What Have You Done For Me Lately?

On the other end of this link is a story about prison rape, a form of assault endemic to the institution. But what interested me about the story were these two passages:

When John was 4 years old, his single mother decided that she couldn’t take care of him anymore, so she left him inside their apartment and set the building on fire.

and,

During his freshman year, John reconnected with his mother. She still took drugs and worked as a prostitute, and she convinced him to help her shoplift.

In a past life, when I world with children who had been taken out of their homes for abuse and/or neglect and placed in residential treatment, you came to recognize the parents like these; the ones for whom their children were only useful as resources. And it was quite easy, once you put two and two together.

The first two, as it were, was made up of the children's stories about their parent(s), or the background that you would get when a new child came into the facility. Despite what people might have you believe, parents do not always have an instinct to look after their children. Some parents enlisted their children as thieves, as "John's" had, others used their children a prostitutes. And some, well, it gets worse.

But there's more to it than that, and the second two came when it was time for family visits. There was a familiar pattern to "resourcers" (for lack of a better term), and it went like this: Firstly, they would never arrive on-time. This is common. Many parents (and usually the same ones every time) would be late, and some would simply never show at all. Secondly, they tended to limit their interaction with their children, preferring to attempt to wheedle things out of the staff members with shopworn hard-luck stories. Thirdly, they tended to leave once they'd had enough to eat. Lastly (although I could jest as easily have led with this), they only came to those events where there would be food. If you didn't promise a complete meal, they weren't interested. They tended to skip the before meal spend-time-with-your-children part of things, but tried to show up before the food was actually served, and once they were done eating, they were headed for the door.

And these two elements tended to go hand-in-hand. The parents whose children had been taken away from them because the parent(s) had been using them for their own ends tended to be the same parents who were always most concerned with showing up to be fed. One couple went so far as to ask if they could continue to receive invitations for family events once their children had moved on to other placements.

Of course, I would encounter people like this in other contexts. When I was a foster care caseworker, a few of the foster parents I worked with were perpetually angry that the state never paid them enough to make a profit. It seemed odd to me that people actually believed that the state would pay foster families enough to care for a child and leave a significant amount left over, but there they were, nevertheless.

In the beginning, it was easy to be angry with them. They were walking embodiments of Not Doing Things Right. But eventually, that anger burned itself out, and they just became another of the more annoying sorts of parent that I would deal with. But I only had to deal with them occasionally. Trying to figure out a way to prepare their children for life after institutions: that was the everyday job. And it demanded all of my attention, to the point that I had none to spare for the people who had created the mess that needed cleaning up.