As someone who doesn't think about foster care that often, I'm inclined to agree with heebie's take; but are we quite sure that parents with substance abuse problems don't respond to that incentive? If they do, the policy could have long-term benefits to the children possibly outweighing the short-term harm. An RCT might not be inappropriate.
At the same time, I realize framing all social policy around "incentives" is often how policymakers basically justify cruelty, and it represents an unwarranted intrusion of homo economicus thinking; much better to treat people as people.
Addiction, courts, and parenting are a terrible combination, no two facets fit together.
Ongoing group sessions (AA and the like) work for people recovering from lots of addictions. Those groups don't have any institutional responsibility (ie, there's noone to sign off on anything), but serve as an external conscience, monitor, and guide, always informally and responsively.
Courts are blind authorities.
Parenting takes flexibility, process goes much better with stability. No idea about what's best, I guess it depeds on how broken the parents are and on foster care conditions, whether contact with parents is a net benefit.
I default to parental visitation rights being eliminated only in extreme circumstances, and I don't much like the state using visitation as a tool for enforcing social policy (I mean, I'm not too extreme about this, I support the state using the Foster Care system for kids who are in danger, but the default setting should be maximal parental access IMO). But it's not like I've thought about it deeply. I will say that it is absolutely terrifying when (in situations including plain old divorce) a judge has any power whatsoever over your parenting or access to your kid.
I don't know how it's done here. We had a foster child for about 6 months, nearly 30 years ago. There weren't any restrictions on access, nor was there much interest in it on either side. (This wasn't an adult substance abuse situation, but an inability to deal with the child's depression). It seemed to me that our social worker (a perfectly decent fellow) was positively overwhelmed, so while I'd prefer not to have 'default options,' but rather that every situation be carefully and deliberately crafted, and well and flexibly supervised, it's going to cost more money than we as a society seem willing to invest at this point.
My aunt and uncle used to run a group home for kids in foster care. I don't recall that they ever mentioned the parents of the kids, but that may be because these were older children, often with issues of their own (not having younger kids in the house meant that they often were assigned older kids who were suspected of sexual abuse). Then again, I don't recall asking my aunt and uncle many questions about what they did.
The right to parent is a fundamental right. Troxel v. Ganville.
Kids are not guaranteed the best parents. But deciding when a society should intercede to take care of kids is a really tough decision. I thought about when someone posted the "Somebody need to take care of my 15 kids" video.
My experience is that court, social services units, and foster care place are horrible at this process. Wildly inconsistent.
I think Thorn is amazing.
I have also had to deal with foster parents with strong beliefs about religion and imposing that on the kids. Even though they are not supposed to.
I briefly worked in child protection prior to attending grad school and supervised a lot of visits between fostered children and their parents. My impression is that a general policy of allowing visitation regardless of compliance is best but the implementation of that policy should vary based on the circumstances of individual cases. There are non-compliant parents who are clearly struggling to get better despite their setbacks where the interactions with their children are generally positive. There are also non-compliant parents who use visits as their main tool to continue emotional manipulation and abuse of their children.
The biggest drawback of liberal visitation policies is that, if parental rights are terminated, then the children go from regular visits to nothing at all. Not surprisingly, that is very hard for the kids. (Termination of parental rights is not always the end of the relationship especially for older kids. They often return to their family of origin once they age out of the system because they have no where else to go and no other long-term relationships.)
I'm busy today, but this is a fascinating fostering blog that Thorn pointed me at ages ago and I've been reading since. Young single woman in NY who fostered a couple of babies who were returned to their families, then a baby who stayed with her for a couple of years before returning to her family, but the blogger managed to stay in touch for a while, now has another baby she's had almost from birth who may return to her family, and is thinking about a possible as yet unborn baby who will be ready to be adopted from birth (I think). Lots of talk in the archives about interacting with birth families.
Best interests of the child. Children are not tools to be used, like some prized game, to control parental misbehavior. The second approach truly infuriates me.
[Obligatory pointing out of the fact that the child CharleyCarp fostered's older brother was the best friend of a kid who would grow up to . . . date me for a while in college.]
11. Did he appear in a movie with Kevin Bacon at all?
12: What is sort of impressive about this is that it all happened in a town with a population of like 500 people very far away from where I attended college. I'm still friends with the guy in question! (Also, I think maybe Carp took over a job when my friend's dad left it? The whole thing was slightly amazing.)
(The job was in a city of over 100,000, so my having taken a job there that had previously been occupied by our future foster child's brother's best friend -- none of whom were known to me when I took the job -- is even more unlikely than if we were all living and working in a small town. The job was in water resources, but the direct link to another commenter is thus far undiscovered.)
Most of my contact with foster care is people whose parents were a disaster and then they went into foster care with people who, by and large, were a disaster. I realize it's because of the populations I work with, but my gut association tends to be that once they're in foster care, not a whole lot is going to go right one way or another.
I do think there's some ambiguity in the idea that they're being punished, per se, for their parents' bad decisions. They may want to see them, but it may not be a good idea anyway. Though, it should go without saying, compliance with drug testing seems like a very blunt instrument for gauging whether someone is an acceptable presence in their kids' lives.
The density of connections is too high to be realistic. You're clearly characters in a novel or TV show. Let's hope the former, so you won't be canceled by the network before your time.
Also comment 2 is really smart.
I have two anecdotes like that, and they both involve my dad.
The first person: my dad went to junior high school with a guy named Jim, then high school. I don't know where Jim went to college, but my dad went to a college seven states away, 700+ miles. My dad went to grad school in a third state to get his master's in education. He spent a few years doing that then moved to a fourth state to go to law school. One day he was walking down the street there and bumped into Jim, who had moved to that town himself.
All that happened before I was born. The second encounter is much more recent. There's a new restaurant near where my parents live that they like. One bartender there, Molly, my family jokes is my dad's girlfriend, just because they're friendly with each other. T. and I went to my parent's house last month for Christmas and they took us to the new restaurant. Molly took one look at T. and said, "Oh, hey, how have you been?" She worked in an office just down the hall from T. for at least two years.
The number of your ex-girlfriends that I've had sex with is truly remarkable.
I could probably do something earlyish downtown on Friday if we want to grab a drink. Back room at Cole's is great.
Though really we should take Essear to the pool at the Standard to confirm his stereotypes.
2/3 of the last three comments are accurate, and 2/3 are misplaced. But are they the same ones?
16: Speaking of connections, I had this funny conversation last year with someone telling me about a friend of theirs who's skeptical that physics has a future and in part because of that took a [puppy] instead of a [guinea pig]...
But that mutual friend of ours has a knack for this sort of small world thing.
2: My impression is that the research on AA/12-step program suggests minimal, if any, effectiveness. Of course, getting around methodological issues is, er, complex.
As far as incentive go, Hawaii and South Dakota have had some success with programs that provide relatively mild punishments for positive drug test; the distinguishing feature is that the punishments are swift and certain--e.g. fail a drug test, spend this weekend in jail. This also has the advantage of making it easier to convince individuals with really nasty addictions that, yes, they do in fact need treatment. (E.g. "Well... you've failed 15 of the last 15 drugs tests and spent 15 weekends in county. Do you think now might be a good time to try impatient treatment?"
But as far as using kids as an incentive? That sounds barbaric and unrealistic because (1) kids aren't bargaining chips, and (2) addiction is a difficult issue that takes time and, often, a few failures.
My favorite small world story goes a little like this. I got on a plane to start college at Deep Springs. I struck up a conversation with the girl sitting next to me. It turned out she'd gone to high school with my high school girlfriend's ex-boyfriend from a summer program. Two rows behind me, a guy heard me talking about Deep Springs, and said he'd gone to high school with a guy who was in the class ahead of me there (and since there's only 13 people in a class, that was a fairly unlikely event). The girl next to me pulled out a book by the then-poet laureate of the United States. In the seat in front of us was the then-poet laureate of the United States.
One time I was in Boston and I went to a party containing only people I knew from an eclectic web magazine. Small world!
25: I'd be curious about that research. On the one hand, I find twelve-step methodology/dogma troubling in some ways. On the other, anecdotally, I would have said it helps people quite a lot, though it can't do much for people whose lives are otherwise in shambles. (Ridiculously unrigorous sample consisting of clients and people I know in recovery.)
I've told this story here before, but on a plane back to Boston while I was at MIT, I got talking to the late-twenties? thirtyish? guy sitting next to me, and discovered that he'd known a lot of people who lived at my co-op eightish years before; not people I knew, but people I'd heard stories about and one or two of whom I'd met. Then the plane was delayed to the point that public transportation shut down, and being impoverished at the time, a cab would have been a huge expense for me. So he offered me a ride to the co-op.
It really was immensely convenient that the one time that taking a ride from a stranger was very useful, I'd happened to find out immediately before that we were part of the same social network.
Sure the drug test doesn't sound like the most fine grained evaluation tool but you need to remember that these kids aren't being taken from homes that are otherwise reasonably safe and healthy and mom or dad just happens to be struggling with some substance abuse. The DCFS and their ilk aren't hugely staffed and the reality is that the number of cases they see where it's "mom's really turned things around and gotten her shit together except that it just so happens that she's still smoking a ton of crack" is basically zero.
29: "The anonymous nature of Twelve Step programs makes it difficult to conduct rigorous evaluations to test their effectiveness. There are a few experimental studies that show that Twelve Step programs improve outcomes for alcoholics, but there is no experimental test of Twelve Step programs for illicit drug users, which makes it hard to assess how well these programs work for this group. And dropout rates are high: fewer than 20 percent of the abusers who begin a Twelve Step program continue to attend after three months--and while Twelve Step programs are intended to provide ongoing support, only a small minority (some estimates suggest as little as 5 percent) of those who attend will ever do so for as much as one year.... But Twelve Step programs play an important role. Many substance abusers who want help managing their addiction (or who are mandated to receive help) need a supportive environment to turn to. The challenge is to match abusers to a supportive environment that is appropriate for their needs, a challenge that grows when treatment resources are scant. The Twelve Step approach might not be ideal for everyone, but it is well suited to some. In cash-strapped jurisdictions (that is, most jurisdictions), the value of free treatment cannot be dismissed." (Kleiman, Mark A.R.; Caulkins, Jonathan; Hawken, Angela (2011-06-06). Drugs and Drug Policy:What Everyone Needs to Know (Kindle Locations 1739-1744). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.)
It would be more accurate to say that AA has some success with specific populations, but merely dumping everyone with a drug or alcohol offense into a 12 step program isn't the most effective way to deal with the issue.
merely dumping everyone with a drug or alcohol offense into a 12 step program isn't the most effective way to deal with the issue.
No, certainly not.
32. The people I know who have benefitted are basically integrated people who would drink uncontrollably.
They tell me about drug abusers who have turned around in 12-step groups. Sampling differently, the drug abusers I knew as a kid, including myself, cleaned up (or not) after some kind of nasty undeniable experience, not as a result of NA. The thing with drugs, the attendant problems seem more likely to lead to family ostracism than do drinking problems, and it's really hard to turn around without supportive people.
Further to 32 it's odd, but I can say at least locally it is prosecutors more than defense attorneys at whose insistence everyone ends up in (what I consider) a pretty uniformly ineffectual form of treatment. Not that I tend to have a dozen better suggestions, but for instance if I were to suggest counseling/med management to address underlying mental health issues for someone who appeared mostly to be self-medicating, the ADA would almost certainly say that only a Treatment Community residential program was an acceptable alternative to state prison. It feels like a higher level of care to a prosecutor, I guess or, less charitably: it's more like prison, retains some of the punitive spirit of a prison sentence.
I'm not sure if the paragraph quoted above is talking about something structured like TC model programs or just any program of attending twelve-step meetings. People do seem to leave residential treatment a lot because it's, well, awful. But again, the bigger missing piece is that twelve step isn't going to help you if the rest of your socioeconomic reality is lined up against you, and neither is anything else.
Is there any legal mechanism to make the outpatient treatment mandatory? In most states, there isn't through the mental health laws, but I don't know how that would work in as part of a sentence or plea bargain.
Elsewhere, Smearcase once said something like "It feels very hollow to keep prescribing therapy for people's whose problem is basically being fucked over by capitalism" and I thought it was very well put.
Is there any legal mechanism to make the outpatient treatment mandatory?
With criminal charges there is. It's a big part of drug court. A judge can say suspend a sentence and make the conditions of that suspension include treatment and other things. Failure to complete those conditions can mean they go to jail instead.
36: I'm not 100% sure I understand the question and of course IANAL but outpatient could be mandated as part of the plea process the same way inpatient can be, and sometimes is. Mind you, we're talking about outpatient substance abuse treatment as distinct from just going to meetings, which almost nobody would ever go for since it's anonymous and there are no urine tests to report &c.
37: I don't remember saying it but I certainly think it so yes I probably said that.
40: Well if you weren't taking your meds, your counselor at the program (after much browbeating from me) would write a letter saying so, and the judge would give you a stern talking to and put the case over for another update and possibly at some point say "you're not complying with what we agreed to" and send you to state prison.
Which is to say I'm sure they can't insist you take your meds but they can insist you stay in your program and your program may well ask you to leave if you're not taking your meds.
39.1: This was years ago, but we had people getting inpatient treatment as the only way to keep them on an antipsychotic regimen. However, it's possible none of them were actually charged after arrest and everything court-related was civil.
What Smearcase said. It can definitely be a part of the bargain to avoid incarceration. There wouldn't be forced medication but refusal could land you in jail or prison.
DUI sentences in California always include mandatory AA meetings, which struck me as bizarre because they're, you know, anonymous, so how exactly are they going to check that you didn't just fill the form out yourself?
23, 24: wait, really? Should I know who this is?
45: This requirement occurs in other states as well. Although it might be easy to forge signatures, I would have been way too paranoid to do so. Going to the meetings definitely felt like a punishment.
46: Just realized who it must be. Works at a hedge fund now, last I heard?
On the coincidences subthread:
I was in a laundromat in Florence and another guy came in to do his laundry and the first thing he said to me was: "I swear you were in my linguistics class." Turns out I was, three years before that.
I also ran into a guy who'd stayed at the same hostel as me in Bergen, Norway walking out of the downtown Berkeley BART station a couple years later.
None of that is as surprising as when I was on a boy scout trip to the Grand Canyon and one of the other kids' parents ran into a friend of his from elementary school who just happened to have stopped at the same scenic overlook point on a trip with his family.
49: Indeed. Goes by initials should confirm if you guessed right.
I've had essentially two out of the three from 50. Ran into someone who recognized me from college in Italy (in my case same dorm instead of same class and Venice instead of Florence). Ran into a friend from home while we were both at a famous national parks service locale (in my case a pizza place near mt Rushmore).
Small-world stuff:
When I moved to Glasgow to study, of the four flatmates I had who were Scottish, I'd gone to school with the cousin of one of them, and dated the ex g/friend of the boyfriend of another. Literal small world I suppose, as there are less than 5 million in the country.
Or, I met one of those flatmates in London a decade later for dinner, and we got to talking about a Channel 4 series (Psychos) we'd watched recently. I mentioned I'd acted in an amateur play with one of the actors. He was sitting at the next table.
Walked into backpacker hostel in far northern Queensland. In front of me: stunning girl I knew from Yorkshire Dales school. About 7 months later, on a student demo in central London, some cunt in a Morris Traveller drove over my foot. I wasn't even bruised, but angry enough to try and wrench the door open, yelling abuse at idiot driver guy. I look up and who do I see?
37
Elsewhere, Smearcase once said something like "It feels very hollow to keep prescribing therapy for people's whose problem is basically being fucked over by capitalism" and I thought it was very well put.
So if they won the lottery most of their problems would be solved?
A good friend of mine was married at Manhattan City Hall, a year or so before his formal wedding party; at the time the civil officiant called in two couples simultaneously. Each would in turn answer preliminary questions, be witnessed, affirm their marriage, etc. When the names were called that morning, the other groom turned out to be a man with whom my friend had shared a Hoboken apartment upon moving to the city - but from the day he moved out 'til the day they were married, years later, they hadn't met once.
55: If they and their extended family all secured high paying jobs that they were competent at, probably a lot of their problems would evaporate.
57
... high paying jobs ...
So what's the lower limit to qualify as high paying?
So if they won the lottery most of their problems would be solved?
Yes, in the same way global warming would be solved if we had a nice chilly day tomorrow. You are not this simplistic a thinker, are you? Don't troll me.
Winning the lottery is the goatse of capitalism, from what I can tell.
60
... You are not this simplistic a thinker, are you? ...
Blaming their problems on capitalism seems kind of simplistic to me. Not to mention unhelpful since capitalism doesn't appear likely to go away any time soon.
Right. And global warming doesn't look like it's going away either.
Which is kind of the point.
But yes, a nice socialist revolution in which everyone had enough for once and neither I nor most of my students had to worry about choosing between paying the power bill, feeding our kids, and buying our meds every month would go some distance toward solving our problems.
Thanks for asking.
60: You are not this simplistic a thinker, are you?
I'm glad you picked up the cudgel, Smearcase, because last night I briefly considered using this as a launching point for some non-constructive feedback to Shearer. But it was late and, you know .. d'oh, trolling. But my contribution would have gone something like this:
James, you ignorant slut, I am sure with but the smallest bit of reflection you yourself could have identified the several logical fallacies and rhetorical dodges contained in your faux clever rejoinder. But you went with it anyway. You also seem to be unusually interested in the apparent "intelligence" of folks and various classes of folk, so let me point out that your continual deployment of shit like this leads me to believe that you are an idiot (there well may be other behaviors which you exhibit that would lead me to a different conclusion, but this is what I have to work with).
Just thought I'd share.
Thanks JP. After 63, I concluded it was, in fact, just trolling and left it.
I wanted to thank all the people who answered. I have my own opinions about how visitation should (and generally doesn't) work in a child-centric way. I specifically wrote the post to be about a parent's right to see a child, but I think the child's right to stay connected to family and community are usually inadequately addressed at best, including by me.
I'm on a committee that's organizing and creating some of the trainings open to foster parents this year as I try to figure out what role I can play once we're not fostering anymore. There's nothing yet I can do at a policy level and quite likely never will be, but I'm trying to get a handle on best practices anyway even if at this point all that matters is what the particular judge I'm dealing with says.