Comment by NoMoreNicksLeft
19 days ago
>This seems too cynical to me. I think child protection services (by whatever name in whatever country) do genuinely care about kids' welfare.
Individuals who work for such an agency may care about kids. They are human after all, humans often care (though not always). But an agency is a different beast, and is at best apathetic. They can be certainly be cruel, but never really kind. They can be hateful, but never loving. Agencies would cease to exist if they could express virtue, but they often thrive when expressing vice. This is not cynicism, just an understanding of the dynamics of groups of people. Virtue is maladaptive at those scales, it does not provide survival advantage.
This is not so much what matters. A child is fundamentally a learning system. How do you screw up a learning system? You dole out punishments and rewards based on things the learning system has no influence over. Good behavior randomly leads to rewards or punishment. Bad behavior randomly leads to reward or punishment. Random from the perspective of the child (obviously no other perspective matters for the child's development)
A fundamental property of any agency is that better or worse circumstances depend on availability ONLY. Availability of everything. Budget most of all, of course, but availability of "in-network" foster families, availability of foster parents determines if you get stuck in a group home or not. Whether you stay near your school. Group home availability determines if you get stuck in a short term group home or elsewhere (and thus have to move every 2 weeks for years). Occasionally foster kids are held literally in prison.
The reasons can be as valid or idiotic as you want, if they're not predictable AND under the influence of the child it will have disastrous effects on the psyche of the child.
And, frankly, this is rational: why should a foster child care about a society where an agency rips it out of it's family but doesn't provide a better alternative? What exactly do you expect to happen when that is done?
The only way CPS could theoretically function well is with 20%, 30% spare capacity that deliberately goes unused (which is the normal situation in families I might add. Parents aren't down to their last dollar. Parents aren't overloaded with kids. Even a drunkard dad is predictable, and if you can avoid them at the correct times ... Even an addict mom is predictable)