Word: fostering
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...places he had to leave were foster homes. He liked two of them because "they had a lot of bugs, and I like to catch bugs." Some of his foster parents were nice and some were mean: "They pinched me, or they would spank me." It is impossible for a visitor to tell what really went wrong, and who, if anyone, was "bad." But someone is listening carefully to Jason now. "It's good here because you get to talk to your social worker about stuff that's private," he explains. "You talk about things you miss, or things...
...descriptions. But when researchers publicized the stunting effects of institutional life, group care gave way to welfare programs that allowed children who were simply poor to remain with their mothers. Children who were "parentless" owing to abuse or neglect or death were remanded into a new system, foster care. By 1980 the Federal Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act had codified the general expert consensus: families were almost always preferable to institutions. Any stay in an institution must be as brief as possible and aimed at reuniting the child with a family -- biological, foster or adopted...
Around this mandate grew a loose spectrum of care. The first stop for the children was a foster family. Sometimes adoption followed, but often it did not, in large part because of an official disinclination to terminate parents' rights. Most of the children stayed in foster care, sometimes bouncing from one family to another until they were pronounced "failures." Only then were they sent to group residential programs or -- for more troubled children -- facilities like Hollygrove. In accordance with the act, children were intended to stay at residential-treatment centers no more than two years. After that, "stabilized" kids were...
...leaving massive carnage. The crack epidemic unleashed a new tide of kids on overburdened social-service agencies. Beleaguered child-welfare workers juggled huge case loads, and soon the newspapers were filled with horror stories not only about failures to remove children from dangerous homes but also about abuse in foster families and kids who bounced almost unnoticed from one inappropriate foster-care experience to the next. A report commissioned by the Reagan Administration in the late '80s concluded: "Foster care is intended to protect children from neglect and abuse at the hands of parents and other family members...
...category of "extraordinary-needs children" was invented and quickly overpopulated by children drug addicted at birth, sexually abused at an early age or impaired by fetal alcohol syndrome. Many were doomed to fail in foster care. Annette Baran, 67, a psychotherapist and adoption expert, recalls, "In 1945, when the Holocaust children began arriving from Europe, everyone was dying to rescue them. But these kids could not be in nuclear families. They were so traumatized they couldn't trust. They couldn't be vulnerable. This is true of today's kids...