As if the good foster and adoptive parents on the planet don’t have enough to deal with in terms of parenting traumatized children, and as a foster parent, doing it handcuffed… articles like this one really help our cause. It is the story of a foster parent accused of attempting to smother her 6-week-old foster child while he was hospitalized. This article is doubly interesting because this gal was not only a foster parent, but a social worker.


Now, if all my books, references and resources were not in a box somewhere, awaiting transport to our new home in a couple of weeks, I’d dig out Foster Cline’s book Hope for High Risk and Rage-filled Children and provide you with a direct quote about his theories on why folks enter the social work profession. Before any social worker reading this blog thinks I am going to bash social workers… I’m not. But I found Foster’s theories very, very interesting.


He believes three out of four social workers enter the profession with significant baggage that probably affects their view of the “big picture”. He gave examples of the child who was maltreated who grows up to be the adult who enters social work to make it better for the next generation… but takes his or her maltreated child viewpoint into the job. It is hard for some of those folks to ever believe parents of attachment-affected kids, but rather they usually think the child is the victim. Foster provides other examples of the other categories but I can’t remember them this morning! (I hardly know my own name at this point.) Only one out of four social workers did Foster think have a pretty clean slate and would be fairly unbiased in their assessment of child and family dynamics. Scary, huh? This taking-your-history-into-the-job is not unique to social workers, but applies to policemen, firefighters, therapists and many other professionals...some of them, anyway.


And then you get someone like the gal mentioned in the article… they are considering a Munchhausen’s by Proxy diagnosis on her. And they are also considering reinvestigating the death of a previous foster child who died while in her care.


How often do foster parents get GOOD press? Much more newsworthy to trumpet the bad news... just what we need.