Police found Brandy McCaslin and her children ages 11, 6, and 10 months old dead inside the Verdigris home following a three-hour standoff.
Police found Brandy McCaslin and her children ages 11, 6, and 10 months old dead inside the Verdigris home following a three-hour standoff.
Foster parent here and guess how many times I wanted to punch a person from the system in the face when they said “the parental bond is the most important thing” to explain away unfathomably shitty parenting.
I work in mental health and have a fair bit of professional experience with parents and the CPS system in my state. What a fucking shit show. With both CPS workers and foster parents, it seems like a 50/50 toss up whether you get a good one or a bad one. Having a system for this sort of thing is obviously better than not having one, but damn do we need to improve upon ours.
Sadly, I don’t think that’s going to happen anytime soon. CPS mostly deals with poorer families and no one gives a shit about them.
I gotta think that part of the problem is even finding someone who would want to be a CPS worker in the first place, considering the kind of work it is and the kind of situations they deal with.
Put another way, It’s like how prison guards tend to be of low quality - no one decent wants the job.
From what I’ve seen, the problem with the CPS worker workforce is that a significant portion of them are people who suffered abuse during their own childhoods and are out on a mission to catch child abusers as a proxy for their own trauma. These folks are zealots and do not have the objectivity necessary to make unbiased assessments in their work. I’ve seen them make decisions about certain parents very early on in their cases, labeling them either “good” or “bad” and refusing to either reassess or acknowledge that people can change.
Thankfully, they’re not all like that and I’ve worked with some very good CPS workers as well. But then you have the arguably more important problem of the fact that all of these workers (like most mental health workers and teachers) are horribly overtaxed with too many cases and too few resources to support them. Underfunding and lack of personnel make even the best efforts of the good workers hamstringed. So, the system is broken, but not because no good worker wants to do the work.