grandma_donna
New Member
I would like to hear what anyone thinks about the problem of children who have loving grandparents with whom they have a lifelong bond and a history of extended visitation being placed with strangers in foster homes rather than with these grandparents as a matter of policy. Current dfcs policy in the county I live in is this- if a parent is even suspected of wrongdoing, the child is taken and placed in a foster home while dfcs investigates the parent. There doesn't need to be any proof against the parent, only an allegation. Meanwhile, while most people seem to think that foster homes are for children who have no family willing to take them, that isn't the case. dfcs, in this county, routinely will take a child who has family, even grandparents who are caring for them at the time, and put them in a foster home and deny the child any access whatsoever with their family for an indefinite period of time and then continue to force the child to live with these strangers, causing extreme emotional trauma to the child, for months while they investigate the entire family until someone is able to jump through enough hoops to be allowed to rescue the child from their emotional nightmare and bring them back into the family. My grandchild has always been a secure, well adjusted, happy child until dfcs decided to take over her life. Now she has nightmares of being abandoned and lost and crying to be picked up by her grandmother. She never before had digestive problems but now she vomits regularly and has appetite problems. She worries that she won't see her grandmother and mother again and tells me regularly that she wakes up crying for me and asks why I didn't come to get her. She is three years old. She has no understanding of why she must live with her cousin rather than with the grandmother who has taken care of her all her life. How do you tell a three year old that dfcs says she must live where she doesn't want to be simply because her grandmother doesn't have a piece of paper from the county called a certificate of occupancy because she built her own house? How do you assure her that she isn't being denied the right to spend the night with grandma because she's been a bad girl when dfcs demands that you not tell her anything at all about what's happening to her and why. She thinks, according to what she's told me, that if she's a good girl I'll let her start to spend the night with me again. She was never abused before dfcs decided to take over her life. Now she is a confused and insecure little girl with sleep problems and digestive problems. She thinks she's been bad and she worries about being abandoned by her mother and grandmother. How does one go about ending the abuse heaped on a child by an agency that simply refuses to see children as individuals and puts their own liability worries over the rights and emotional well being of the children they control?