Counterpoint To Yesterday’s Post

As a result of ASFA, when the federal government gave money to states for the purpose of increasing adoptions, large numbers of kids did get good homes. Thirteen years later, hoards of those kids are re-entering the system because they came to parents with severe mental and emotional scars as a result of infant and child trauma, neglect, and abuse.

States refuse to help in any way with the astronomical mental health fees, such as $150,000 per year for residential care. Health insurance, Medicaid, and adopt subsidies pay nothing towards this care, not $1. Adoptive families are being forced to relinquish them back to the states to access astronomically expensive mental health care.

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Accentuate The Positive; Child-Parent Centers

Few problems facing children of all ages have been discussed as often as that of substandard education. More specifically, the American education system has been under attack from a number of sources.
However, the situation has yet to improve, possibly because the programs that work are not highlighted, instead only those that have failed are.

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Practical Strategies for Helping Troubled Adopted Children with Complex Histories: Focus On Anger Issues with Dr. Richard J. Delaney

Minnesota Adoption Resource Network Announces August Webinar Wednesday, August 25, 2010 12:00 PM to 1:30 PM Many adopted children are “multiply impacted” by prenatal exposure to drugs, and/or alcohol, by neglect and deprivation, complex trauma such as chronic child physical and sexual abuse, exposure to domestic violence, separation from or loss of significant other, and/or…

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International Symposium on Human Nature and Early Experience at Notre Dame

The University of Notre Dame’s Department of Psychology and Center for Children and Families invites you to a multidisciplinary symposium entitled “Human Nature and Early Experience: Addressing the ‘Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness’” October 10-12, 2010. This symposium brings together an international audience interested in innovative approaches to human development, children, families, parenting, and human evolution. Speakers will present their research on the relationship between caregiving practices and outcomes.

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Attitude Adjustment; Children Count

The good news is we have created workable models to heal terribly abused children. The bad news is our communities are shutting down services that would heal terribly abused children. This will cost us for generations to come.

We will only recover our place in the world as a productive first place nation, if we recapture our sense of humanity and concentrate on making children healthy enough to become productive citizens.

It is economically sound policy and caring about children is the right thing to do.

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Really Good Child Advocacy Links

AZ: Child abuse isn’t a priority in Arizona
Arizona Daily Star August 31, 2010
Michael is the sixth Pima County child to die in recent years while under the watch of state Child Protective Services. Each killing spurred outrage and demands that things be done better, that children be saved from the relatives who do them harm. “Reforms” were put in place in 2008. Little, it appears, has changed.

http://azstarnet.com/news/opinion/editorial/article_627221d8-c0b6-55f4-b03b-a663abc9e15c.html

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Back To School & In Support of Education

This child’s traumatic and fearful entry into an unprepared and under-resourced public school system is the tip of the iceberg.

The Prozac, Ritalin, and other psychotropic medications being prescribed to very young children is terrifically overused in many child protection systems. Judge Heidi Schellhas shared with me the pages and pages of very five, seven, and nine year old children that passed through her courtroom that were heavily medicated on antipsychotic drugs.

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Quality Of Life

There is little that comes easier for a sixty or seventy year old person when it comes to raising children.

The physical and mental demands made on grandparents by their younger charges are tremendous.

From the bottom of my heart, Thank You.

From the rest of us, let’s see to it that they and the children they care for, get adequate help from our communities to make their tasks a little easier and more successful.

Happy Grandparents Day in advance.

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