[phantomworker]

Well, often your gut feeling is the most important. It must be heart-wrenching for you to see this happen. Sometimes God works in mysterious ways with these kids. I really admire what you do.

[sweetliberty]

My gut feelings about these kids....and parents, is pretty good, but I always try to give the parents the benefit of the doubt...initially anyway, and the opportunity to fix the problems. All too often, they don't see that there IS a problem, or don't WANT to see it. In most cases these are people who do not take responsibility for their own actions, their priorities are really screwed up...and they don't want to change anything. A lot of times, their kids are their primary source of income. In Arkansas, very few people can qualify for Medicaid or HUD or any number of other government programs without kids. They don't admit it, but a significant number of these parents, and I use the term loosely, use their kids for their own gain and they are much more concerned about the loss of financial benefit to themsleves than they are about parenting their children.

And here's something else that really makes me upset. In some cases, the parents have legitimate problems that could be improved with the right kind of help, but do you think that the help is available to them? In most cases, no. The vast majority of our clients are dirt poor, even the ones that work steady. A lot of the time, it makes good sense to have a psychological evaluation on one or both parents to at least establish a baseline of functioning and potential. That gives us a much better handle on making referrals and recommendations. Well, we were just informed this past week that our budget for the area for the year will only allow for 10 psych evaluations. There are 9 counties in our area. We're not talking 10 per county or 10 per month or 10 sets of parents. We're talking 10 total, to be divided between 9 counties for the entire year!

Here's another good example. We have used to have what is called IFS (Intensive Family Services), which was the single most effective program going and actually did make a huge difference for quite a few families who were in the borderline range of functioning. The service still exists in the state, but not in our area....because our contract was cancelled and we haven't been able to get anyone to pick it up. Why, you ask? Because we didn't pay the bills. Why? Because supposedly there was no money. Meanwhile, this is the same area that can have these useless, mandatory "trainings" 4 times a year that require everyone in the area to lose a day's work. Most have to drive a significant distance at .39 a mile plus a $30 meal allowance. That's every caseworker, investigator, supervisor, aide, etc. in every county office in the area times 9 counties over a period of two days. I shudder to think what that bill runs. And what do we get out of it? NOTHING...well, except a lot of lost time that we really need to be doing other things. There is absolutely nothing that goes on in these meetings/trainings that could not be done as effectively, and certainly more efficiently, by using the the intereactive video set up that we use for other trainings.

Sorry about the ranting, but it just really frosts me how the very people who hire us to do a job set out to make it impossible for us to actually DO the job!