![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gnimaerdThe attitude of this article has me SO pissed off.
For those of you who can't be bothered to read all of it - there's a couple of young kids (a five year old boy and a four year old girl) being adopted, in Edinburgh, by a male/male gay couple. Only the second gay adoption to happen here.
The grandparents of the kids are kicking up a stink about it because they don't want the kids raised 'without a mother figure'.
The article mentions that social workers 'admitted' that several heterosexual couples had also been interested in adopting the kids.
The emphasis is on how tragic it is that the kids are being seperated from their grandparents and the grandparents' wishes about what kind of home they should go into have been ignored.
Okay, there are a lot of complex issues here, so lets take it from the top, okay?
The kids mother - grandparents daughter - is/was an addict. She couldn't take care of the pair - who were toddlers at the time - so the grandparents took them, but they struggled to juggle caring for their addicted daughter and the toddlers. They turned to social services for help. Social services offered these people multiple options but told them repeatedly to keep their daughter out of their home or at the very least, stop her from seeing the children. Apparently, her behaviour was erratic and sometimes dangerous and clearly this was NOT good for the children.
The grandparents refused to keep their daughter away from the children - things at home deteriorated. The grandparents have a number of health issues to boot that were making things difficult.
Eventually, the grandparents were persuaded to allow the kids to go into foster-care. For two years (TWO YEARS) the kids stayed in a series (A SERIES) of foster homes with regular visits by the grandparents. The article paints this as a 'happy time'.
Let me tell you something here, f-listies.
Two years, being bounced from temporary foster home to temporary foster home is NOT a 'happy time' for a three-five year old child. THIS is precisely why Reactive Attachment Disorder is so prevelant in young children in british foster care - they have NO stability, NO constant parent figure, NO ONE to whom they can form a close, healthy attachment and trust never to leave them again.
Sensibly, Social Services recommended that the children be adopted into permenant homes. This was, most definitely, the right call. The kids were getting older - for every year they get past five, their chances of being adopted drop by a good twenty percent or so - by the time a kid gets to ten, adoption is EXTREMELY unlikely and by the time they get to thirteen most kids will simply age out of foster care. Besides which, children that age NEED stability. You DON'T just let kids be bounced back and forth from home to home like that.
The council were not happy that the grandparents could provide for the children's needs - they had health problems, they were older, and, beyond that, they obviously weren't prepaired to keep the children safe from their self-destructing mother. The grandparents fought the courts to get custody of the kids and lost.
Yes, this is horrible. And I feel for the grandparents. I also don't doubt that they probably weren't treated very well by social services, simply because social services suck at treating birth families with respect and concern (we have family friends who have adopted and were treated horrendously - and complained about the treatment of their children's birth family, also, since they WANTED an open adoption so the kids could stay in contact with their bio-relatives but many of them were scared off by social workers threatening all sorts).
But what PISSES ME OFF is how it is so very, VERY awful that the children are being adopted by, shock horror, a GAY COUPLE.
OMG. STOP PRESS. TWO MEN RAISING KIDS.
Firstly, let me tell you something (as someone who wants to adopt and has been researching the issue on and off since she was fifteen) social services' first priority is keeping birth families together. I read so many blogs (and those are just my favourites of the non-password protected ones) by social workers, foster carers and adoptive parents and what is VERY clear is how much work goes into reunification, often times when actually, it's NOT in the best interests of the child and much MORE to do with what the birth family want.
So I gaurentee you, if these kids COULD be raised by their birth mum or grandparents, they would be back with them. Despite how shittily they get treated, bio-families are social services' first priority. The fact that these kids spent TWO YEARS in foster care should tell us something here. What do you think the council were DOING in that time? Sitting on their hands?! NO. They were almost certainly working their ASSES off trying to make it safe for those kids to go back to their grandparents' home. THAT is the reason kids SPEND so long in foster care in the first place - social workers HAVE to give that amount of time for bio-families to get their shit together.
The fact that, in two years, the grandparents could not get those kids back, suggests very strongly that they simply were NOT able to provide a suitable enviroment for these children to grow up in, whether it be by their health problems, their age, or various other reasons which I bet you they didn't mention to these reporters.
The fact that they are also not being 'guarenteed' contact with the children is, um, not news. One of the biggest problems with the adoption system as it stands is that once a child's parental rights are terminated, the bio-family has no rights to that child. That would be the POINT of 'termination of parental rights'. Is that right or wrong? It's a grey area and it needs looking at more closely because the very nature of the issue means that we CANNOT make blanket judgements where it is always right and always wrong.
But like I said - it's NOT news. When they agreed to stop fighting for custody - when they agreed to terminate parental rights - the grandparents would have been TOLD this. It has NOTHING to do with them calling in the press; it has nothing to do with it being a gay couple; the grandparents agreed to terminate parental rights and THAT is the deal that occurs when that happens.
It sucks - but it is NOT news.
And since the grandparents couldn't look after the kids and agreed to terminate parental rights, the council found some people to give these children a permenant, loving home.
A pair of men in a happy, stable relationship, who were able to provide a safe, stable enviroment, with a princess bedspread for the little girl and wellington boots for them both.
Do you KNOW how hard it is for ANYONE in this country to get approved to adopt from foster care? Because let me tell you, it's frakking HARD. You have to jump through SO MANY HOOPS. You have to pass SO MANY background checks, have SO MANY inspections, go through COUNTLESS interviews, psych exams, social worker after social worker who WILL treat you like a pedophile out to buy children to molest - and on top of that, to be a GAY COUPLE you THEN have to hope like hell that you don't encounter a judge, a social worker, a councilman, an adoption worker, an adoption panel with just ONE person on it who thinks that a child is best raised by straight people.
If these people were approved to adopt these children, they fucking EARNED IT, let me tell you. And the fact that they made it over several heterosexual couples means that they really were the best people for these specific children. The matching process is not random. Most foster-adopt couples go through the process of application for several children and get turned back in favour of another more suitable family several times before they are properly matched with a child.
And the stink the grandparents are causing that there will be 'no mother figure'?!
Oh for fucks sake. The steriotyping and homophobia encapsulated in that sentence REALLY bothers me. Firstly, it implies that only women can be maternal, loving, gentle 'mother-figures'. Secondly, it implies that ANY woman in a heterosexual relationship MUST be the gentle, loving, maternal one (these people have NOT met MY mother) - that role couldn't POSSIBLY be filled by the father of the children and women couldn't POSSIBLY be anything but 'maternal'. Secondly, it implies that men are fundamentally incapable of playing a maternal role in a family unit - which is BULLSHIT. Some of the most mother-like figures I've ever had have been MALE!
And you know the worst part?
This adoption could fall apart because of this stink. The children could be taken AWAY from their new parents and bounced into ANOTHER foster home and no doubt spend ANOTHER year in care waiting to be matched with another couple. It's bad enough for the poor guys who just want to love and care for these children - the poor BABIES involved here could once more have the world COMPLETELY destabilised because a pair of adults who claim to love them would rather they spend their lives in foster care than be raised by gay men. I don't even want to THINK about what this could do to their attachment process, their ability to trust people, their emotional development - I mean seriously, is it REALLY any wonder that childrne in foster care have so many emotional problems?
Ugh, this whole thing just PISSES ME OFF.
For those of you who can't be bothered to read all of it - there's a couple of young kids (a five year old boy and a four year old girl) being adopted, in Edinburgh, by a male/male gay couple. Only the second gay adoption to happen here.
The grandparents of the kids are kicking up a stink about it because they don't want the kids raised 'without a mother figure'.
The article mentions that social workers 'admitted' that several heterosexual couples had also been interested in adopting the kids.
The emphasis is on how tragic it is that the kids are being seperated from their grandparents and the grandparents' wishes about what kind of home they should go into have been ignored.
Okay, there are a lot of complex issues here, so lets take it from the top, okay?
The kids mother - grandparents daughter - is/was an addict. She couldn't take care of the pair - who were toddlers at the time - so the grandparents took them, but they struggled to juggle caring for their addicted daughter and the toddlers. They turned to social services for help. Social services offered these people multiple options but told them repeatedly to keep their daughter out of their home or at the very least, stop her from seeing the children. Apparently, her behaviour was erratic and sometimes dangerous and clearly this was NOT good for the children.
The grandparents refused to keep their daughter away from the children - things at home deteriorated. The grandparents have a number of health issues to boot that were making things difficult.
Eventually, the grandparents were persuaded to allow the kids to go into foster-care. For two years (TWO YEARS) the kids stayed in a series (A SERIES) of foster homes with regular visits by the grandparents. The article paints this as a 'happy time'.
Let me tell you something here, f-listies.
Two years, being bounced from temporary foster home to temporary foster home is NOT a 'happy time' for a three-five year old child. THIS is precisely why Reactive Attachment Disorder is so prevelant in young children in british foster care - they have NO stability, NO constant parent figure, NO ONE to whom they can form a close, healthy attachment and trust never to leave them again.
Sensibly, Social Services recommended that the children be adopted into permenant homes. This was, most definitely, the right call. The kids were getting older - for every year they get past five, their chances of being adopted drop by a good twenty percent or so - by the time a kid gets to ten, adoption is EXTREMELY unlikely and by the time they get to thirteen most kids will simply age out of foster care. Besides which, children that age NEED stability. You DON'T just let kids be bounced back and forth from home to home like that.
The council were not happy that the grandparents could provide for the children's needs - they had health problems, they were older, and, beyond that, they obviously weren't prepaired to keep the children safe from their self-destructing mother. The grandparents fought the courts to get custody of the kids and lost.
Yes, this is horrible. And I feel for the grandparents. I also don't doubt that they probably weren't treated very well by social services, simply because social services suck at treating birth families with respect and concern (we have family friends who have adopted and were treated horrendously - and complained about the treatment of their children's birth family, also, since they WANTED an open adoption so the kids could stay in contact with their bio-relatives but many of them were scared off by social workers threatening all sorts).
But what PISSES ME OFF is how it is so very, VERY awful that the children are being adopted by, shock horror, a GAY COUPLE.
OMG. STOP PRESS. TWO MEN RAISING KIDS.
Firstly, let me tell you something (as someone who wants to adopt and has been researching the issue on and off since she was fifteen) social services' first priority is keeping birth families together. I read so many blogs (and those are just my favourites of the non-password protected ones) by social workers, foster carers and adoptive parents and what is VERY clear is how much work goes into reunification, often times when actually, it's NOT in the best interests of the child and much MORE to do with what the birth family want.
So I gaurentee you, if these kids COULD be raised by their birth mum or grandparents, they would be back with them. Despite how shittily they get treated, bio-families are social services' first priority. The fact that these kids spent TWO YEARS in foster care should tell us something here. What do you think the council were DOING in that time? Sitting on their hands?! NO. They were almost certainly working their ASSES off trying to make it safe for those kids to go back to their grandparents' home. THAT is the reason kids SPEND so long in foster care in the first place - social workers HAVE to give that amount of time for bio-families to get their shit together.
The fact that, in two years, the grandparents could not get those kids back, suggests very strongly that they simply were NOT able to provide a suitable enviroment for these children to grow up in, whether it be by their health problems, their age, or various other reasons which I bet you they didn't mention to these reporters.
The fact that they are also not being 'guarenteed' contact with the children is, um, not news. One of the biggest problems with the adoption system as it stands is that once a child's parental rights are terminated, the bio-family has no rights to that child. That would be the POINT of 'termination of parental rights'. Is that right or wrong? It's a grey area and it needs looking at more closely because the very nature of the issue means that we CANNOT make blanket judgements where it is always right and always wrong.
But like I said - it's NOT news. When they agreed to stop fighting for custody - when they agreed to terminate parental rights - the grandparents would have been TOLD this. It has NOTHING to do with them calling in the press; it has nothing to do with it being a gay couple; the grandparents agreed to terminate parental rights and THAT is the deal that occurs when that happens.
It sucks - but it is NOT news.
And since the grandparents couldn't look after the kids and agreed to terminate parental rights, the council found some people to give these children a permenant, loving home.
A pair of men in a happy, stable relationship, who were able to provide a safe, stable enviroment, with a princess bedspread for the little girl and wellington boots for them both.
Do you KNOW how hard it is for ANYONE in this country to get approved to adopt from foster care? Because let me tell you, it's frakking HARD. You have to jump through SO MANY HOOPS. You have to pass SO MANY background checks, have SO MANY inspections, go through COUNTLESS interviews, psych exams, social worker after social worker who WILL treat you like a pedophile out to buy children to molest - and on top of that, to be a GAY COUPLE you THEN have to hope like hell that you don't encounter a judge, a social worker, a councilman, an adoption worker, an adoption panel with just ONE person on it who thinks that a child is best raised by straight people.
If these people were approved to adopt these children, they fucking EARNED IT, let me tell you. And the fact that they made it over several heterosexual couples means that they really were the best people for these specific children. The matching process is not random. Most foster-adopt couples go through the process of application for several children and get turned back in favour of another more suitable family several times before they are properly matched with a child.
And the stink the grandparents are causing that there will be 'no mother figure'?!
Oh for fucks sake. The steriotyping and homophobia encapsulated in that sentence REALLY bothers me. Firstly, it implies that only women can be maternal, loving, gentle 'mother-figures'. Secondly, it implies that ANY woman in a heterosexual relationship MUST be the gentle, loving, maternal one (these people have NOT met MY mother) - that role couldn't POSSIBLY be filled by the father of the children and women couldn't POSSIBLY be anything but 'maternal'. Secondly, it implies that men are fundamentally incapable of playing a maternal role in a family unit - which is BULLSHIT. Some of the most mother-like figures I've ever had have been MALE!
And you know the worst part?
This adoption could fall apart because of this stink. The children could be taken AWAY from their new parents and bounced into ANOTHER foster home and no doubt spend ANOTHER year in care waiting to be matched with another couple. It's bad enough for the poor guys who just want to love and care for these children - the poor BABIES involved here could once more have the world COMPLETELY destabilised because a pair of adults who claim to love them would rather they spend their lives in foster care than be raised by gay men. I don't even want to THINK about what this could do to their attachment process, their ability to trust people, their emotional development - I mean seriously, is it REALLY any wonder that childrne in foster care have so many emotional problems?
Ugh, this whole thing just PISSES ME OFF.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-01-30 04:58 pm (UTC)You do not know how many arguments I got into over this very topic when I went to Catholic school, and you've hit all of the major points.
It's the "lacking a maternal figure" that really irks me -- it just upholds the stereotype that men can't have any feelings, which is not true at all. My father tends to be the more nuturing one in our house, so that argument just makes me mad. Also, I've seen the lack of a paternal figure argument way less with lesbians (although I have seen it). So, it's natural or OK for women to have masculine qualities, but men can't have feminine qualities?
Ugh, the ignorance.
no subject
Date: 2009-01-30 05:32 pm (UTC)It's just part of this whole culture that teaches men NOT to have close, nurturing relationships with their kids and places the burden of child-rearing soley on the mother's shoulders. It's not good for men, or women, or children. Women are over-burdened, men feel emmasculated if they are too close to their kids, and kids learn a similarly dysfunctional set of rules about how unequal parenting is meant to be.
The reason men can't have feminine qualities is because they are 'sinking' to the level of a woman, and women are lesser beings. The reason lesbians are often more accepted by society is because they are 'aspiring' to be male. Society values male-ness over female-ness. That is why homophobia and mysogny are so closely linked. As long as women are viewed as 'less than', hatred for gay men will continue to permiate our culture.
no subject
Date: 2009-01-30 05:42 pm (UTC)The problem is that feminism only did half of the job -- sure, women are more free to act more masculine. Women can have good jobs or play sports. But men aren't free to act more feminine. Male nurses, stay at home fathers, and men who enjoy feminine activities like sewing are ridiculed, and often are assumed to be gay. I remember a Friends episode with a male nanny, and the guys tried to draw a comparison between a female in an unsuitable job, and couldn't do it without being sexist. But making fun of a man because he's in a nurturing role wasn't treated as having the same sting -- it wasn't exactly acceptable, but it wasn't like saying "Women can't be construction workers".
no subject
Date: 2009-01-30 06:05 pm (UTC)The attitude is different towards men defying gender stereotypes, because different expectations are laid on them. That's not feminism's fault - that's the fault of society in general, and the people in it who are unwilling to flex their gender-normatives. The day women are valued equally to men is the day that men are allowed to act like us without judgement.
no subject
Date: 2009-01-30 05:17 pm (UTC)There is so much wrong with this. It's irritating to hear that men can't be maternal. Some men can be very caring and nurturing. And some women don't have a single maternal bone in their bodies. I'd rather see two kids with two men who can give them a fantastic life than with some straight couples. If they can give the children a happy life then what does it matter whether they're male or female?
The kids would be so much better with a steady family than with being in care.
no subject
Date: 2009-01-30 08:27 pm (UTC)Those grandparents have clearly terminated their right to raise a stink. I get it, and it is tragic and I feel sorry for them but they are being selfish and are clearly not thinking about the best interests of those two children.
These two men sound like they've been preparing a lovely home for those two kids. A bedroom for each with a stable, caring environment is what they need after the horror that they've had for so long. That is what is important - not whether the people providing that environment are gay or straight.
no subject
Date: 2009-01-31 10:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-31 10:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-31 10:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-31 09:19 pm (UTC)I did find the comments slightly heartening, though. The vehemence against the social services annoyed me, true, but most of the comments seemed to be objecting against the adoption full stop, not the fact they were being adopted by a gay couple. The Mail probably wouldn't have bothered publishing it so loudly if that wasn't the case, but the readers don't seem to care that much.
no subject
Date: 2009-01-31 02:21 pm (UTC)And I totally get what you're saying about men having maternal instincts. I'm much, much, MUCH closer to my Dad than I am to my Mum for exactly that reason. My Dad is the one who would quite happily spend Sunday mornings curled up on the sofa with me when I was younger. My Dad is the one who reads to my little brothers every night. My Dad is the one I STILL go to for cuddles at 20 years old. My Mum is the one who spends all day every day in the shop ignoring her children. My Mum is the one who couldn't look after my youngest brother for weeks after he was born because he "didn't feel like hers". My Mum is the one I can't talk to because she doesn't understand me.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-03 03:43 am (UTC)The fuck.
Wonderful (Or most likely), loving gay couple who have been thoroughly approved by the system, or foster care.
HMMMMM
TOUGH CHOICE. /sarcasm
I'm not sure what the foster care situation is like over there, but here it's a bit...well, lacking in standards.
ignorant!
Date: 2011-03-05 11:48 pm (UTC)Re: ignorant!
Date: 2011-03-05 11:53 pm (UTC)Seriously, read posts before you comment. kthxbai.