>>>You don't like hearing the pregnant woman next door being beaten up? Mind your own business, nothing to do with you.
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>>Funny you should say that. Something over the weekend reminded me of a family in the neighborhood I grew up in. The kids came to school dirty and smelling of urine. The property was a disaster from the outside. I wondered where was the community, why didn't anyone step in and rescue these kids. But then I remembered that back in the 1960's, we believed that the family was sovereign. Even had the school or the neighbors complained, likely the kids would've ended up back with the parents anyway.
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>>We still don't have that one entirely right, but that's more because we're not willing to spend the money it takes. But we no longer believe that abusive parents automatically get to keep their kids.
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>>Tamar
>
>How did the kids end up? I grew up with a couple kids who came from dirt poverty. Always dirty, when not in school they tended to be working, either on farms or in other family businesses. Most turned out rather well off. Families, good jobs & a couple business owners. My low opinion of government bureaucracy goes even lower when I consider CPS. I have a friend who works the SF branch and her stories are tragic, both in the human debris that are parents and the system which has little effective way of dealing with them. In addition I helped a friend who went through the nightmare of having to clear his name after an utterly bogus accusation from his ex. The ex was a raging alcoholic, had hit their son and manipulated him into telling CPS that his daddy did it. This was after the son had already reported to his teacher that his mother was the one who hit him. It took a lot of time, legal work, money and seperation before he got his son back.

I don't actually know how they ended up. I know that when I was a teenager, things were still bad there.

I also don't know why this family was like that. After I posted the other day, I realized that it was possible that one parent was mentally ill. But my vague memory from childhood is that we kids were scared of the father.

FWIW, while we weren't involved with this family (except that the girl my age was in my class and, I think, my Scout troop and, IIRC, my mother wouldn't allow me to exclude her from parties and so forth), my family was part of the solution overall. We had foster kids a couple of times. After my mom died, I got a wonderful letter from the man who'd been with us longer about how we'd changed his life for the better.

I assume we had foster children because my mother had been one during the war, which literally saved her life.

Tamar