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Should Parents Lose Custody of Obese Kids?

Again we have experts advocating the micromanagement of families by recommending that obese children should be removed from their parents (see article)  for no other reason than the child is fat. Fox News [dot]com reports:

Should parents of extremely obese children lose custody for not controlling their kids' weight? A provocative commentary in one of the nation's most distinguished medical journals argues yes, and its authors are joining a quiet chorus of advocates who say the government should be allowed to intervene in extreme cases.

These experts actually believe that removing a child from his non-abusive parents is far less damaging to him than the child being obese. Talk about denial. 

State intervention "ideally will support not just the child but the whole family, with the goal of reuniting child and family as soon as possible. That may require instruction on parenting," said Ludwig, who wrote the article with Lindsey Murtagh, a lawyer and a researcher at Harvard's School of Public Health.

Ideally state intervention will support the whole family? Since when is any government agency operated according to the ideals? Ideally, in all child welfare cases, the families would be allowed more than one supervised visit a week or month, and case plan that is not onerous, irrelevant and punitive, and a caseworker who isn't overworked, underpaid and making her recommendations based on a quotas rather than the best interests of the child. Hoping for the ideal administration of a child welfare case is not reasonable or rational.

"Despite the discomfort posed by state intervention, it may sometimes be necessary to protect a child," Murtagh said.

Discomfort?!!!  Forced separation from each other is much more than mere discomfort, it is sheer terror for most. Such an intervention holds the very real risk that the child will be abused in foster care, not to mention the psychological trauma caused by being torn from his parents. Then, there is the very real potential that parental rights will be terminated, presumably if the child doesn't lose the weight. These consequences are considered benign by these experts? Hello-oo? Losing your child to the state forever is far from benign.

Their proposed solution? Stranger foster care. A parent-for-pay who gets money to feed the child, money that--oh, I don't know--his biological parents could use to buy the right kind of food for him.

Ludwig said he starting thinking about the issue after a 90-pound 3-year-old girl came to his obesity clinic several years ago. Her parents had physical disabilities, little money and difficulty controlling her weight. Last year, at age 12, she weighed 400 pounds and had developed diabetes, cholesterol problems, high blood pressure and sleep apnea.

"Out of medical concern, the state placed this girl in foster care, where she simply received three balanced meals a day and a snack or two and moderate physical activity," he said. After a year, she lost 130 pounds. Though she is still obese, her diabetes and apnea disappeared; she remains in foster care, he said.

A year in foster care?!!!  Because mommy and daddy were too poor to buy healthy food?

A year in foster care? Just to give a child three balanced meals and exercise? This is horrendously overreaching and intrusive, not to mention unnecessarily expensive to taxpayers.

See how easily the experts find it to redistribute other people's children willy nilly, just to forward their own personal agendas? They have no qualms about taking control where they don't belong.

These doctors want to shirk their own responsibility for their patients and pawn the problem off to the state as a feel-good solution, rather than put their money where their mouth is and provide a professional or community solution that would prevent the family from being put through the horror of state intervention.

It is obvious these experts have no concept of the hurdles faced by working poor and middle class families to provide the necessities of life, especially in this economy. Good, healthy food is expensive! Most families simply cannot afford good, healthy food. Fruit and nuts are far more expensive than chips and cookies and white bread, all of which are poor choices for anyone, much less anyone on a diet. Yet, if they spend the money on wholesome food, then there won't be nearly as much food in the house, which is often used to as grounds to remove a child from the family home. Now, even if there is enough food, if it's the wrong kind, snatch the kiddies and pay the foster care givers to feed them.

Many of the targeted families get food stamps, and cannot make ends meet without buying groceries that are heavy on the processed foods, pasta, cereals and high-fat, high-calorie, high-sugar ingredients--those oh-so-bad "fluffy white" foods that cause so many health problems. Lean meat, fresh fruits and veggies, whole grains and low-fat dairy are simply not as affordable.  And the schools aren't any better than those dastardly family homes with their Federally funded cheap, high-fat, high-starch, high sugar content menus they offer for school lunches. How can the parents be held accountable for what their child eats outside of the home?

The law already has a better solution. If a child is obese and the state is considering removing the child, the agency must first provide the parents with services to prevent the child's removal, as mandated by reasonable efforts.

This means the agency must provide the family with the means to purchase the expensive low-fat, low calorie wholesome food.  They must provide a nutritionist to help the parents plan appropriate menus and a cook to teach those who don't know how to cook how to prepare the meals according to that menu. They must provide the child with an exercise program or participation in sports, and provide the transportation, access or equipment for the child to participate daily in the sports or exercise. And if they hope to succeed in slimming this child down, they must provide some sort of peer support group to help the child stay on a healthy diet and exercise program.

Only after the parents fail to insure the child eats right and exercises should the state consider removing the child, and then, only if the child is on the brink of death.

Advocating yet another reason to burden an already overburdened, underfunded, understaffed and incompetent agency with more child welfare cases is not only a heartless solution from the perspective of the child and family, it's poorly thought out, lazy and profoundly irresponsible.

Definitions of abuse or neglect change with the current social fads (satanic ritual abuse, shaken baby syndrome, child sex rings and other debunked past hysterias come to mind) and cannot be relied upon from one case to the next. This is just another fad. I entered foster care as a child of normal weight and height. When I left a year later, I had gained one hundred pounds. The foster care givers ate a high-fat, high-starch, high-sugar diet. They were very obese, even their children were fat.  This was deemed to be an appropriate placement at the time. Even today, foster care givers are fat, feed the foster kids cheap fluffy white food which is identical to what the child's parents fed him. Unless foster care givers are mandated to provide good, wholesome food to all foster children, this idea isn't even worthy of consideration.


Too fat, too thin, too smart, too stupid, breastfed or not breastfed, too affectionate (enmeshed) or not affectionate enough (emotionally distant), too involved in athletics or a couch potato . . . no matter what the issue, child welfare agencies can make it legal to take a child. That doctors advocate child removals  rather than providing competent medical care to help the child eat better and become more active in the family home is the height of hypocrisy.  Who better than the pediatrician to get his own patient on the right track to a healthy lifestyle?

Here we go again. . .Wisconsin and Texas Contribute to Abuse of Children

Florida's child welfare agency, DCF, is not unique in losing children or placing the legal orphans they created in abusive "forever families."

In this case, two states are involved, Wisconsin, who removed the children from their parents and placed them with these state-approved parents, and Texas, where the parents lived.

Yes, Virginia, once a child is a legal orphan, they can be sent anywhere, even overseas, at the discretion of the child welfare agency. The beauty of this arrangement--for the agency at any rate--is the fact that there is nobody left who has standing or even knowledge to question where these children have been redistributed or if they are being mistreated. . .or killed. If they die, their real families never even get notified, can never attend the funeral, or visit their grave, assuming they even get a grave.

Most of these parents eagerly await the day their children turn eighteen and seek them out. Some never move, some have made the kiddie's bedrooms into shrines. Virtually all maintain a presence on the Internet, seeking and searching, and often finding their children featured on some adoption web site. Often, once their parental rights have been terminated, it turns out their children are not adoptable, and are then marketed by the child welfare agency like puppies in the pet store window. When they read about their children, they learn how damaged the children have become since being taken from their home, and many agonize over their impotence to help their own children.

Yet another set of state-approved adoptive parents have been arrested for viciously mistreating these children who were placed with them for protection.



I have extensive experience in Wisconsin. They have a history of removing children too quickly, and refusing to return them without justifiable cause, often to satisfy vindictive motives. I have documented on video, their propensity to tamper with photographic evidence and suborn perjury in their efforts to protect children. 

Texas is no model of best practices, either. It was several years ago that the state auditor revealed a shocking report on the placement of Texas foster children in a camp setting, without adequate toilet facilities or shelter from the weather. Where older children preyed and perpetrated on younger children, and where the staff was indifferent at best and abusive at worst. Texas is a hotbed of horror stories.

Both states rank in the top ten worst states for child welfare practices.

Few of these accounts reach the public. Most are covered up by the agency and the courts, often citing confidentiality to protect their malpractice from public scrutiny. Contrary to the prevailing propaganda, this type of conduct is not the exception. Spend a day searching for foster parent and adoptive parent groups online and you will see graphic discussion of the situations these children are forced to endure at the hands of these state-approved care givers.

These children resist bonding with strangers, and refuse to stop loving or needing their real parents. This is actually a very healthy emotional state for a child. . .unless you have made him a legal orphan. Often, the process of making the child a legal orphan requires a therapist to diagnose the child as not having a bond with their parents, a finding that is often consistent with what the caseworker demanded, but inconsistent with the actual emotional attachment maintained by the child. When this child is placed for adoption, this healthy attachment to his real parents must be purged, regardless of the harm to the child.

Most state-approved forever families cannot tolerate such emotional defiance as the child's attachment to his parents. The children MUST bond with these strangers and the real parents must be eliminated from the child's heart and mind.

In response to this malpractice by the experts, other experts have a developed complete pseudo-science on how to break the child's bonds with his real parents and purportedly transfer that bond to the state-approved adoptive parents known as attachment therapy. These techniques are universally harmful, even fatal. . .remember the deadly rebirthing therapy that killed ten-year-old Candace Newmaker in Evergreen, Colorado in 2000? They are based on the false premise that the child's attachment issues stem from the abuse he suffered in his home.

The experts are in complete denial that children have a bond with their own parents, need theirown  parents, no matter if the parents have abused or neglected them (which abuse or neglect is so subjective that often something claimed to be abuse, isn't). Regardless, the child inately loves and needs his mommy and daddy. The fact that they are imperfect isn't going to change that need, and removing them from the child's world, then attempting to use control and force to compel the child to no longer love or need his mommy and daddy is a recipe to destroy that child forever.

Which is why it becomes so important to keep the children in the family home with appropriate services if necessary. I seriously doubt these kids were abused or neglected by their biological parents to the extent they were abused by their state-approved, adoptive "forever family." This tragedy could have been prevented, if Wisconsin had complied with their statutory mandates.

Interviewing Children, the Perils and Pitfalls

In view of my recent discussion on SCOTUS hearing the Camreta case, I have occasion to discuss the prevailing practice by child welfare agencies of excluding parents, even non-offending parents from observing agency interviews with their children.

Many of the briefs in support of the parents in this case advocate the use of child advocacy centers for conducting interviews of children who are the subject of a child abuse or neglect investigation.They state the prevailing wisdom that the persons who conduct these interviews are highly trained experts who are less likely to taint the interview and more likely to elicit accurate information.

I will concede that this is the premise behind these centers, but that is only the theory. In practice, they commit the same errors that caseworkers commit. The same errors described in our subject case.

I have ample occasion to review the interview videos from these child advocacy centers. They ask leading questions, they repeat the questions over and over, they give verbal and non-verbal cues to the children, they use discredited techniques and props such as anatomically correct dolls, toys and drawing (the child does not distinguish between serious work and play when toys are used---sheesh), they discuss the facts with the child before/during the interview with the camera off, they have the "correct" facts written on a board off camera so the child can "remember" what she is supposed to say in front of the camera, and much more.

But let's assume that they didn't get it wrong, or make any mistakes in their technique. There is another very important factor that is totally ignored as significant in these interviews. The child's language and the family language.

I once accompanied a non-custodial mother to visit her children in another state. She had not seen her children for five years. As her visits progressed through the course of a few days, and because I was intimately immersed in their interactions, I noticed the parents and children quickly slipped into their familiar family language.

They used unfamiliar shorthand that they all understood, but which I did not necessarily grasp fully. They had esoteric terms to describe their memories and situations that were unique to their shared relationship, and not entirely consistent with common English usage, but which were meaningful by virtue of the context of their intimately shared experiences as a family.

This language of the family went deeper than funny words to describe body parts, it was a contextual language to which outsiders were not fluent. It was a style of interacting and communicating that formed a bond of understanding that survived years of separation. The family language forms as the relationship forms, and is added to when the children begin to contribute their baby language to the matrix of this highly personal communication. It evolves with the family's stages. But even as teens, these children still communicated with their family according to the language of their childhood family.

This is not the same thing you see when a family is in public. This is private, and increases emotional intimacy between the members of the family by virtue of enhanced understanding of the matters being communicated.

Then along comes an arrogant case worker who is clueless about this family's language, and interviews a young child. The young child is being probed about intimate family matters, and responds in the family's private language. He says something benign and this clod of a caseworker translates it using common usage, and viola', we have a disclosure. This is not speculation. I have seen it happen over and over. The case workers universally turn a deaf ear to the explanations of the parents.

If a family member where present to translate, this tragedy could have been avoided. Many times, the caseworker doesn't have the proper context to interpret what a child is saying. And a child is severely handicapped by virtue of his immaturity and cannot say what he means in the common language. . .remember, he is still learning the common language. His first real intense exposure to the common language is when he goes to school. He cannot understand it completely, nor translate quite yet, but his parents can, perhaps his older siblings can.

I have seen many of these cases turn sour on nothing more than erroneous translations of the child's use of the family language, or on the caseworkers use of the common language which the child misunderstands because he doesn't fully grasp the common language.

Since accurate communication is so critical to the proper administration of these cases, one would think that those who administer these cases would be interested in insuring that the child and the interviewer are actually communicating in the same language. One can only conclude, that if their expertise has not revealed this flaw to them, or if they haven't recognized this particular problem, they aren't interested in accurate communications.

Before you scoff about this family language observation, think about this. Lawyer have their own language, and they use it to trip up witnesses on the stand. The witness answers with his interpretation of the common usage of the word, the lawyer takes his admission as applying to the legal usage of the word. Medicine, science, law, youth, music . . .everything has it's own esoteric language, and we learn multiple usages of our native language depending where we live various portions of our lives. That the family has a personal dialect of the common language isn't so very far-fetched.

It would serve the children better if the professionals recognized this and conducted their investigations with a more sensitive ear.

Quotes From Amici - Camreta v. Greene

In support of neither party:

Children's Advocacy Institute
". . .the system in place includes numerous checks to protect the rights of suspected parental abusers, including required “reasonable efforts” not to remove a child; a detention hearing before a neutral
court with the burden on the State to show child danger; appointment of counsel for all involved parents;
mandated “reasonable efforts” to reunify; jurisdiction hearing; disposition hearing (pendente lite); review
hearings; and permanent placement hearings – all before the judiciary, and including liberal rights of
appellate review."

In support of the respondents:

Liberty Counsel
"Moving the seizure and interrogation of S.G. from the family's residence to a school office did not shield Petitioners from the requirements of the Fourth Amendment. A mere change in locale did not transform the
criminal investigation of alleged child abuse by a county child protection officer and deputy sheriff into a school discipline investigation by a principal or superintendent. The lessened expectation of privacy accorded to students in the latter circumstances cannot be applied to relieve Petitioners of their obligations under
the Fourth Amendment."

National Association of Criminal Defense Counsel
"History teaches that the Framers in the last quarter of the Eighteenth Century would not have countenanced government’s meddling with America’s families. They would not have allowed government officials to take children because of alleged abuse. Simply put, the Founders did not consider raising and rearing children government’s business. Warrantless rescues based on claimed abuse would therefore not have been tolerated. Nor did such a practice exist at the time the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted."

"One’s right to family cannot depend on location. It follows the family."

". . .the class of potentially “dependent” children is huge. It encompasses all children in America. Infants, toddlers and young school-age children, like S.G., are all potential targets. This vast universe of potential “status” victims, coupled with mandatory reporting requirements, vague understandings of “neglect,” and undertrained investigators produces a significant error rate within the child protection system."

"Petitioners’ demand for a lower standard is premised less on a desire to protect children than to win unbridled discretion. History teaches, however, that license breeds abuse. See, e.g., Kolender v. Lawson,
461 U.S. 352, 358 (1983) (warning that 'virtually complete discretion in the hands of the police' cannot
be tolerated); Papachristou v. City of Jacksonville, 405 U.S. 156 (1972); Grayned v. City of Rockford, 408 U.S. 104, 108-09 (1983). History teaches that 'unbridled discretion, however benevolently motivated, is
frequently a poor substitute for principle and procedure.' Gault, 387 U.S. at 18."

Liberty Counsel
"Rather than according Respondents' Fourth Amendment rights the respect required by Congress, Petitioners side-stepped the issue by conducting the investigation at S.G.'s school instead of the family home. Petitioners should not be permitted to evade their obligations under the Fourth Amendment by simply changing the venue for their investigations. Respondents' Fourth Amendment rights are not limited to the confines of their residence, and Petitioners should not be permitted to flout the will of this Court and Congress by doing at
a child's school what they cannot do in the home. Fourth Amendment rights should not be subjected to such gamesmanship."

Exclusive: Florida DCF approved daycare raided by police

This story has not even been picked up by news organizations yet. 

A daycare center approved by DCF and used by parents accused of child abuse/neglect has been exposed as the source of abuse and neglect of children. The only reason parents weren't accused was because one of the parents was a client of Family Rights Advocacy Institute, whose advocacy exposed this abusive daycare facility.

Reports of child abuse reported against a parent (whose identity is protected for confidentiality) reveals that the abuse suffered by the children was perpetrated by Mrs. Beasleys's Daycare in Lakeland, Florida. Their own website declares:

We are a fully licensed and accredited day care center providing a safe and nurturing environment where children thrive and flourish.

False advertising:
    Reports from children in that daycare indicate that they are not fed, and that they arrive at home in the evening filthy. According to one parent who move their children to another daycare, "My son's socks were white in the morning when he was delivered, and white in the evening when I picked him up.

A very young child reports having lunch set in front of him in the new daycare, and when he was encouraged to eat, he remarked, "You mean this food is for me?" In Mrs. Beasleys's daycare, he was not permitted to eat his lunch and he arrived at home in the evening starving.

This is notable because Mr. Beasleys daycare was licensed by Florida DCF as an approved daycare. Many parents placing their children in this daycare did so as a part of their case plans under DCF child welfare cases. DCF vouched for this daycare.

On Friday, law enforcement and DCF workers was observed raiding Mrs. Beasley's and shut it down. Reports include allegations of unsafe driving causing injury to children in the Mrs. Beasley's vehicle and reported sexual assault of children by other children.

Here we go again. . .DCF demonstrates the inability to judge who is qualified to care for children. . .and permits children to be place with inappropriate and abusive caregivers upon pain of termination of parental rights.

Way to go, Lakeland, Florida.

Guaranteeing Reunification Failure

The generally accepted practice when a child is at risk of abuse or neglect is to swoop in and remove the child, rather than remove the danger from the child's environment.

The most absurd snatch and grabs occur in hospitals, shortly after the child is born. Right when the most critical bonding between the mother and the child is supposed to occur. According to an article in The Scientific American,

"It’s fairly easy to wrap our heads around the notion of the mother-child bond. The two are intimately connected during the nine months of pregnancy. Hormones, such as oxytocin, that course through a mother’s body biologically link her to the baby. Their heartbeats can even synchronize. Following birth, a mother provides a natural food source for the newborn."

Child welfare professionals insist that this bonding is not critical, at least not as critical as insuring the safety of the child by placing the child in foster care--where studies have proven children are 10 to 35 times more likely to be abused. It is, after all, better for the child to deny him his bond with his mother, his mother's milk, and the comfort of the heartbeat he has heard for the past nine months.

But it gets worse. Science has now proven that dads bond with babies, too. And like the mother, this bonding requires close proximity to the baby, because touch and smell play an important part in this bonding process. According to the article, It seems that this bonding involves hard-wiring the brain, the baby's brain and the father's brain.

"We are now learning that in the first few days after birth, changes occur in the brains of both the dad and the baby, depending on whether the father is around or not."

Child welfare professionals cite "the best interests of the child" as justifying the removal of newborn children from their parents. This argument is only valid if these professionals discount the child's biological and psychological needs for the very two people they have excluded from this child's world.

". . .it seems a child. . . may be born with a brain that expects this bond to form in the first place. "

And the absence of the father from the child's world has proven to cause problems for the child as he grows up.

So. . .let me get this right. . .rather than go through the bother of conducting a valid investigation and providing appropriate in-home services to the parents, it is best for the child to inhibit this bond with his parents by excluding them from his world. Shuffle the child from stranger's home to stranger's home. Expose him to abuse, neglect and abandonment. Put him on drugs when he acts out, dump him on the street when he turns eighteen without a dime, without a job, without the safety net a family affords, and take the babies he makes to repeat the cycle because he's a product of the system and presumed unfit to be a parent.

Yeah, right.

Given the overwhelming recommendations to terminate parental rights based on the lack of the child's bond with the parent, because the "professionals" felt one hour a week was sufficient time to facilitate that bond, removing the child instead of providing in-home services looks remarkably like a set up to fail. After all, these "professionals" are presumed to know what a child needs, and they can't possibly argue they didn't know removing a newborn from his parents would insure the child would not bond with them, could they?

Review-presentation offered by Judicial Council of California

In this final review, I discuss the video game component of this presentation.

There are two games offered, one for attorneys representing parents in dependency cases, and one for attorneys representing children - Guardians ad litem (GAL). Each completed game is worth 2 California Minimum Continuing Legal Education credits.

The game takes you through a typical day in your dependency practice, including three areas of your practice; interviews with the client, court proceedings, and work performed in your office. The introduction to the games states, "The purpose of this game is to orient you to the kinds of situations you will encounter, give you an idea of the demands you would be facing in daily practice, and instill a set of professional values that will optimize your professional practice."

The case scenarios and the parties are similar for each game. You are presented with a case, in which a series of events is described. You are required to select actions to perform from a list of choices for three areas of your practice. One action is optimal, the others are varying degrees below that. Each choice carries a particular reward of consequence. No matter what you choose to do, the game explains how your choice rated and why. You can earn promotions and extra points depending on your responses.

You earn overall points for the quality of your response. You also learn credibility coins depending on the quality of your response in the context of the situation--and can be promoted and get a raise. You are also working on a burnout meter, and if your burnout level reaches 100%--again based on the stress any particular response causes, you will quit your job and the game ends.

I played both games. I found that politics was a contributing factor in the points awarded for certain responses. The game was clever in its application of a variety of factors that come into play during an attorney's representation in these cases. However, because it was limited to multiple choice answers, there was no room for creativity in representing your clients during these informal proceedings.

It is a competent basic orientation tool for a lawyer whose practice includes dependency cases. The game provides useful perspectives on dealing with adult and child clients, rewarding the player for tactful handling of their clients. It also seems to be reinforce some of the best practice models that many attorneys and agencies tend to avoid in the interests of expediency. This game stays more focused on the best interests of the child than real live practicing attorneys seem to. However, it is quite weak in the esoteric critical issues unique to child welfare cases. It is much stronger in management of your practice than in actual child welfare law. It is a fair start to a complex and unique area of practice.

Oh. It doesn't matter what your score is, you get the MCLE credits simply for completing the game. I can report that I got promoted and a raise, never got anywhere near burnout, and my final score was 1468 points. The game generates a California MCLE certificate with your points included.

You can obtain this disk from Center for Families, Children & the Courts, 455 Golden Gate Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94102-3668. (415)865-7739.

Credible Child Welfare Reform Efforts Not Newsworthy?

The family rights grassroots movement is mourning the loss of former Georgia state Senator Nancy Schaefer. I did not work with her personally due to conflicts with those who were in contact with her, however I did follow her work to expose and correct the abuses in Georgia's child welfare administration. She was quite pro-active in the arena of child welfare reform. But to read the news articles, one would never know that.

Elected officials who advocate for reform or accountability in child welfare are frequently engaged in political suicide. I have seen the political careers of statesmen abruptly cut off for their pro-active attempts to reform child welfare in their legislative capacity. The stakeholders in the child welfare industry finance an opponent who invariably defeats the annoying incumbent in the next election. The boldness of their stand in support of families deserves some recognition.

In a search of articles reporting on this tragedy I found one  mainstream news article that mentioned this aspect of her career, but only in the context of a speech in Europe. Evidently the powers-that-be don't want this aspect of her work to be legitimized in the public eye.

On the other side of the coin, I have observed that the news media jumps at the opportunity to spotlight the highly vocal wackadoodles* in the family rights movement, affording them the public forum to spout their woe-is-me nonsense about their own cases and their rabid, kooky tin-foil-hat conspiracy theories, making all of us look like nothing more than disgruntled parents who deserved to have their children removed. Even now, the radicals are spouting theories of a child welfare agency conspiracy to murder her in an effort to capitalize on the headlines of her death.

Conspicuously absent from the public debate are discussions with credible representatives advocating balanced child welfare reform. Mainstream media's refusals to even acknowledge attempts by legislators to legislate reform contribute to that deafening silence and serve only to eliminate any reasonable solutions from public consideration. The public is left with only two extreme alternatives, leave children in dangerous homes or remove children who don't need to be removed and place them in foster care.

There is a third alternative, but nobody hears about moderate and sensible solutions to the problems alleged by both extremes in the child welfare debate because mainstream media panders to sensationalism in favor of solutions to controversial issues.

Based on what I have observed of former Senator Schaefer, I believe she considered her efforts to reform child welfare practices to be noteworthy among her accomplishments. I think the mainstream media has done a great disservice, both to her and to the public, by ignoring this important component of her work in their articles about her.

*Wackadoodles are those family members who have truly abused or neglected the children in their care and who are attempting to use the family rights movement to achieve public vindication for that abuse or neglect. The designation also includes batterers, con artists, control freaks and the mentally unstable. The family rights movement has more than their fair share of these unstable elements who seek leadership positions and undermine the efficacy and credibility of this movement. To be fair, the cadres of child welfare workers also demonstrate a disproportionately high percentage of wackadoodles, including a disproportionately high percentage of providers who were or believe they were abused as children.