A Continuing Saga Of Wrong-Headed Family Welfare Policies

The Case of Marie and Her Sons

Some years ago I left the Department of Social Services (child and family welfare agency) for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts because I found it to be as much, if not more, harm to my clients than the original harm that called the family's situation to the attention of DSS in the first place. Depsite all of the work done by good social workers, counselors, lawyers and various community agencies, the system built around providing attention and intervention to families in crisis is munged. The sway of politics has more to do with policy than a sound, principled approach to addressing the needs of families, children, foster care, adoption, etc.

In one political era (usually the length of time one political party exerts control over the government) the pendulum swings to the left, in another the pendulum swings right. While so many folks are brow beating the public with their own sense of morality, the basic needs of the children and parents of these families are fodder.

We need to have clear guidelines--absent of political football approaches--that focus on the needs of the family, placing the needs of the children first, and the family as a unit second, and the needs of the parents as individuals last. But the article below demonstrates the way that no justice, decency or service is being done in our family and child welfare systems.

To make the letter look right, Marie needed a computer, so one day in March she walked to a public library. There she composed at the keyboard, but the writing didn’t go well. She had the first of her five children at 13, spent part of her teenage years in a group home and part in the home of her crack-addicted mother and never reached high school. “You know,” she told me later, “the way I sound sometimes doesn’t sound like it’s supposed to.” But she wasn’t leaving that library without the letter she needed. College students were studying nearby, and Marie, who is 29, interrupted one of the girls. To this stranger, she confided her situation. And soon, with the girl’s help, she began again.

“To whom it may concern,” she typed, “I am writing to you to appeal for the return of my children.” Marie (I am using her middle name, as well as the middle names of her children, to protect their privacy) lost her kids, all of them boys, to the State of Connecticut more than a year ago. The Stamford office of Connecticut’s Department of Children and Families has placed the boys in an array of shelters and foster homes; it has recently found potential adoptive parents for four of them; and earlier this month it filed a petition to end Marie’s role and rights as a mother. If the department, known as D.C.F., succeeds in court, she will lose her children forever.

For the time being, Marie is still entitled to spend about one hour each week with her sons. I first met her in early April, in a visiting room at the Stamford D.C.F. office. A cloth wall-hanging of panda bears in a classroom adorned one scuffed wall, and crayon scribbles covered another. Christopher, who is 3 and Marie’s second-youngest, was sick that day and had stayed at his foster home, and Joseph, at 16 Marie’s oldest, had fled during an outing with the family’s D.C.F. social worker, Annette Johnson, the previous October and was nowhere to be found. So just three of the boys gathered around Marie, who is Puerto Rican-American and wore her long fingernails painted pink, her dark hair pulled into a ponytail with a powder blue tie, a gold nose stud, several tattoos, blue jeans and tan work boots. Between the ponytail and her short, square build, she looked half cheerleader and half fullback. She managed her cranky blond year-and-a-half-old baby, Diomedes, in her lap, and played a game called Jumpin’ Monkeys with Antonio and Anthony, who are 8 and 6 and shot plastic monkeys from a spring-loaded launcher, trying to hook them in the branches of a little tree. In her low, raspy voice she gave them advice when they missed (“Papi, you got to hit it soft”) and congratulated them when they scored (“You got a banana!”).

“Give me a kiss,” she said, and Anthony, who has black bangs, dark almond-shaped eyes and delicately curved lips that sometimes spread into a beaming smile, did. “Let me try for Mommy,” he demanded, and climbed into Marie’s lap alongside Diomedes. He launched a monkey for his mother.

“Can I use the bathroom?” Antonio asked.

“Don’t touch the toilet seat,” Marie warned.

“Could you read us a book before we go?” Anthony begged, time running out. “Please, now?”

Marie took a book from a table and began steadily: “Simba and Nala at play.”

Her steadiness lasted through goodbye. But when Johnson loaded the boys into a blue D.C.F. van to be delivered back to their foster parents, and when the van turned out of the parking lot and disappeared, Marie started to tremble. “They’re going T.P.R.,” she said, referring to the department’s plan to file for termination of parental rights. “I did everything they asked me. I’m trying to believe this is what God wants, but I can’t believe this.” She said that at birth, Christopher had tested positive for marijuana, that Diomedes had been born positive for marijuana and cocaine. “I fell in the game. I messed up, I know I messed up, but all I did was the drug use. I addressed everything. I’ve been clean for a year. I went inpatient. I have the paperwork. My kids are going to be taken from me for good.”

I asked if I could accompany her home. It was a chance to see her house the way the D.C.F. social workers often see the homes of their clients, showing up with no appointment, no warning, allowing no time for the clients to prepare, to clean, to hide the depths of their lives’ disarray. I was ready for dilapidation outside, decay within. We took a taxi through Stamford, a city of about 120,000 with glass-sheathed corporate headquarters, beachfront mansions and crouched, decrepit houses fronted by rusty fences. A bright white picket fence surrounded Marie’s small home, on a modest, resilient block. The pale yellow clapboard facade looked freshly painted, and inside the wood floors gleamed. So did every surface in the kitchen, except the refrigerator, which was covered with fruit-shaped magnets — pears, strawberries — and pictures of the children. I asked how long she had lived here, wondering if she had just moved in, if there hadn’t been time for the place to become run-down.

“Three years,” she said. Disability payments for epilepsy and money from the family of Diomedes’s father helped pay the rent. She showed me the spotless highchair that awaited Diomedes’s return, and in the tiny bedrooms downstairs, the children’s beds and toy box and shelves of precisely aligned kids’ DVD’s, all looking like a display in a furniture store. At the kitchen table, she laid out letters and drug-test results from the state-supported treatment programs she had attended, all proving that for the past year, since a few months after Diomedes’s birth in December 2004, she had stayed drug free. One program noted Marie’s “motivation and commitment to her recovery.” Another wrote that she “has been a pleasure to work with” and “appears to be doing everything that she can to get her kids back home with her.”

Marie knew that the department doubted not only that she had enough strength to stay clear of drugs but also that she was fully committed to the boys and that she had enough skills to successfully mother them — especially Antonio, who has attention deficit and hyperactive disorder. She showed me more of her library work: a three-page printout from the Web called “The Gift of A.D.H.D.” Alongside her drug-test results she set a gold-trimmed graduation certificate from a state-financed “nurturing/parenting” class, where, a letter from the program described, she had been taught “positive parenting technique” over a minimum of seven two-hour sessions.

The next week, at a special outdoor visit with her kids in the park across from the D.C.F. office, Marie arrived with a pink plastic serving bowl full of homemade chicken, yellow rice and peas. She doled out the picnic lunch in red and blue bowls and plucked a small bone from a piece of chicken so Christopher wouldn’t choke. After they ate, Antonio and Anthony played with a Wiffle Ball and bat she had bought for the occasion, and after the visit, the social worker who had quietly supervised it, Beverly Maybury, who was not the family’s regular worker but had spent 17 years with the child-welfare systems of New York and Connecticut, said, “People are complicated.” Maybury is an African-American woman with a nose stud much like Marie’s, gold streaks in her hair and a taste for beaded-and-embroidered jeans. “Maybe some of these people at D.C.F., they think it’s cut-and-dried, but people who’ve seen some of the spice of life, been through some things, they know it’s not that way. Those kids are bonded. Maybe someone’s going to say she’s not parenting, but look at that food, that looked pretty parenting to me. We can’t just throw people away. She’s clean. She’s showing up for her visits. She’s playing with them. You’ve seen that house, it’s spick-and-span.”

During the visit, Anthony noticed something different about Marie in her midriff-baring T-shirt. “Mommy,” he asked as she gathered up the bowls, “you got another baby in your belly?”

She did, and soon learning this, the department decided it would petition the court while the baby was still in the womb. Based on “predictive neglect,” it planned to claim her sixth child, permanently, the instant it was born.

Pictures of Marie’s children decorate Annette Johnson’s cubicle. Perched atop one of the cubicle’s partitions, above the piles of case reports on her desk, is a Peter Pan Happy Meal pirate ship, a gift from Antonio on a day Johnson treated him to a McDonald’s lunch. A miniature Ninja Turtle, a present from Anthony, sits nearby, beside a figurine of a girl playing the fiddle, an offering from another child Johnson watched over for a time.

Around her, the 30 or so staff cubicles and eight supervisors’ offices form a Stamford D.C.F. headquarters that looks nothing like it did when Ken Mysogland, D.C.F.’s Stamford-area director, started out as a social worker 17 years ago. Back then, he recalls, the electricity was sketchy, the lighting bleak, the phones unreliable. Workers shared broken desks as each strained to deal with caseloads of 50 or 60 at a time. Spurred by a 1989 lawsuit and 1991 federal court consent decree, the department has gradually transformed itself. Its budget has tripled in the last decade, and it appears close to working itself free of court-imposed goals and monitoring. At the Stamford office, all is bright, all is functional; the staff members are each responsible for 15 to 20 cases, and though the work can be frantic, the social workers seem to have at least a bit of time to weigh decisions about the families they investigate and oversee.

Most of these families live in hard-pressed sections of the city and its surrounding towns, in a part of the state that lies beside Long Island Sound and is celebrated as “the gold coast.”

When Johnson, who is black and in her mid-40’s, first came to the department two and a half years ago, she desperately hoped that she would never take a child from its family forever. For the child, she explained, her thickly braided hair falling in a spirited way over the collar of a pinstriped suit, the complete and final failure of a parent can be more traumatic than a parent’s death.

Before following her mother into social work in the early 1990’s, Johnson was a marketer for Procter & Gamble, making sure that the company’s cleaning products were well placed on store shelves. Yet she had, in fact, seen plenty of what Maybury called “the spice of life,” and not only while doing social work with the homeless, substance abusers and mentally ill before joining D.C.F. Her younger brother had been a drug trafficker’s mule: he swallowed a cocaine-filled condom, the rubber tore open inside him and he died of the overdose. Six of her cousins died because of addictions to heroin: from overdoses, from AIDS.

Johnson’s age and master’s degree in social work make her an exception among her Stamford colleagues; even her brief time in child welfare makes her “senior staff,” she said, joking. Across the room, a 24-year-old with a year’s experience was getting ready to seize a newborn, whose enraged mother had tested positive for PCP when she checked into the hospital to deliver. “You want me to get a car seat?” a colleague called out, helping the 24-year-old get ready. Child seats lie on file cabinets, beside desks, beneath stairs, waiting.

Turnover in the office is constant and quick. “I’ve seen someone leave a Post-it on her computer, ‘I quit,’ and never come back,” Ilia Morrows, a 29-year-old who has spent four years with the department, said. It wasn’t only the acute awareness that a child could be killed if you made the wrong decision — and that it could be you being named on the local TV news. It wasn’t only everyone’s knowledge of the summer before last: three deaths — a 14-year-old’s suicide; an infant’s suffocation, possibly accidental but definitely suspicious; a toddler’s baking to death in the back of a car — two in families under the watch of the Stamford office, the third in a family that had just moved to Stamford after being investigated and cleared by another D.C.F. office. It wasn’t only the knowledge of 7-year-old Nixzmary Brown, who had recently been allowed to remain with her family by New York City’s child-welfare system and was reportedly beaten to death by her stepfather. It was also the extreme authority, the burden of holding it, of wielding it, the prerogative to enter a family’s home and split it apart. “It’s almost hard to comprehend that we have that ability,” Morrows said. “It’s so huge.”

The staff is made up of investigators and treatment workers, with investigators handling the initial unannounced knock on the door after a report of abuse or neglect comes into the state’s hot line. Investigators have up to 45 days to decide whether to take a kid into D.C.F. custody, or to leave him at home but compel the family to accept the department’s long-term help, or to deem a report unsubstantiated and let the case go. During this time they can enter the house again and again and interview school nurses and neighbors, anyone who might know how well or terribly a child is being cared for. To take control of a child for longer than four days, the department needs a judge’s approval, but if a social worker senses that a child is at immediate risk, a supervisor’s signature on a form known as a “96-hour hold” will let her walk away with that boy, that girl or all the children in the house.

Johnson is in the treatment unit, which inherits cases from investigations and focuses not only on the protracted evaluation of families but also on guiding and, ideally, strengthening them so that children don’t have to be removed or so that those who have been seized can be returned. (“Reunification,” as it is called, is the outcome for about half of the 3,000 children D.C.F. takes into its care each year statewide.) A treatment worker might send an abusive father to group counseling for men who batter, a mother like Marie to a hospital program for substance abusers, a child to individual therapy, all with private providers under contract with D.C.F. But to be part of the treatment unit does not mean that you don’t take kids. Morrows, who is now in investigations, told me that during her first year with D.C.F., in another office, she had a treatment case with a family whose three children — an 11-year-old girl and boys who were 9 and 8 — suddenly confided that their father, an alcoholic, was coming home drunk, waking them and forcing them to kneel on rice or punching them in the stomach. If they doubled over from his blow, he commanded them to stand bent that way for long periods until he allowed them to straighten.

“You can’t do this, you can’t take my babies!” Morrows remembered the mother pleading, collapsed in agony on the floor, when Morrows tried to invoke a 96-hour hold after the father refused to move out of the home and the mother would not leave with the kids. “Do something!” the mother screamed at her husband. Outside the apartment, neighbors gathered in the hallway of the run-down complex — ominously, Morrows said, because D.C.F. is a known and not very welcome agency in the city’s poor neighborhoods. Slightly built and self-restrained, she waited. On her cellphone with her office, she was told that the police were on their way. But now, amid the mother’s sobbing, the kids told Morrows they would not go, that everything they’d said was a lie. The police, when at last they arrived, had to grab the children, lifting them in their arms. Two of the kids clung to the frame of the front door with both hands as they were carried out. The cops had to pry at their fingers, wrestle their bodies through.

“I almost started giggling hysterically,” Morrows said, describing how she nearly broke down. “I really wanted to sit on the floor with Mom and cry.” Then she recalled her feelings hours later, in the aftermath of what had been her first removal: “I was shocked at what my job is, at the career choice that I had made. I went home thinking, How do I have this power? In this state, in this country, the government can come in and take your kids. Tell you you’re unfit to take care of your kids. It was earth-shattering to me. It rocks you to your core.”

Johnson, in her work with Marie and her boys, longed to turn away from this power. Talking about Marie, she didn’t begin with the present, with the clean drug tests; she began, emphatically, with the past, focusing on the crack addiction of Marie’s mother. From that, as Johnson told it, anarchy had taken hold of Marie’s life: the first child at 13; the group home; charges for robbery; time spent incarcerated; marriage to a drug dealer; the dealer’s fathering Antonio and Anthony before being deported to the Dominican Republic; the birth of Christopher, whose father was a drug addict (three men had fathered Marie’s first four boys); the marijuana in Christopher’s system when he was born; the addict’s trying to rob Marie in front of the children, wielding a gun, beating her.

Johnson wasn’t yet with the department at the time of this assault, but she knows the case record deeply and, at her desk in the spring, recounted the history to me in quiet tones of pain and near-helplessness. Above her head, Antonio’s pirate ship sailed off toward the horizon, while Anthony’s Ninja Turtle gazed down on her like a minute talisman the child had given to his protector to ensure that she do well on his behalf. In October 2003, a few weeks after the assault by Christopher’s father, Marie’s oldest son, Joseph, then 13, ran away from home and was gone for three days. “He alleges,” the case record states, “that mother hits and punches him in the face. . .that mother has kept him home from school to watch younger children and clean house while she goes somewhere.” Then, in December 2004, Marie had Diomedes, by yet another man, and the newborn, six weeks premature and weighing three and a half pounds, had cocaine running through his body and brain. Soon the case was Johnson’s, and it wasn’t long before she was praying over a prospect, T.P.R., she could hardly bear to contemplate. “I asked God to enlighten me,” she said. “I asked God for help.”

Parens patriae is the legal principle, about four centuries old, that lies behind cases like Marie’s. It lies behind the child-welfare investigations into the families of three and a half million children in the United States in 2004 (the last year for which statistics are available). Each year around 300,000 children are temporarily removed and 65,000 to 70,000 of those children are ultimately taken from their parents forever, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. Parens patriae is the doctrine that empowers government institutions to venture into the intimate realm of child-rearing and effectively deputizes social workers like Annette Johnson and Ilia Morrows to knock on the doors of family homes and gain entry. Translated from Latin, parens patriae means “parent of the country”; it entrusted the king of England to be the “general guardian,” in the words of the 18th-century legal scholar William Blackstone, “of all infants, idiots and lunatics,” of all who were helpless.... Please read the rest of the article.