Furthermore, the adult child victim should be compensated for punitive damages due to gross negligence caused by CPS,
Foster Care taker or alternative care taker other than “the true and natural” parents through their placement
in their new environment
.
Adult Children Victims placed into foster care according to state laws can remain in foster care until 21, and they
are not fully emancipated until they are 21 years of age and released out of the foster care system.
If the adult child victim was placed into a permanent adoptive home placement the adult child reaching the age of majority
which is 18, if the adopters haven’t petitioned a Probate Court to retain the guardianship of the adult child due to
mental or a physical disability, should be able to readdress the Court until the age of 21.
Any alternative care taker of a child, other than his or her “true and natural” parents should not be able
to petition The Probate or District Court, whatever Court handles Guardianship petitions should have clear and convincing
evidence that the adult child can in no way take care of his or herself at all. If the child is able to take care of his or
herself and his or her daily and basic needs, hold either a part time or full time job is not disabled enough to warrant that
the Probate or District Court award the alternative caretaker’s the adult child’s guardianship.
Adult child victims of CPS need to be taught independent living skills of money management, maintaining and keeping
clean their apartments, how to shop for food and clothes, how to wash their clothes, and how to manage their anger and learn
how to resolve their conflicts in a positive manner.
Anger and conflict management also falls under psycho-social skills as well, after all if these young paper orphans
are to be sent back out into polite society, they will need to learn these very important skills.
Every adult child victim of the CPS system needs access to vocational testing, evaluation, and training. This way once
they are released from the foster care system they will have a viable useable skill to help them enter into the workforce.
Assessment of every adult child victim either placed into foster care or adoptive care needs vocational testing, evaluation,
and training. In this way, neither the state nor the adopter can and will be able to run down to social security immediately
apply for Social Security SSI benefits for a child that is about to be loose from either foster care assistant payments or
adoptive assistant payments.
Nothing is more crueler than having a foster parent or an adoptive parent run down to Social Security and apply for
Social Security SSI payments and placing the adult child into extreme poverty. To place that child into extreme poverty is
cruel and unusual punishment.
The transition from adolescence to adulthood is hard enough on those of us that were not a part of the child welfare
system. Therefore, it cannot be easy on those adult child victims that have been placed into foster care or adoptive care
and not given the psycho-social skills and independent living skills to make it outside of the foster or adoptive care system.
While foster care children have one set of problems the children that have been adopted out of the child welfare system
have a whole set of different problems and many adoptive children come down with adoptive child syndrome.
Adoptive child syndrome is not imaginary like so many people think it is. A child adopted is not adopted or “taken
as one's own child, like the old definition means.
Today adoptive parents are allowed to relinquish their own parental rights to children they have adopted out of the
child welfare system and litigate a wrongful adoption lawsuit against the child welfare system, state, and anyone that has
to do with the adoption placement. The results of these lawsuits are that the child is replaced back into the child welfare
system, and the adoptive parents are awarded damages.
While foster children have no legal kin on record, adoptive children have a legal kin on record, but it is not the
child's “true and natural” parents.
Adoptive children have their own set of problems and when their adopters have children of their own they often place
exceedingly high expectations upon the child they have adopted and compared said children to one of their own natural children.
Some adopters come back and state later on that they regret adopting the child they have adopted out of the child welfare
system because the child has prolonged unresolved mental health or physical problems that caused them to spend more money
on what they were prepared to spend on a child they had taken out of the welfare system.
It is a common known fact that when a person adopts a child out of the child welfare system that the parents get reimbursed
for legal fees up to 2,000, and they are also eligible for adoptive assistant payments from the state. How much adoptive parents
get paid is according to the state and county they live in.
Adoption payments may be higher if the adopters adopt a child that is over the age of five year old, if the child is
disabled or a minority child, or comes from a group of two or more siblings and if the child is over the age of 12 year old.
Foster parents receive the same amount in the form of foster care payments and often the money is not used for the
care of the child but the foster parents as well as the adopters squander the money away on themselves.
The remedy to this is that once a child is placed into the foster care system and the state starts to pay foster care
payments that the Court appoint a trustee to oversee the foster care payments of children that are placed into foster care
and this will further ensure that the children in foster care get what they need.
Furthermore, once a child is placed into the foster care system, their case should be given and monitored even more
so once they are placed into a foster home. The foster care worker should be dedicated and willing to work with both the foster
parents and the child placed into foster care to ensure the child receives everything the child needs.
Foster care workers should be made to monitor their cases on a weekly basis, and they need to be made to understand
that weekly visits be made out to the foster home to ensure that the child is not being abused, neglected, by the foster parents.
Foster children reaching the age of 16, should be prepared for release, as soon as they turn 18 years of age.
The Transitional skills should be taught to all foster care children starting at the age of 16 and if need be continued
up until the age of 21 depending upon the maturity of the foster care child. Each foster care child needs to independently
to be tested and evaluated if they are ready to be transitioned out of foster care into polite society.
Maturity is the key here if the foster care child can take care of his or her basic needs in life, they have viable
useful skills to enter the workforce and can support and can take care of themselves.
They are able to resolve conflicts and manage their anger and to seek out community based services for mental and emotional
problems, and vocational services to help them obtain vocational skills and job placement. This way these children now adults
will not need to depend on Social Security SSI and live in extreme poverty.
Social Security should only be applied for if the child is so disabled that there is nothing he/she can be trained
for by state vocational services. All this must be well documented by psychiatrists, psychologists, vocational rehabilitation
service specialists and other persons with training in the mental health profession or if the foster care child is so disabled
due to a physical disability.
There are many different degrees of mental retardation and not all require that the adult child be placed on Social
Security SSI.
It is best if the adult child is mildly mentally retarded or has a developmental disability that is an onset before
the child's 22nd birthday that the adult child is given a thorough psychological testing and evaluation to determine the extent
of retardation. It may also help by understanding that the child has other problems besides mental retardation and a developmental
disability.
There is a world of difference between a developmental disability that develops before the child’s 22nd birthday
and a disability that happens after the child’s 22nd birthday.
Every foster and adopted child has the potential if they are given the right tools to bring it about.
An adoptive child may seem happy, but underneath, he or she is terribly unhappy. He or she is often expected to do
more to prove themselves to their adoptive parents. They are often treated entirely different from their adoptive parents
natural children.
Adoption no longer means “to take as one's own.” If that was the case anyone that adopts a child would
treat the child the same way as they treat their own natural children.
The creation of paper orphans has definitely got out of hand and the truth be known that most adoptive parents that
adopt a child out of the child welfare system has already looked into what benefits the child receive from the state and what
the adoption payments for the child are.
This is an incentive for people to adopt these children that should have never been taken away from their own parents
at all.
Every day thousands of parents throughout the United States are falsely accused of child abuse, child neglect, a child
that the state adjudges that is in the need of services and dependency, parents that have suffered economic setbacks, parents
that have committed non-violent crimes and parents that have what CPS terms as unresolved mental health problems and physical
health problems. If that doesn't take the cake they can use a little tool known as “substantial risk of harm”
which is their definition of poverty?
What is the true definition of an orphan it is a child that has lost their true and natural parents to death, natural
disaster, war, or auto accident? This means that their parents have a death certificate filed with the state that they died
in.
Adoption was meant to give these children that had lost their parents to death, natural disaster, war, or auto accident
and that are truly dead a second chance to have a mother and father and a new home rather than be placed into a group home,
foster home, boy's or girl's ranch, or any other alternate temporary home.
Foster care was meant to be temporary, and it was meant to be used as a short term placement until which time the child
could be returned home to his or her parents.
Foster care has now become a long term problem with no viable solution at hand. Foster care is a problem and a long
term problem and there needs to be a solution to it.
If an adoptive home can't be found for the children taken away from parents on false allegations and other unjust reasons
the state, judicial system, and CPS systems needs to be honest and truthful to the children that understand that they might
not be able to be placed into a permanent home due to any number of reasons. The main reason is age, minority, number of siblings,
or disability.
These children in these groups will linger in foster care until it is time for them to be set free from the foster
care system and most of them will have no where to go and have no family to turn too because the Court terminated the child's
parental rights to the parents.
Some will make it and some will not. Those that make will make it because they were given the tools to make it in the
real world and other will not because they were not given the tools to make it in the real world.
Foster Care and Adoption are not the answer the answer is that if the true and natural parents are given that what
they need to take care of their families there would be no need for foster care or adoption other than set forth above.
©United
Family Rights Association-Nationwide 2008.
