you or someone like you will contact the authorities, maybe via the BBC, and make that offer and it will lead to an adoption. If not then I hope good long term fosterers will be there.

mathanxiety When I had to take my DS to hospital last year, there was a boy of around 7/8 in the waiting room for a surgical (pre-booked) appt. His dad (or certainly a father figure) was there, and they waited in silence for quite a while. I wondered at the time who wouldn't talk to their young son as he waited to have a medical procedure done, to keep him calm and distract him. The dad had a newspaper with him and was reading the football pages - I would bet that you could have talked to a 7 year old about it if nothing else came to mind. But it is evidently fairly common that people just don't think to do it.

Yes, Math. DH and I have the forms and everything, and after our next biological child we will adopt from the system. I'm hoping to take a sibling set.

Eighties I don't think they'd let me, personally, as I'm an American. But I honestly would take them, I have a fairly good idea of the support systems we'd need and how to get them. I hope somebody steps up too.

Are you currently residing in America CheerfulYank?

Yup. I live in Minnesota. :)

Sadly children in care are far more likely to leave school without any qualifications, far more likely to end up imprisoned/sectioned/addicted to drugs or become parents themselves as teenagers. This suggests that the care system is far from great at looking after children (although may be the lesser of two evils compared to staying with their families).

It's shocking that we have a system where children can endure repeated changes of placement, with no warning at all - a child can get home from school to find a social worker ready to take them away. And this can happen again and again. Whatever the reasons, this is a shit way to treat anyone, let alone a child who will already be insecure.

Clearly this isn't because everyone working in care is evil or deliberately out to damage children - but it is obvious that the system is shit and desperately needs reform.

Government statistics from 2010:

Of the children looked after continuously for 12 months at 31 march and of the age where the child is eligible to sit key stage assessments and tests:
-58 per cent achieved the expected level in reading and 62 per cent achieved the expected level in mathematics at Key Stage 1.

• 36 per cent achieved the expected level in both English and mathematics in Key Stage 2 tests
• 12 per cent achieved 5 or more GCSEs or the equivalent including English and mathematics at grades A* to C.
• 73 per cent of school age children looked after continuously for 12 months have some form of special educational needs*

• 7.9 per cent of children looked after continuously for 12 months at 31 March 2010 who were aged 10 or over had been convicted or subject to a final warning or reprimand during the year
• Of the children looked after continuously for 12 months at 31 March, 4.3 per cent were identified as having a substance misuse problem during the year.

*Clearly this affects everything listed above it.

well it explains everything above it which makes the link to care non existant. all it says is children with sen have more difficulty reaching expected levels at the best of times let alone when their family unit has collapsed and they've had to move, go through loss etc.

Edam, I know statistically that children do better when staying with parents, as your post rightly points out. What I'm never sure of is the causality - many of the children in care spent some years at home (like Toby) with parents that may have been addicted or neglectful or abusive. Is the reason for their poor outcomes the fact that they were brought up in care or could it be due to the circumstances of their formative years?

It's hard because there aren't similar statistics to show how children who stayed with neglectful/abusive etc parents turned out - and rightly so, because most children are removed from these families.

Great minds

The reason that children are moved from carer to carer in some cases is because the child has been so damaged by the birth parents in his early weeks, months and years, and the most important time in a child's development is the first 3 years. Children removed from parents will by definition have an insecure/anxious attachment to their parents, because their needs for physical and emotional care have not been met. These children learn that adults are not to be trusted and some of these children will be withdrawn and others will be angry and behave in a similar way to Toby when with his parents.

I have seen foster carers try their utmost with attachment disordered children, to the extent that their own marriages suffer and some suffer from mental health issues. They feel a tremedous sense of guilt that they are unable to cope, but the sad fact is that the damage done in the child's early life cannot always be overcome, even with the best will in the world.

It's the same thing with educational progress and poor outcomes for children in care, and that many young people in the care system end up in prisons in later life. It isn't because foster carers are no good and give up on children, it is in the main because of that early emotional harm the the child suffered when in the hands of their birth parents. OK foster carers and adoptors are like anyone else, some superbly confident, offering warm loving homes, others who are not as good, and a small minority who would be better off doing another job.

Toby had made tremendous progress (even with the little bit that we saw of him) in the contact session after being with foster carers for a few months, and I think this demonstrates the tremendous skills and patience that most foster carers are able to give to these children, but the whole foundations for life are laid down in the first 3 years of a child's life, and sometimes it cannot be changed. Many times it can change, if the carers are given the opportunity to learn about parenting the "hurt child" but it takes an enormous amount of time and patience and the rewards may be slow to come, and sometimes the toll on the carers and their own children is just too much to take. I have seen marriages break up and carers have mental health problems and their own children suffering, so please stop and think of this before you talk about how shocking it is for children to move around placements so much. Of course it is, no one would deny that and of course it is going to make the child more and more insecure, but foster carers are human and sometimes have to end a placement and suffer with the guilt for a long time ahead.

The emotional harm is caused by the birth parents and I am not being unnescessarily critical of birthparents, because many of them are like Tiff and Mike - children trying to bring up children, emotionally immature, having experienced abuse or neglect (or both) in their own childhoods. Earlier upthread Mrs DeVere was giving an account of how this cycle of deprivation can be broken into, but it all sounded rather vague and overly optimistic in my view.

I just wish we did know how to break into this cycle but I am wholly pessimistic about successin that area.