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Part of: NaeNae26's Journal 'Family Lost/Family Found' |
Date Posted: 05-27-2005 at 07:16 AM Comments(0) |
| I was in tears last night watching an abc special on 'Family Lost/Family Found'. I am taking classes to become a foster parent and last week they spoke on Kinship and Foster Care as options for the children taken out of parents homes. So anyway, I was already thinking along these lines. Last night I flip to this channel and was glued to the stories straight through. It was a kind of documentary on several separate families and what they went through in New Jersey throug DYFS. First off, they threw out statistics of how the majority of inner city citizens are AA, the majority of individuals receiving services from mental health and substance abuse centers are AA, the majority of teen girls in these areas having babies are AA and the list goes on and on. Not to mention the majority of babies and children in the foster care system are AA. So they show a short clip of Bill Cosby causing ripples among his own AA race and going into these areas and telling them the staight truth. He was very direct about how this situation needs to change. I was impressed. Well, back to the stories. The stories/families that they followed were through the grandmas point of view. They would interview them and ask what they thought went wrong with their kids. The grandmas would cry and say they did everything they could to raise them right, but they ended up having all their kids on drugs and sleeping around. They were a product of their environment even though the grandmas did everything they could to raise them right. Then the kids had babies with issues or normal and DYFS would have to take them about of the parents home. The social workers would take the kids to the grandparents doors and right in front of the kid ask them to take them or they are going into foster care and you may never see them again. Of course, the poor grandmas are going to say they will take them. How sad is that. My mom said that in most situations she things the individuals raising the kids who have been displaced should be a certain age group so the kids can get around and have healthy childhoods. So in one story, the grandma was taking care of ten grandchildren from her four kids who were running around doing their own thing. The grandma was 58. She was part of an inner city group of grandma's in the same situation who came together for a support group. She ended up having a stroke and her brain shut down. They had her on life support, but her four kids had to come in and take her off because she was already gone. Then one of the sons finally stood up and took control of the situation. He moved into his mom's home and raised all ten kids on his own while his sisters are running around and messed up. I was impressed! The stories were all sad, but it really showed the pros and cons of kinship. One grandma could not take her grandson out to do things and she would not let him out of the apartment except for school. He was not living a healthy life. Eventually DYFS placed him in a younger aunt's home and he was able to have a healthy environment. The grandma understood that he needed more than she could give. |
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