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DHS dilemma: Doing right by a child
A foster couple battles a mandate to keep families together.
Just before Christmas, he climbed onto the living room couch between the couple he calls Mommy and Daddy White to read a Spider-Man book.
Grinning and giggling, he gripped the book and scoured the pages.
Pointing to an illustration, Gary asked Ronnie, "What's he doing here?"
"Climbing the wall!" Ronnie shouted.
"Who's the best boy?" Pat White asked.
"Ronnie!"
"Who's the smartest boy?" she asked.
He scrunched his bony shoulder against her, jerked his chin skyward and, jubilant, shouted, "Ronnie!"
Torn in two directions
For most children, the birth family does provide the safest, most stable home, said Robert Schwartz, who heads the Juvenile Law Center for Children in Philadelphia."When the state raises children," he said, "it's just not pretty. . . . I've seen too many situations where the foster parents decide after a while this is too hard. Or adoptive parents say, 'Here, you take them back.' "
But Schwartz agreed with experts like Dicker, the child-welfare lawyer, who insisted that every case must be judged on its own merits, and that the child's needs must come first.
"We tend to look first at the parent and ask, 'Is that parent really bad, or a victim of their circumstances?' " Dicker said. "God knows, people in awful circumstances deserve help. But the child-welfare system is not the parent-welfare system."
Fortunately, she said, the best interests of children and their parents are often the same, but Philadelphia's DHS reform panel will have to decide what to do when they're not.
"If they say we need to focus on the needs of children, it really changes the way you approach these cases."
As an advocate for parents who feel their children have been unfairly taken from them, Gomez, of Community Legal Services, sees the problem from a different vantage point.
Her agency publishes a pamphlet for families involved with DHS. "Don't give up!" it says. "Take action to keep your children with you or get them back from DHS."
Ideally, parents with cognitive limitations get help early on: parenting classes during pregnancy and careful health screenings for their children, said Megan Kirschbaum, director of Through the Looking Glass, a national advocacy group for parents with cognitive disabilities. Across the country, 40 percent to 60 percent of these couples lose custody, she said.
"Some parents with intellectual disabilities - just like some parents, period - can't parent," Kirschbaum said. "But in general, with the right services, people can do quite well."
The key phrase is "with the right services."
Few cities, Philadelphia included, she said, are able to identify families who need support early enough, and when they do learn about a family like Ronnie's, the services are often inadequate.
