This article discusses how the mother’s emotional health is important for reunification or termination of parental rights cases, as well as other reasons. Why the issue needs to be addressed, by policymakers.
Losing Hope
Healing your bond when your children have been taken by CPS Child welfare system has caused many mothers to experience grief and loss of their children. The statistics are alarming. One and three mothers who have had contact with the child welfare system will lose their child at some point during her life. As a result, birth mothers need more support than they are currently receiving from the current system. This article discusses how the mother's emotional health is all-important for reunification or termination of parental rights cases, as well as other reasons why this issue needs to be addressed by policymakers. I'm a mother of two girls, which I lost due to the child welfare system. My goal today isn't to share the statistics of which were shown, over and over again. Instead, it's to share a solution. As a birth mother myself, I know the pain of losing a child to the foster care system, and it is excruciating. Many women go through this loss and don't get the support afterward. When we lose our children in the system, we often feel: “Like how I felt like I wanted to die,” or leaving questioning your worth? The answer might be that you weren't getting any counseling after they took your child\children. I did research and asked my prepaid court appointed lawyer. Looking back, she falsely didn't represent me nor was informed of my rights as a parent, forced into signing paperwork relinquishing my rights. The child welfare system in this country causes mothers to grieve their losses. The emotional and mental trauma that occurs when a mother is forcibly separated from her children at the time of relinquishment has been shown to be deeply traumatic. It can also lead to long-term grieving over the loss of one's child, which includes having to deal with unresolved grief and sorrow years after the separation took place. Leaving lingering effects and a huge impact on self-image, mental and physical health and not to mention a generational effect causing family bonding trauma. It is a never ending process and in turn, you must find other ways to fill the void. When left, that emptiness feeling when the separation occurs with their child was taken away. A a lot of time the system's case load is full of addicts. That then turns into a bigger addiction crisis. If anyone knows anything about addictions, “it's a bondage to a substance for a feeling of a missing void for a short term feeling” because it's easier for them to take care of others than themselves. I'm speaking for myself about my personal experience and the way I personally feel. I feel like I've had countless conversations with other addicts about this matter and feel like it's an adequate way to sum up addiction. This scenario can become one where addiction only gets worse In relation to the kids who were taken from their parents or family members at some point in time and this starts. Does this cycle continue to the child? If addiction is often a family disease, are we as a whole preventing or helping a child? It's said if the biological parents are addicted their child has a 2\3 higher rate of being an addict themselves, although genes, environment, social environment, and mental health play a part in addiction. My question is, parent, are we really preventing addicted parents? Removing children from an environment based on another's perspective of a choice determining what's expected to be considered okay? Do we really know without physical proof seeing an event played out that home is really suffering? Or are the expectations and sometimes personal perspective wrong or right? Simply a matter of an opinion. The fact is if you ask foster parents, adoptees, adoptive parents, birth parents, and anyone involved they will all share one thing in common, they felt a shame and questioned their experience in being involved. Uncertainties of an outcome, a change in one's favor. Many times we forget about generational side effects. We are mother's, daughters and sisters, creating a gap between the roots of our DNA and leaving behind questions with no answer. The answer here is to end closed adoption, have open contact with adoptees and birth parents and biological families. Avoiding a problem, adoption, isn't the fix to the problem. This often isn't a happy ending to their stories. The article discussed the loss of mothers who are grieving the loss of their children to the child welfare system. The article suggests that open adoption is the solution to the loss of children. This is the importance of family ties and it's bonds, to insure parents and adoptees a sense of belonging and a new journey to move forward. — LaNaya Schmoker (Birth Mother)
HOME 
Leave a Reply