I read the whole thing, and the one thing that stuck out to me the most is that this Diane Baird is an disgusting person. I had such a visceral reaction to this article, and her use of pseudoscience to take advantage of foster parents and rip children away from their birth parents is absolutely horrific. The more factors you load onto one variable (in this case, eye contact), the less it means, and she uses people's lack of understanding about that to draw absolutely insane conclusions that no competent and ethical psychologist would.
this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2023
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She's apparently made it her life's work to abuse the vulnerability of both bio and foster parents by leveraging her "knowledge" in a way that favors kids being permanently separated from their bio family. There are certainly circumstances that warrant that kind of separation, but she and that lawyer's office seem to be leading a campaign of child separation. That's pure evil.
Yeah wow. What a horrible person. She has no care for the children's well-being as evidenced by the conclusion where she attributes the child doing well to "heroing on".
I’m gonna be really shallow and judgmental and just say her picture is creepy, too. What a bizarre pose and expression.
This is such a horrible situation for all involved. Understandably the birth parents and blood relatives want to have the right to raise their kids especially when they clean up their act and find themselves in a better place to raise their kids and make things right for their family.
On the other hand I imagine it has to be heartbreaking to foster a child who was unwanted or removed from an abusive situation and raise them for several years like your own only to have a court come in and tear that child that you were raising and caring for away because you're not their real parents.
The whole thing from both sides is just awful.
To be fair, it is implied that foster care is temporary, no? Like you have to know what you're getting yourself into
I know a lot of people who foster. There’s generally two situations, ‘foster to adopt’ and ‘emergency placements.’
Emergency placements are when a 13 year old shows up in the middle of the night with a trash bag holding the sum total of their belongings because they were in a dangerous situation and while the courts figure things out they need a place to stay for a couple weeks.
Long term fosterage is often done with the hope to one day welcome the child legally into your family. I know two different young couples who raised infants into toddlers and had to ‘give them back’ to families who were strangers to the child.
They knew the risks, that doesn’t mean it hurts any less
You're right, but imo when you know the risks of what you're doing its pretty vile to rip a child from their parents especially in this case where the parents clearly worked very hard to get clean and get their shit together for the kid.
Yup. You knew what you were getting into. That, best case scenario from the child's pov, is going back to their real family. Always.
That's not normal. Foster placements are almost always intended to get the child home. The parents don't stop being the parents and usually have a list of conditions to follow, this might be drug testing, improving the home, etc.
It can be quick, a couple of weeks, but it's often slow. With having to get off drugs they have to do X amount of weekly drug tests to prove they're long term clean, 6 months isn't uncommon for serious addicts.
This baby was intended to go home and they knew it.
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This is true, but that doesn’t make it any easier. Especially since it’s not always a guarantee
I'd imagine it is incredibly hard, and that entering with the knowledge the arrangement will only be temporary is unlikely to make handing back a child any easier emotionally, but from the article it seems some foster parents have been using the foster system as a means to circumvent the far more onerous adoption system, rather than merely finding themselves alarmed that a child they took in is being returned somewhere they believe to be unsuitable, and willing to fight such a return.
Have no issue with the latter, even if their beliefs happen to be incorrect (that's for the courts to sort out), but the former is an intentional manipulation of the lives of vulnerable children from the outset - before a placement has been initiated, before attachments have formed within a foster family, before the foster parents know any details of the lives of the biological parents & before any indications could have arisen that it would be in the best interests of a particular child to remain with their foster parents.
The whole area is a maze of incredibly difficult decisions, and I don't think there are obvious solutions, other than to remind judges in the family courts to be particularly cautious about the advice of experts & the behavioural theories they invoke.
This is awful. Foster caring is such an important job and assesments should rule out people who want to steal babies from their families.