A publication called Rise recently found its way into the ADN post office box. You can learn about the organization that produces this newsletter here. It says Rise is

“...a magazine by and for parents who have been involved with the child welfare system. Its mission is to provide parents with true stories about the system’s role in families’ lives and information that will help parents advocate for themselves and their children.”

These are stories about parents who involuntarily lost their children due to charges of neglect or abuse… this is not about parents making a decision to relinquish an infant. I found this newsletter reasonably unbiased in its discussion about the responsibility of birth parents to make the changes necessary to be reunited with their children. Several parents who had successfully navigated the system and been reunited with their children applied their experience by becoming advocates for those who came after them. These same parents were the ones whose articles appeared in Rise… and they seemed to me to have a good sense of how the system should work to preserve families if at all possible, but move forward with alternatives if birth parents do not provide a safe environment for their children.

One mother who became a mentor asked her “clients” the same questions that were asked of her…

Do you love your children?

Of course, the parents inevitably answered...

I love them more than anything.

To which she responded...

If that is true, than why do you choose drugs over your children?


Other snippets of wisdom and reality found in this newsletter are worth mentioning…

• Birth families need to learn that foster families are not automatically the bad guys, and there were several stories about foster families continuing to support the children and the parents after the family was reunited.

• Having said that, however, there was also the recognition that families who were successful in regaining custody of their children often learned that their children had been abused in foster care. As much as that sickens me, I know it happens. The foster parents in my sphere are the most dedicated and child-oriented people I know… but I know there are some less-than-stellar foster homes out there.

• Many of the descriptions of biological parents trying to understand their rights and the way the system approached them were identical to the experiences many adoptive and foster families report. The system as a whole seems pretty clueless about attachment and bonding, whether it concerns biological families or adoptive families or foster families. But of course, we pretty much knew that already, didn’t we?

Check out this publication, and you can order free copies, too!

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