I rewrote the post from last month and the rewrite is running in today's MetroWest Daily News:
Four-year-old Rebecca Riley died in December after her parents gave her an overdose of medication, and DSS took a big hit. It’s natural when the system fails in such a dramatic way that criticism will follow. Commissioner Harry Spence, though, in a rare stance for a public official, held his ground when he said that the little girl didn’t fall through the cracks, citing agency procedures that were followed. He also said that, while child abuse deaths are rare in Massachusetts, they do occur and it’s not clear there’s much capacity in the department to alter that. In other words, mistakes happen. Mistakes happen in every quarter of life, and the thing about DSS is that the stakes are so high that when mistakes are made the repercussions are proportionally great and very visible.
DSS caseworkers are like the lineman on a football team. They spend their days in the trenches and you don’t notice them until they get beaten. And, like linemen, when they are beat it can be extremely visible. For the lineman, an opposing player gets through, and maybe it’s only one time during the entire game, but the pretty-boy quarterback is sacked and the opposing player does a victory dance on national TV. In the case of DSS, it usually means a child is dead and a politician is grandstanding for votes, or someone in the paper is calling for someone’s head.
What you don’t ever hear about are the daily struggles the typically overworked, underpaid caseworker has to manage. Most carry a caseload way over the recommended 18 cases. They have to. There are too many cases and too few caseworkers. They could have three or four major cases needing attention all in a day, all that would have serious repercussions like the death of a child if not handled correctly and immediately. Then there's the normal day-to-day work with clients, just keeping them going forward bit by bit. Keeping a father sober. Making sure a kid has some Christmas presents. Making sure a mother stays on her treatment plan. DSS, despite what people think, isn’t in the business of taking kids away from their parents. It’s in the business of first, protecting kids, and then trying to get parents to the point where they can have their kids back. No, it’s not a perfect system, but it is more perfect than the clients it deals with.
So as cold and calculating as it sounds, Rebecca Ripley didn’t slip through the cracks. When parents are as deeply troubled as hers, sometimes there just isn’t anything anyone can do. I do believe, though, that there are plenty of cases in Massachusetts that do slip through the cracks. There are plenty of cases that are marginal, that don’t get on the DSS radar screen. We all have seen families where things just seem kind of funny. A single, middle-aged parent continually parties hard and gets calls from her kid at two in the morning wondering where she is. What kind of life is that for a kid? It’s not life-threatening, but plenty of us know about the adverse affects of a lost childhood. Maybe there’s a kid who’s too clingy for her age. What’s that about? What’s causing that kid to not let go? With another kid you can see the sparks just snapping behind his eyes. Something’s not quite right; we know it. But there’s nothing we can do because we don’t have the hard proof.
The simple fact in our country is this: You need a license to own a dog, but anyone can have a kid. All it takes is one drunken night with a sailor, and a woman is pregnant and two people who never thought about taking care of another human being now are going to carry one of the biggest responsibilities on their shoulders. The child isn’t born out of love, but instead of selfish lust. And the selfishness remains throughout the course of the child’s life.
Many of the parents never felt the love of their own parents, so how are they expected to give love they never felt? And at best the child is cared for out of a practical sense of obligation. They are clothed, fed, sent to school, signed up for sports. All the bases are covered, the parent goes through the motions doing everything that all the other parents are doing, except that one special thing that makes the child know at the end of the day that she is wanted and loved. Kids know when that special something is missing; we all do. There’s no hiding it.
In the end, God willing, the child grows up with some serious, but treatable problems. As therapists like to say, the best thing parents can do is make sure their kids have enough sense to get themselves to the psychiatrist’s couch when they grow up. That means breaking established patterns that the dysfunctional parent brings to the family and facing some really nasty, deep-seated truths about themselves. It’s not easy. And it’s a problem for the individual flying under the DSS radar screen. The ones slipping through the cracks.
No comments:
Post a Comment