Poor homes, poor policies are failing children

Truth, especially the painful kind, is not a popular commodity. And truth is what Journal Inquirer Managing Editor Chris Powell delivered in his Sept. 18 column, “To fix schools, just turn off the child neglect machine,” reprinted in The Day.

I am a retired social worker with a master’s degree in social work administration and planning. I was educated to think in terms of systems and I could not agree more with Powell’s observation of the perverse incentives in Connecticut that produce unwanted outcomes.

While I volunteer at a local health care provider, my heart breaks as I observe wounded, emotionally immature women screaming at, threatening, and demeaning small children. I intervene, very carefully; only when I think it could be understood as helping. If it is not understood that way, the child pays the price for the parent’s feeling of shame.

Where once a church was a source of love and support to children, if only through their grandmothers, now Grandma is just as likely to have a violent or sexually predatory boyfriend who poses a threat to any children in the home.

Drug abuse, an attempt to self-medicate the pain of traumatic events in early life, keeps this cycle going. Add to this young women who are desperate for love and think that having their own babies will fill their empty hearts. They have a romantic notion that the child will both feed their emptiness and keep a boyfriend around. They have no idea what it takes to be a good parent because they’ve never seen it done.

Then we have a deeply dysfunctional foster care system in which too many children find no grownups to love and guide them. Even when there is a good situation and a loving bond is developed, the child is often removed from that home (the only home the child has known for two or three years, since infancy) and awarded back to the abusive or neglectful parent. This action comes from the ancient patriarchal notion that children are the property of their biological parents. The misery caused by family courts just creates more despair.

I worked for five months for a social services agency engaged by the state Department of Children and Families in New Haven to find therapeutic foster placements for kids with mental health, emotional, or behavioral issues that were diagnosable. After originally providing quality care for 50 children, the agency sought and was granted a license to place 150 vulnerable children. The agency was making a large profit from running this program, hiring an ambitious woman to replace the long-time director.

What I observed, and brought forward to supervisors to no avail, and then brought to DCF when I resigned, was the placement of kids in totally inappropriate “families,” almost all headed by single women with older kids of their own, more than a few of whom were in prison. The foster kids got no therapeutic care in the home, only one hour a week from social workers, most of whom were just out of school and there to get their supervised hours. I was in my 50s and considering becoming a licensed therapist in my later career — thus my participation.

Children were put in rooms in basements, one with a clothes dryer for company and no window for escape. In that case it was a 7-yearold boy with a 17-year-old unrelated male, an invitation for abuse.

A heavy 15-year-old girl was put in a broken bed and told to store her belongings in plastic bags under her bed, which was listing, because the foster mother, who worked for the New Haven school system and was dressed to the nines, supposedly couldn’t afford to buy the girl a dresser. The girl was expected to do all the cooking, dishwashing, and cleaning in the apartment.

Another teen girl was housed in an alcove in a finished basement with no curtain separating her tiny space from the “man cave” used by the older male member of the couple she was made to live with.

All these situations were a breach of the contract with DCF. All of them were against the rules.

My advocacy for these kids was met with “that is none of your business” by the clinical supervisor. Once I realized that I could do nothing more to change this situation, I reported these and other abuses and irregularities to the top of the foster care division of DCF and left.

Later I learned that nothing was done to stop the abuse because DCF needed the “beds.” I have grieved much about this.

I hope that Powell doesn’t back off these issues and I urge The Day to pick up on the idea that the schools cannot make up for generations of unloved, un-nurtured and un-guided kids. There is so much to do and it needs to begin at the source.