Suffer the Little Children

Geoff Strong explains why we need to change the way we foster children from wrecked families:

Our experience is of a system driven by an ideology that the solution for all children is to stay with their biological family at just about any cost, and that this will somehow be possible if resources are thrown at the problems.

Foster or permanent care parents are made to feel the least important part of the solution.

Even before we met her, Chloe gave us a clue as to what was really missing in the life of such a child. When told there was a couple willing to bring her up, her first question was: “Can I call them Mum and Dad?”

In the welfare homes where she lived she never had anyone that she could honour with those very ordinary titles. It was only then that I realised such small things could be so important.

But she had a more powerful heart-tearing surprise. About a month after moving in she hit us with a question we had never expected. She asked: “Is it OK if I love you?”

Chloe had ended up as a state ward aged about two after being taken from her birth family along with her older brother and sister after a long history of neglect and abuse.

It took six years before all the attempts at family reunification and appeals against the children’s removal had been exhausted. By then the two older children were considered unsuitable for family placement.

From Andrew Bolt.