·
Do parents have the God-given right to determine
the care and upbringing of their children?
·
Is it possible to tell the good guys from the
bad guys?
Sunday’s Houston Chronicle had a lead investigative
piece starting on the front page. It’s about the difficulty medical
professionals have in identifying and dealing with possible child abuse.
Much of the piece centers on a particular case, a boy named
Tristan Timmerman. The nightmare started when he was four months old. At 3:00
AM the dad woke his wife, panicked because their baby was limp, not responsive,
with eyes rolling back in his head. The mom, barely taking time to put on pants
(no shoes) quickly drove their baby to the hospital while dad stayed home with their
two older boys.
The boy was transferred to a children’s hospital, and brain
scans were done. A neurologist assured them it was probably related to a
difficult delivery and believed the condition would resolve in a few days,
which it did.
But the ordeal wasn’t over. Another doctor looked at the
scans and saw the possibility of shaken baby syndrome. This doctor, assigned to
specialize in identifying child abuse, didn’t get the neurologist’s report.
As the Chronicle story says, “In their zeal to
protect children, some child abuse pediatricians also have implicated parents
who appear to have credible claims of innocence, leading to traumatic family
separations and questionable criminal charges.”
That’s a nightmare on top of a nightmare.
In the Timmerman’s case, the child was not allowed to return
home with the parents, who were now under investigation by Child Protective
Services. The mother’s parents were able to take him and allow for the parents’
supervised visitations. After the first two weeks, they were asked how things
were going, and in the questioning were asked what they thought had happened.
They said truthfully that they did not believe
the baby had been shaken—which was “not the answer the child abuse pediatric team
was looking for.”
The mother reports that the pediatric team’s note, “read
like a call to place her baby in foster care, or worse, an effort to persuade
her parents to turn against her husband.” Fortunately, the baby wasn’t taken
from the grandparents and put into foster care.
The Timmermans’ battle for their family lasted seven months,
with much of the Timmermans’ time spent in attending court-ordered appointments and
researching similar cases, discovering the many times certainty about shaken
baby syndrome turned out to be not only uncertain by just plain wrong.
It took two months to get the baby returned to his mother,
but an additional four months before the dad was allowed to be around his baby
unsupervised. A few weeks later Child Protective Services dropped the case. And
a year later they reviewed evidence and reversed the original findings of the
investigation. In the meantime, the Timmermans had spent $200,000 to defend
themselves against a case that should never have been brought against them.
 |
| Pardo family, image from BringDrakeHome.com |
The boy has a number of health issues. During a recent
hospitalization, his doctor had failed to even visit the patient. So the
parents transferred his care to another doctor. This seemed to be a triggering
factor. A doctor (the one who had failed to visit, or it may have been another at the hospital; I'm unclear on that), who had not
seen the child nor reviewed his entire records, suspected that something like
Munchausen Syndrome was going on—non-necessary medical treatment because of a
mental illness of one of the parents. The doctor asked a question, which
triggered an investigation.
But rather than do an actual investigation, CPS jumped to
the wrong conclusion that the child was in imminent danger. Even the doctor
with the suspicions never believed there was imminent danger or suggested the
child should be removed from the home. She just asked for CPS to facilitate a
meeting with the parents.
CPS refused for two weeks to reveal to the parents, or their
representation, what the charges were. Eventually the doctor’s concerns were
alleviated when the parents provided the fuller record of the diagnoses, which
had been done by other doctors at that hospital and were readily available. At
this point the doctor was fully satisfied, which should have ended the
investigation and any problems.
But CPS decided they were going to keep the child,
regardless. As they put it, the child was getting the same medical treatment
the parents would be giving. No harm; no foul. They failed to create a family
plan, as required by law, while insisting that the parents sign a statement
admitting to their mental illness, or they would not be given access to their
child. The parents couldn’t sign such a statement, since it would be a lie.
The Texas Supreme Court is stepping in on this case, which
is very unusual. CPS has its own appellate court system. This intervention by
the executive branch—the solicitor general and state attorney general—happens only
rarely for CPS cases. There was supposed to be a response last Wednesday, but I
believe it was CPS that asked for a continuance. That means something should
happen this week. Meanwhile, the parents get occasional one-hour supervised
visits, and their son gets no explanation for his trauma.
You can help with the family’s legal defense by donating at BringDrakeHome.com.
CPS’s suggestion that the only thing the parents need to concern
themselves with is whether their child is getting adequate medical care feels
like some dystopian world.
In The Giver, there’s one boy, Jonas, who is selected
at age 12 to receive the knowledge that the Giver, an older wise man,
maintains. He is the only one to see color, to feel emotions beyond very simple
innocuous feelings, or to experience real pain. In that book, Jonas’s father, a nurturer, brings home a
baby that is failing to thrive, to have him sleep at their house so as not to
disturb the night workers at the nurturing center. At the end of that book, Jonas
realizes they are going to euthanize the child, and he makes an escape, taking
the baby with him.
In Son, we follow the story of the baby's actual mother,
Claire. Her parents were disappointed, as was she, that her assignment was only
to be a birthmother, which, while valued as a necessity, is considered what they
assign people to if they have no other aptitude. Her birth went badly and had to be
done cesarean, and the decision was made to reassign her. She gets sent to
work in a fish hatchery, where she has no particular interest.
She happens to discover where her baby went, what his number
is, and keeps track of him—none of which is ever supposed to happen. No one is
supposed to be interested in such information.
The summary on the book cover suggests that most of the
story is mainly about the time after her baby son is taken from the community (by Jonas, so we’re looking back to The
Giver), and Claire follows. So the rest of her story is beyond the community. But
I’m 100 pages in, and that escape hasn’t happened yet.
There’s a part where Claire has visited her baby boy in the
nurturing center, where she has volunteered from time to time to see him. No
one knows she has made the connection with her son, which would not be
permitted. As she leaves, she chokes back tears. She can’t enjoy her meaningless life at
the fish hatchery; she’s obsessed with her son:
She wanted only to be with the child, to feel the warm softness
of his neck as he curled against her, to whisper to him and to sense how he
listened happily to her voice. It was not right to have these feelings, which
were growing stronger as the weeks passed. Not normal. Not permitted. She knew
that. But she did not know how to make them go away.
This is a dystopian novel. Of course a mother feels an
affinity for her child, an aching to hold him. The novel is showing us that
centralized control doesn’t work for human beings—that’s the point.
But here we are, in real-life Texas, and some CPS workers
claim to have as great a right to control the care and upbringing of a child as
the child's parents. They dismiss the reality that the parents and children have a
right—even a need—to be together and love one another. They wonder why anyone
is complaining. After all, the child is getting the right medical care. What
else is there to be concerned about?
I can hardly imagine how painful this must be for good,
loving parents. This preventable trauma should never happen to these families.
There are times when actual abuse does happen. It’s
surprising how often those stories appear in the news. Children are left in
dangerous situations until the unthinkable happens. Heavy caseload is blamed,
to excuse the social workers who were vaguely aware of the danger but didn't act.
And yet these overworked CPS employees have time to pursue
families in which the child is in no danger. Why?
Every session the legislature looks at CPS reforms. Maybe there
are tiny, incremental improvements. But to the regular citizen out here, we don’t
understand why a CPS worker can’t tell the difference between a truly abusive
situation and a healthy, loving family.
I think that, unless and until CPS workers can tell the
difference between good parents and those who are actually harming or
neglecting their children, they should cease and desist. Maybe we could require
CPS workers to prove that they have this discerning capability before they are allowed
to do any casework. If that’s fantasy (and it probably is), then we need better
guidelines. Something that will safeguard the good families while exposing the
bad. And, as we see from the Chronicle story, trusting "experts" isn't all that useful.
In the meantime, when CPS makes a mistake that deprives
a family of their child, they should be liable for damages—including all
defense costs for the family, after-care to deal with the trauma, and damages
that would at least be a token compensation for the pain of kidnapping the
child. My knee-jerk reaction is to give the CPS workers jail time for kidnapping. If you can talk me out of that, then at minimum the workers involved should lose their jobs—and maybe they should be held
personally responsible for at least some of the damages.
Parents do have the God-given right to see to the
care and upbringing of their children. It’s one of those Tenth Amendment rights
reserved to the people without the need to spell them out, because no one questioned that the people had those rights. Until we have the power to discern between good and
bad, government shouldn't be in any sort of position to infringe on that right.
