Gathering Place
By Sarah T. Casken
Thursday, May 8, 2003
Fostering children takes
enormous caring, workMy hat goes off to Thomas Haia for caring enough about children to step up to the plate and become a foster parent to children he knew through his work as a guardian ad litem ("Children's legal aide becomes a foster dad" (Star-Bulletin, April 28). Many children who come into the foster care system are separated from their siblings, move from home to home and, if parental rights are terminated, never end up in permanent homes. Why? Because there are not enough families in our state willing to turn their lives upside down for a child in need. People are not lining up at the door offering to open up their homes to foster children, particularly older ones, who have experienced abuse and are not cute little babies with little memory of their birth parents.
No doubt Angela Valdez, whose children are now under Haia's guardianship, loves her two boys. However, an entire team of players determined that Valdez could not provide a safe home now or in the foreseeable future. The court made this decision with input from many sources, none of which came into this difficult work because they were looking to take children into their own homes. But sometimes, when you know the option is that the children might be separated from one another and moved from home to home, or might experience overcrowded and overburdened foster homes, you just can't help caring enough to open your home to these children.
Credit should go to Haia for caring. He realized that he had an ethical and moral responsibility to remove himself from the case and to obtain a legal opinion from the Office of Disciplinary Counsel.
Certainly, it is not easy for a mother to face the fact that she has made some decisions in her life that led to the removal of her children. And it may ease the pain if the blame can be pinned on someone else. But perhaps she can gain some comfort in the knowledge that her children are with someone she knows, someone who genuinely cares about them, someone who will respect their right to privacy and confidentiality.
Contrary to some reports, it is not unprecedented for guardians ad litem or social workers to become foster or adoptive parents for children on their caseload. Is it common? No. Is it encouraged? No. But it does happen. What is the crime for which they are guilty? Caring about children.
What our state needs is more people like Haia, people who care enough about children to do the hard work. The number of children coming into care is rising, and the abuse and neglect they have experienced is increasing in severity, yet the number of people willing to care for other people's children is decreasing.
The real issue here is not Haia caring too much; it is our state not caring enough. Our state does not commit the money to pay for adequate resources for birth parents, foster parents, social workers and guardians ad litem. Everything is being done on a shoestring (or less). Until our state addresses the bigger issue of our commitment to children and families, pointing our finger at people like Haia is just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
Sarah T. Casken is executive director of the Hawaii Foster Parent Association.
