The End of May

In an attempt to climb out of blogging doldrums, I'm posting two links here to commemorate the end of National Foster Care Month, and the end of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month.

Thought Leader Forum on Disproportionality: This is a very interesting link that someone just left in my comments. it's to a forum exploring issues in racial disproportionality in foster care. I will be going through it and listening to some of the sound clips soon. Here's one that I'm going to find especially interesting, as it touches on a local Atlanta issue: "Ray Torres, executive director of Casey Family Services, explores the impact of disproportionality on Hispanic foster children, as well as the urgent need for Hispanic foster parents to improve outcomes for these children".

Fallout Central: Along with the OCA, Fallout Central organized a swift, powerful and effective defense against recent racist attacks by DJs JV & Elvis. Their show was taken off the air. Yay for victory!

In personal news, things are moving pretty slowly. My husband and I have decided on a lifestyle change that is going to improve our home life while also preparing for the arrival of kids. We'd been getting into a habit of internet surfing at night. From now on once I get home from work, no more internet. We'll be doing more reading together on weekday nights. I know, it sounds like one solitary activity replacing the other, but we both think reading together is much more involving.

I finally finished Stephen Saylor's book, Roma, and I was not terribly impressed with it. I love, love, love his Gordianus the Finder mystery series, and this book was also all about Roman history, but organized as a James Michener-type multigenerational historic novel. Saylor is a great writer but this particular genre is not a good fit for him. Historical fiction and science fiction face exactly the same problem of how to impart background information to the reader. There are many potential solutions, and sometimes nakedly artificial ones are better than forced natural ones. In the detective format, background information comes along naturally as the detective follows the clues. But in Roma, there were way too many passages like this:

"Hello my friend Tortuous Prosus Historicus, what a coincidence running into you at this significant geographic location on the anniversary of an important event that happened fifty years ago to an ancestor of mine."

"Nice to see you too, Expositor Pompus Maximus. You know, a strange fit of amnesia came over me, and I seem to have forgotten all the important political and cultural events of the last fifty years, by Jupiter, so could you go ahead and give me a recap?"

Oh boy do I hate that stuff, but once I skimmed through those passages the rest of the book was not too bad. I do highly recommend his detective series, starting with Roman Blood.

He didn't make it

RIP.

A week later, victim of L5P shooting dies of injuries

Living with Gun Crime

I have some more depressing local news to report. A friend of my husband's was shot in the head late last night and is currently in critical condition. Here is the news brief.

It was a failed mugging. These happen a lot. A friend of mine was shot in the chest near that same corner (he's fine now).

I hate this kind of bullshit, I hate loser thugs who think a gun makes them big men, and I hate guns!

My husband is terribly upset, and we're really hoping his friend makes it through.

I have never experienced gun violence directly, thank goodness, but living in this kind of society means that it's a constant low-grade presence. I feel safe, but I have to make a lot of concessions to feel safe. It would be nice to live somewhere like Japan where you can walk down the street late at night without worrying that some random person will randomly murder you.

Personal Update

I'm still working up to that foster care in Japan post.

In adoption news, our homestudy has officially been state approved. We're now sending off inquiries at the rate of two a day. Some of them we have to take off the list pretty quickly. For example, there was a sibling group legal risk placement that we had to back out on because it turns out we're only licensed for legal risk placements in our own state. So far our caseworker has been very responsive and the process is slightly less painful than I thought it would be.

In local news, right now the whole city of Atlanta is like a giant nasty smoke-filled bar. Visibility is very low. I blame anti-environmentalist peckerheads.

The State of Georgia's own policies—or lack of policies—may be partially to blame for the past month's destruction of a quarter-million acres by wildfires in the southeastern part of the state. At least one prominent naturalist has suggested that the state has historically failed to properly manage the area's vast tracts of timberland.

[...]

Absolutely Horrifying Foster Abuse in South Dakota

I've been putting together a positive post about a Japanese organization promoting foster care. I happened to stumble across this abuse story in the meanwhile. I think it might pick up a lot of notoriety soon.

I have never heard of such cold and cerebral violation. I hope the abuser goes to jail for the rest of his disgusting life.

How can we give good foster parents the support they need, keep them from burning out, and keep the bad ones from being foster parents in the first place? It would make sense, if we aligned our national budget with better priorities, to pay foster parents a $30,000 base salary with frequent raises for experience, additional training and degrees in child development and special education. Then raise the bar like crazy. Perhaps an extended pre-licensing-approval period including a psychological exam?

Someone like Klaudt who becomes a foster parent so they can violate the most vulnerable children... this should never, ever be allowed to happen.

05/18/2007
Former SD Legislator Arrested On Sex Charges

A former South Dakota lawmaker is accused of molesting his own foster children and legislative pages.

Ted Klaudt, 49, a Republican rancher from Walker, faces a long list of charges: eight counts of rape, two counts of sexual exploitation of a minor, two counts of witness tampering, sexual contact with a person under 16, and stalking.

Court documents mention five possible victims. Three were foster children between the ages of 15 and 19 who lived with Klaudt's family. One is a cousin of one of those girls, and the fifth is a friend of Klaudt's daughter.

In the most disturbing accusation, the girls say Klaudt had them convinced they could earn up to $20,000 by donating their eggs to a fertility clinic. And even though he has no medical training, the girls say Klaudt did all the supposed "exams" and "procedures" himself.

Former State Representative Ted Klaudt is accused of manipulating, molesting, intimidating and threatening teenage girls who the state of South Dakota paid him to raise.

[...]

Another complaint, this time against Lou Dobbs

Left at CNN.com via this form:

I am writing regarding your news personality Lou Dobbs to complain about his racist insults against Latinos. I received an email from the Southern Poverty Law Center with some shocking information which I am quoting below:

"Despite being confronted with undisputed evidence to the contrary, Mr. Dobbs says he stands '100 percent behind' the claim that there have been 7,000 new cases of leprosy in the U.S. in recent years. What's more, he has attributed part of the increase to 'unscreened illegal immigrants.'

The truth, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is that new leprosy cases peaked in 1985 at 361 and have declined since, even as the number of undocumented immigrants has increased. The source for Dobbs' outrageous leprosy claim is an anti-immigration zealot who once publicly stated that 'most' Latino immigrant men 'molest girls under 12, although some specialize in boys, and some in nuns."

This email was quite alarming to me, because here I was thinking I lived in the 21st century. What's next? Will Dobbs accuse Latinos of spreading the bubonic plague and poisoning our water supply? Stealing babies and mutilating cattle? Perhaps his next plan is to for America to gather them up and burn them at the stake! I cannot believe a modern news channel is supporting this superstitious claptrap.

Until the hate-spewing Mr. Dobbs is taken off your channel, I will not watch it anymore, and will let others know the news contained therein is simply not trustworthy.

Study on Racial Disproportionality in Foster Care

Although there isn't a lot of actual news in this article, it's a great introduction to a very complicated subject. It's going to be interesting to see what the upcoming study says.

I believe there is a lot of systemic racism feeding into this issue. This doesn't mean that white social workers are all running around grabbing black babies. In fact, almost all the social workers I meet are black, but I'd be willing to bet that there is still major disproportionality in Atlanta counties. It's a systemic problem, and the solution is going to take a huge amount of collective work.

Report on Reasons Behind Disproportionate Number of Blacks in Foster Care Due Next Month
Date: Wednesday, May 16, 2007
By: Jackie Jones, BlackAmericaWeb.com

A long awaited investigation into the causes behind the disproportionate representation of blacks and other children of color in the foster care system is scheduled to be released in late June, according to the Government Accountability Office, which is conducting the probe.

Rep. Charles Rangel (D-Harlem) asked the GAO in September 2005 to investigate the causes of disproportionate placement and to recommend solutions following a report from the Congressional Research Office, which showed that black and American Indian children were about twice as likely to be among the children entering the foster care system than their overall presence in the general population.

According to that report, theories about racial disproportion in the child welfare system suggest that children of color are more likely to be poor or from single parent homes, which are considered risk factors for maltreatment; that they come into contact more often with social services officials who are likely to report such mistreatment; that biased assumptions likely spur social service employees to report children of color to child protective services, and that children of color have less access to preventive services or conditions that promote permanent placement.

However, the National Incidence Survey, which collects data to measure the mistreatment of children, including incidents not reported to Child Protective Services, have consistently found no link between race and the incident of maltreatment in the general population. National studies show there is no significant difference across racial lines for the number of children who are subjected to abuse and neglect.

[...]

Asian-Pacific Heritage Month PSA

Here's a PSA to get this blog back into a good mood. Go Beau Sia!

No More Entourage (it sucks now, anyways)

I sent a message via this form in response to an episode of Entourage I saw last night after the Sopranos.

Do the writers of the show realize that May is Asian-American heritage month? The last thing I want to see is another example of Asians treated as sex objects servicing their white masters.

I used to enjoy watching Entourage but I have grown increasingly disgusted with the treatment of Asians on the show. Lance's character seemed promising, but the only show on which his character really mattered was one where he was a prostituted sex object. And now the massage parlor episode...

I will not watch this show anymore.

NY Times article on a special needs adoption from China

There was an account in the New York Times today about a mother adopting from China. The child, presumed healthy, was in fact very ill, and after their first meeting, the diagnosis was made that the child would probably be paralyzed from the waist down for the rest of her life. The response is a heartwarming counterpoint to the depressing case I wrote about a few weeks ago.

My First Lesson in Motherhood

[...]

“In cases like these, we can make a rematch with another baby,” the one in charge said. The rest of the process would be expedited, and we would go home on schedule. We would simply leave with a different girl.

Months before, we had been presented with forms asking which disabilities would be acceptable in a prospective adoptee — what, in other words, did we think we could handle: H.I.V., hepatitis, blindness? We checked off a few mild problems that we knew could be swiftly corrected with proper medical care. As Matt had written on our application: “This will be our first child, and we feel we would need more experience to handle anything more serious.”

Now we faced surgeries, wheelchairs, colostomy bags. I envisioned our home in San Diego with ramps leading to the doors. I saw our lives as being utterly devoted to her care. How would we ever manage?

Yet how could we leave her? Had I given birth to a child with these conditions, I wouldn’t have left her in the hospital. Though a friend would later say, “Well, that’s different,” it wasn’t to me.

I pictured myself boarding the plane with some faceless replacement child and then explaining to friends and family that she wasn’t Natalie, that we had left Natalie in China because she was too damaged, that the deal had been a healthy baby and she wasn’t.

How would I face myself? How would I ever forget? I would always wonder what happened to Natalie.

I knew this was my test, my life’s worth distilled into a moment. I was shaking my head “No” before they finished explaining. We didn’t want another baby, I told them. We wanted our baby, the one sleeping right over there. “She’s our daughter,” I said. “We love her.”

Matt, who had been sitting on the bed, lifted his glasses, and, wiping the tears from his eyes, nodded in agreement.

[...]

The ending lines could have been written directly to me. Nothing is ever sure. We have to hope for strength.

We would not have chosen the burdens we anticipated, and in fact we declared upfront our inability to handle such burdens. But we are stronger than we thought.

Mother's Day Post

I had originally thought of a long post for the occasion but I just don't have the time. I'm installing a content management system for my mother's website. Not the most sentimental present, but I think it will be much appreciated.

I don't talk about my mother very much on this blog, probably because I have very little to complain about. I mean, I love my dad, but he's nuts. My mother is just an all-around superwoman and her accomplishments are amazing. I'm fortunate to have had a very close relationship with her for 100% of my life.

I'm also giving a donation on her behalf to a great organization called MADRE that advocates for women and families all over the world.

Fugees Soccer in Clarkston

As I mentioned in a post a while back, my mother has done some work tutoring refugee children. She got my husband to start doing it as well. He's been assigned to a boy in the 6th grade who also happens to be on the famous Fugees soccer team!

Here's an interview with their coach.

Here's their website.

These kids are doing great, but they still face a lot of hardship. Life is not suddenly all sunshine and roses now that they're in the US. Many of their families are dealing with PTSD on top of poverty.

I'm proud of my husband. He loves tutoring and has really gotten worked up about the positive male parenting stuff he learned at the conference last month. The volunteer manager is so happy to get a rare male tutor into the program.

Matching Meeting

Our matching meeting was reassuring. A lot of the stuff I knew already, but having our worker repeat it to us in a calm voice made a huge difference.

I now have a list of 30 children from photolistings, and some of them are two-brother and two-sister groups. Our worker explained that she'll send of inquiries and phone messages on all of them. Maybe a third of the caseworkers will get back to her. Often, the listings are out of date. She reminded us that diagnoses and need levels can be unreliable. An unscrupulous foster parent might be exaggerating the need level in order to get a higher state subsidy. Yikes! Conversely, a caseworker or foster parent may be downplaying the significance of certain issues for various reasons. She encouraged us to have her inquire on any child that fit our parameters even remotely.

I've heard stories of people sending off inquiries for hundreds of photolistings before getting back one response that the child's caseworker might be interested in them as a possible placement.

Age: 0-7. Almost all the children on our list are 4-7. Because we're not a medically qualified home, no serious physical disabilities. It's so sad how many of the kids are in wheelchairs or need to be fed through tubes. We don't know sign language or have any experience with severe visual impairment. No mental retardation, or other conditions that would mean the child would only be able to live independently with great difficulty. No FAS or full-blown RAD, or severe psychiatric disorders. Mild to moderate needs for pretty much everything else is fine. We feel especially confident about speech disorders and learning disabilities. We understand many children will have ADHD or ADHD-like behavior (this is a whole other topic I want to write a lot about later, because we have some pretty intense ADHD genes in one branch of our family), attachment issues, grief and loss, massive emotional trauma, tantrumming, etc., and we're doing as much training as possible on the issues we think we can handle. Many of our parameters have an easy justification: children with higher level needs usually need a full-time stay-at-home parent and will say that in their listings.

Applying these parameters still gives me a nasty feeling, like I'm cherry-picking... arggh. That's all I can say. I used to work with mentally handicapped children a long time ago and I especially feel bad about passing over them. They are wonderful. If I had a biological child like some of those children I worked with, I would be fully committed from the beginning... but I feel like I just couldn't dive into the middle.

The ten-year-old is back on our list, though. Our worker encouraged us to put him back in, and my husband and I leaped at the chance.

We had dinner with my parents tonight, and my stepfather asked me when I was going to bring home his fishing buddy! I tried to explain the intricacies of the coming matching stage. Damn, it's going to be tough.

Next week, we're going to another training seminar on transracial adoption. I can't wait to see what the audience demographic is going to be.

Weekend Update

I've been down in the dumps lately. A lot of little projects and long-term goals I have just don't seem to be going well... or going at all.

One major trigger is that I'm not doing ESL this semester. I'd dropped out of the teacher pool in advance in order to be around more for my father. Now that he's long since returned to independence and Japan, I really need to get back into it, or else pick up another volunteer teaching position. That would improve my mood enormously.

On Monday, we're having a matching meeting. We'll get to read through our homestudy and discuss the matching process. Our homestudy approval has been delayed for two annoying reasons: my husband's fingerprints were smudged on the criminal background check paperwork and had to be redone, and my drug test results weren't entered correctly by the lab company. Both of these got fixed quickly and we're now on the record as Mrs. Fresh and Mr. Clean. Amazingly, my husband's teenage mushroom enterprise failed to materialize in the background check. It must have been too old and too trifling. We still have a statement about it in the application, though.

I've sent our caseworker some photolistings I've been looking at. I ran them past my husband and we had to drop one off, which was very sad. I am sure we'll have many such difficult decisions in this coming stage. The boy was above our age range, at 10 years old. There was something about him that we would have been uniquely qualified for, but he also had a serious diagnosis of something that we're not very qualified for.

My husband pointed out that when the boy hit the difficult age of 12-13 he would have been with us for only a couple years, and the situation might get out of our control. That was something I'd never thought about, but it makes sense to me. I realized I might feel more secure parenting a kid on the other side of puberty, say 15 to 17.

It's terrifying jumping into this kind of stuff as new parents, knowing so little about the children who'll be coming to you.

I've heard that the first three years are crucial in childhood development. I've also heard conflicting ideas. "Raising a little kid is easy, just keep them warm and fed and hug them. The hard part is when they get older and start asking tough questions and going through identity crises."

My mother just tells me I was a perfect kid and being a mom was always like a walk in the park. It's nice to hear, but not especially helpful when it comes to triage and thinking of all the stuff that could go wrong.

I think we'll stick with the range of 0-7. In realistic terms this will probably translate to a 4-7 range, unless a foster-to-adopt situation comes up.

Housing Aid for Parents Adopting from the Foster Care System

I was recently made aware of this program because an adoptive mother on another forum recently bought her house this way. It's too bad that only New Jersey and a few other states have programs like this.

There are very strict rules about the pre-adoptive period when adopting from foster care. I've written about this before, but in Georgia, siblings are not allowed to share a bedroom past the age of three if they are of opposite sexes.

I can only imagine the hardship this causes in very high-density urban places. Let's say you have adopted a boy from the foster care system. The boy has two sisters, and a year later they also end up in the foster care system. The parent really wants to keep the family together, but they don't happen to have an extra bedroom in their small apartment. If they don't adopt the sisters, they could end up in an adoptive home several states away, or even a group home if they're older.

The parent could make do for a while. Perhaps they could screen off part of the living room and set up a sofabed. They'll work hard and in a year they'll be able to get a bigger place. Families make do like this all the time. It's not ideal but it's not terrible. However, pre-adoptive rules may disallow this kind of arrangement.

It would be almost impossible for a moderate income person living in an urban area to adopt some of the available sibling groups. Groups of five, six, seven kids... they deserve to stay together, but how? They get split up, or else stay together, but shuttled back and forth among the few foster families who have a really big house.

There's a great need for these kinds of programs.

Commissioner Levin Relaunches Program to Benefit At-Risk Youth

[...]

The expanded Home Ownership for Permanency Project (HOPP) was created by DCA and HMFA to help children placed in foster care due to the loss of one or both parents, abandonment, abuse or neglect. The program benefits children who are available for adoption but are unable to be placed due to a prospective family’s lack of adequate and affordable housing.

"HOPP gives families with poor credit the ability to make needed home improvements that will allow them to adopt or become legal guardians through the Division of Youth and Family Services or a state-licensed adoption agency," Commissioner Levin added. "Through the program, we can encourage adoption that would otherwise not be possible, allowing families to remain together and creating permanent homes for at-risk and special needs children."

HOPP is available to individuals and families who have made a commitment to adopt a child or children, and grandparents or relative caregivers who have legal guardianship. Eligible participants receive services such as below market-rate first mortgages, second mortgages for home improvements to accommodate the needs of adoptive children, and refinancing of first mortgages.

HOPP was created through a partnership with DCA, HMFA, the New Jersey Department of Human Services, the Division of Youth and Family Services, and the Catastrophic Illness in Children Relief Fund Commission.

"Together, we are lending a helping hand to adoptive or foster families by offering them financing to provide good homes for children in need," Commissioner Levin said. "This not only ensures the affordability of housing and rehabilitates homes for the state’s hardworking families – it rehabilitates the lives of children who are desperately in need of families that can love and care for them."

Soul Autopsy and China Adoption Disruption

It looks like most of the posts at CHEW have been taken down. Thank goodness. Maybe that woman understood the harm she was doing.

So I won't go into full detail describing the nastiness of the blog's tone.

The basics are that a woman starts the China adoption process. Halfway through she gives up and gets a child from Guatemala instead. Three weeks after bringing her child home from Guatemala, she changes her mind and decides to go through with a last-minute China adoption. After picking up her 18-month-old child, "M" she decides "M" is not healthy enough and returns her. By the way, I am not sure if I remember the age correctly but it was definitely between 1 and 2. The Chinese officials are understandably irritated and tell her she won't get a new child. On top of that, since she returned "M", due to the way the bureaucracy works, the little girl almost certainly won't be deemed adoptable again and is going to age out in an orphanage. Now, this woman has given up on getting a new child but she wants her money back.

Reading her account, two really wrong things jumped out at me.

1) A US pediatrician who makes a diagnosis of PDD autism over the phone. The woman calls him up, describes symptoms her child is exhibiting a few days after being taken into a strange environment, and he tells her to give the child back. Either she's lying or exaggerating to make herself feel better, or this doctor needs to be brought up on ethics charges.

I'd like to quote, with permission, sarahs_mom, a mother who adopted from China I know from another forum, who made some even-tempered but hard-hitting comments on the original blog posts.

Sarah was just like this woman describes M. We just came home from spending a wonderful morning at the beach where Sarah played in the sand... a major first for her. Sarah does not have autism. She has some behaviors that were pretty severe that have gone away and she has some we are working on. We have a generalist, a speech therapist and an occupational therapist and all of them think Sarah will be fine. If not, we will deal with it.

My heart breaks for M. It's clear she wasn't as bad as Sarah because Sarah did not make much progress at all in China. It wasn't until after 3 months that I started to have hope. By that lady's own account, this girl made progress.

[...]

This story should not be about her or her agency. It needs to be about M. It needs to be about people getting educated and trying to get the US off the list of families with the greatest number of disruptions in China.

[...]

I can tell you that Costa Rica closed its adoptions to US Citizens because of the antics of people like this woman. I wanted to adopt from there because that is where I was born and I called and spoke to PANI (their version of the CCAA) and was told that the corrupt agencies in the US and the unreasonable demands by the US citizens led them to stop adopting to the US. Until the US implements the Hague they will not allow a US citizen to adopt.

2) She kept making excuses for the fact that she didn't take the child back to America and disrupt there.

Now, this second one is the part I'm qualified to comment on. I have no problem sitting in judgment on this woman and telling her what she should have done. She should have taken "M" back to America. Maybe "M" really had special needs that were beyond the ability of this woman to care for. In that case, as so many others have been sadly forced to do, she could have made an adoption plan. She could have found another family that wanted to adopt "M" and legally relinquished her to them. She could have even left her at a damn fire station and run off, and it would have been better. I'm not saying she should have done something that extreme, since it probably would have been legally easier to do private relinquishment than go through the foster care system. Anyway, there would be many families (and I bet quite a few lower-income Chinese-American families) who would leap at the chance to adopt a baby like "M".

If you've been to photolisting sites before and are ready for the emotional sledgehammer effect, go to adoptuskids.org and do a search on 2-year-olds legally available for adoption in the foster care system. The tiny few you will find have needs that are so severe. Many will never walk or speak or feed themselves. Most of them will mention "lifetime" care, which means that if you adopt the child and they live longer than you, you need to figure out who else will take care of them. The reason there are so few very young children on these sites is that they are so quickly adopted that they don't need to be photolisted.

From what I've heard of other people with more knowledge of the subject, the fate of "M" if left in the orphanage is not very bright. But since this story has affected so many people, hopefully someone will find a way to get her out of the orphanage system and into a good foster or adoptive home in China.

I believe that when you have set out to adopt a child and have made that commitment and take them in your arms, you are responsible for them for the rest of their life. Even if you can't be a family for them, you are duty-bound to look out for their best interests. Both "M" and the first mother who gave her up are owed more than this.

Duty, honor, obligation: these are universal values.

Anyone who adopts from China should educate themselves to the fullest extent and think about what they would do in their worst-case scenario.

China adoptions: the good, the bad and the ugly

American Family just gave me a Thinking Blogger award! Thanks so much!

AmFam is one of the few China adoption blogs I regularly read, and I love the supportive but critical perspective found there. And this is an interesting coincidence, because I've just been thinking about China adoption a lot lately.

One thing that bothers me about China adoption is that so many of the parents don't seem to involve themselves in Asian-American issues. Asian-American culture isn't easy. It's deeply fragmented and often swirling with repressed anger and self-loathing. But forming a healthy Asian-American or Chinese-American identity strikes me as more important than "keeping a cultural connection" to China. I could be wrong on this, but it's definitely a criticism I've seen before.

There are parents out there (the good) like AmFam (or other non-Asian adoptive parents) that don't ignore that kind of stuff (the ugly).

And then there's the bad. The really, really, really bad.

I got caught up reading the mess over at cHEW. For those who haven't read it, it's the story of a woman who recently disrupted a Chinese adoption. The story points out a lot of things that are wrong with the system.

I'm going to do a long post really soon expressing what I think about the blog. As a semi-informed outsider to China adoptions, I don't come to it with an agenda, or anything at stake. I've also read a fair amount on the topic of disruption because it happens a LOT in the foster care system.

I believe that blog should be taken down, because it has some pretty horrible misinformation.

Stay tuned for more, in a much longer post...

Thanks again for the award, AmFam! I'd give it back to you if you didn't have it already. Also, I hate to become the blog where memes go to die, but I can't even begin to think about picking five of my thinkingest blogs.

Searches of Note

When I started off blogging I swore I would never do one of those "list the keywords people are typing to find my blog" posts. I now understand their sick appeal. I checked my keywords for the last week and found all kinds of neat stuff. Most of it was fairly self-explanatory, but here are some keywords of note, eached link to the part of the blog they uncover.

how can i distinguish people of chinese, japanese and koreans descent from each other
I answer this question quite clearly!

dinner of heroes
This sounds like a great Hong Kong movie.

get human tall by hanging upside down
Holy crap...

should families be allowed to adopt outside of their race
I hope so, or I'm in big trouble.

totally crap.com
Excuse me!

adopting traditions in japan
I answer this question tentatively.

are geisha hoes?
I answer this question exhaustively!

obama sounding like he's from the hood
How dare he.

Conference on Fathers and Men in the Foster Care System

Last week my husband and I went to an all-day conference to catch up on our hours.

We need ten training hours this year to maintain the foster license we'll be getting. Although we're not actually doing foster-to-adopt, we're still under similar rules during any pre-finalization placement. The nice thing about living in such a big city as Atlanta is that there are huge numbers of training opportunities and we can really pick and choose which ones sound most useful.

The conference was all about fatherhood and men. As is usual for these inside-perimeter training events, it was about 75% African-American. All the presenters were African-American men with experience in dual or triple roles: regular fathers, foster/adoptive fathers, child psychologists, social workers. The conference was just incredible and inspiring. It was also inclusive enough that anyone could benefit. Even if you were a white atheist lesbian couple with a daughter, you would go home with a lot of useful, positive ideas.

I did get a little nervous when an audience member happened to bring up the inerrancy of the King James version of the Bible within the first 15 minutes of the conference start. The presenter skipped around that, and from then on all mentions of God, Jesus and biblical values were placed in a context of personalized spiritual foundations.

How often do you see a discussion of fatherhood on a high level, coming from theory and daily living at the same time, that …

• treats nuclear heterosexual couples as the majority of families, but not the norm that everyone has to follow?
• includes religion, church life and spirituality without, again, invoking a norm everyone has to follow?
• spent part of the time exploring social problems specific to the African-American community without engaging in the deeply unproductive self-flagellation so often demanded by black uber-traditionalists?
• does not blame single mothers or women in general?
• praises men for good parenting, but demands higher expectations for them?

The main theme of the conference: the role of men is crucial in all aspects of parenting. Sadly, it's so crucial because so many children in the system have already been let down by men in their lives.

I'll try and summarize the information using my notes. This is not quite a summary from A to Z, but more of a highlighting of certain points that really connected for me.

1. A brief introduction was given by an Adoption Unit Manager with the state of Georgia. She introduced herself as a birth mother, who placed when she was 16 and was reunited in 2005, and had a lot of positive things to say about adoption. (I'm reporting this very neutrally).
2. The first presenter talks about baggage that we carry with us as parents. What are our expectations of fathers? How were we raised? We can't turn our children into versions of ourselves, even if they're biological.
3. Many kids in the system think dysfunction is function. However, even "regular" members of society have a tendency to think that way. An example of dysfunction as function… is male infidelity! Why is it so often excused or even praised?
4. An example of an older child who was adopted by a single father. The single father was caring but very strict. The adoption disrupted at the age of 14 when the teenage hormones started spiking up. Very difficult to hold on to a child that age who is 100% determined they'd be better off outside your home. Now in therapy, the child talks about missing the former adoptive father all the time; the boundaries were good for him. Sad story, but on the plus side, at least the child has around five years of positive "functional living" to draw strength from as he enters adulthood.
5. My husband notices some of the elderly foster mothers don't seem to really engage. I imagine they are thinking: "I've been doing this for decades and I'm not going to change a damn thing because some whippersnapper with a bunch of fancy letters after their name tells me to, I'm just going to tune out, get my training certificate and go home". On the other hand, some of them were very engaged and had great things to say. One elderly woman talked about spanking and how she stopped spanking (this is a huge hot-button topic for African-American foster parents) and forcefully said "when you KNOW better, you DO better". Great approach to education and an attitude I totally agree with.
6. Presenter notices sadly there are not a lot of foster fathers in the audience. Many single adoptive fathers and a few gay couples. Single pre-adoptive fathers all know they have to hustle when it comes to training. They are at the bottom of the barrel for placements, so they really need to shine. Overall, not that many pre-adoptives though.
7. During break I chat with the gay couple next to me. We're both liberal religionists and we trade some horror stories about not-so-liberal churches. In one church one of them went to as a child, any unmarried woman who got pregnant had to get up in front of church and apologize to the whole congregation. No such penalty for the father, of course.
8. A lot of talk about education and how crucial men are. A foster dad shares that he is the only male teacher at his school; he also serves as an informal counselor as other teachers send him their discipline cases. When men go to schools, teachers often assume something is wrong, someone got in trouble, but this should be a normal, everyday occurrence! Often janitors are the only males in early education; children often confide their problems to the janitor. If a father eats lunch in the cafeteria, children crowd around him in wonder. Our society does not value education and childcare enough, especially as a male pursuit. I'll give a very feminist "amen" to that!
9. Presenter talks about all the men that have mattered in his life, and all the things he does for his son. He gets a lot of praise for his fathering activities, but points out that what he is doing is not superhuman, and he's only getting a lot of that praise because of the general low expectations for men.
10. Idea of a "safe place" to encourage communication. Make sure they know, whatever the child says in that safe place, whatever bad names they use or emotions they express, they can't be punished for or yelled at in any way.
11. Talk about child custody battles; the practice of some women to deny visitation unless support is paid. Another hot-button topic touched on successfully. The focus is on cooperative parenting. Warns adoptive and foster parents that their relationship might "terminate" and if it does they really have to think about how they will approach cooperative parenting.
12. If children don't get positive male attention growing up, they often seek it later from unhealthy sources. Gangs. Pimps.
13. Sports are great but not a cure-all. The goal should be "structured extracurricular activity involving contact with males". Sport works great for some kids, but if they are not good in teams or physically adept, there are plenty of other options.
14. "it takes a village to raise a child… are you in that village?" What have you done to promote fatherhood/male parenting? If you have a male friend or family member who is not stepping up, if they're given low expectations or no expectations, exert some peer pressure on them.
15. Know what your values are and how you will communicate those values. Be consistent.
16. The second unit I went to was on grief and loss. My husband attended a different one, which was more of a rousing pep talk to our quiet meditation. We could hear them laughing it up next door.
17. Loss in the foster care system is usually "complicated loss". Family members are not dead, but "lost" or inaccessible.
18. Example: foster son who was 7 when his mother went to prison for a long time. Grieved her loss. Reunited when he was 23 and she came out of prison. Currently in jail for something that she did (he took the fall for her). Not a happy story or one with any clear lesson.
19. Men are taught from an early age not to verbalize grief. "Boys don't cry". We should instead give them the message to express their grief and loss. They should express it any way they want as long as it's not inappropriate (e.g. violence against property or people). Some examples: creating art to express loss, breaking up bricks in the backyard with a hammer.
20. Sometimes boys are told "you're the man of the family now" at age 3 or 4! That's too much to handle. You have to help them to be boys.
21. When children are moved from a home, they lose uncountable things. One example: every child has a "secret stash" of small objects that are highly meaningful, maybe under the floorboards or in a stuffed animal. When the social workers come to move the child, guess what gets left behind.
22. Make sure children are allowed to grieve. We kept returning to this vital point.

I met some people from our initial classes again, and had several interesting discussions with other people at the conference. Due to privacy concerns I don't want to get too in-depth about those, even though this blog is anonymous. I'll just say, even though we could fulfill training hours doing online courses and book reports, as some other people from our classes have chosen, I think these in-person events are invaluable. Learning about the foster care system always seems to involve a mix of shining inspiration and horrible despair.

This was such a fantastic event that I wish the material could be made mandatory for a wider variety of people.

My husband told me that the conference gave him a great confidence boost about his impending fatherhood.

Someone who makes me ashamed to be an Atlantan (more victim blaming)

Boortz is an extremely popular radio talk show host based in Atlanta.

Atlanta blogs today: Boortz berates Virginia Tech shooting victims

How far have we advanced in the wussification of America? I am now under attack by the left for wondering aloud why these students did so little to defend themselves. It seems that standing in terror waiting for your turn to be executed was the right thing to do, and any questions as to why 25 students didn’t try to rush and overpower Cho Seung-Hui are just examples of right wing maniacal bias. Surrender — comply — adjust. The doctrine of the left.

– Neal Boortz, explaining that unarmed college students who don’t team up to rush armed attackers are, in practice, spineless leftists. Silly me, I just thought they were innocent victims.

Goddamn that scum Neal Boortz. This is the kind of horrible thing I've heard before. I know what's going to happen: many of the families and friends of the victims are going to consume media obsessively even though they don't want to. They'll want to absorb as much as they can to try and make sense of it somehow... it's the natural human thing. They will never fully make sense of it but the pursuit itself offers some kind of solace. And they'll stumble across poison like Boortz is vomiting up and it will make them fall apart all over again.

Third Mom and Baggage have more direct, productive posts on things that can help. The Republic of T also offers a good calm reflection. I'm too upset right now to post anything positive and helpful so I should just stay off it for a while.