Usually kids assigned to me through my work as a Guardian Ad Litem stay on my caseload for two or three years at best. Most are able to leave within that time to either be re-united with their families or to start life again with a new family.
But there is always a hardcore group of kids who end up being raised in the state system despite everyone’s best efforts. Some of these kids come to me through Juvenile Probation (JPO) at 12 or 13. Some are as young as 7 or 8 when they enter the system through the Office of Children’s Services (OCS). So the fact that they don�t exit the system till they are 18 or 19 probably deserves some examination.
The easy way out, of course, is to blame the system itself for not having enough resources to deal with troubled kids. While that may be part of the answer, it’s not the whole answer. I have children on my caseload who gobble up services like a starving person at a Thanksgiving feast. They are evaluated 18 ways from Sunday. They receive myriad diagnoses. They get “wrap-around” services so that their every move and thought is tracked and analyzed with an adult nearby to provide them whatever feedback and external control they need.
And still they never leave the state system. They never heal enough to be returned home, if they even have a home to return to. The go through foster homes, even specialized ones, like a hot knife through butter. They never reach a point where they can function normally in society without the assistance of multiple resources.
These kids get a lot of labels attached to them. There always seems to be a new name that’s the latest hot diagnosis. There was a period where every problem kid had an attachment disorder. Now they all have oppositional defiance disorder. I’m sure a few years from now, there will be yet another name.
But whatever you call the problem, the question remains as to why some kids benefit from the treatments and services offered and some kids don’t, even when those treatments are specialized to accommodate the fact that the damage to their brains makes them think differently.
My own opinion is that kids born with brains damaged by parental drinking, and kids whose brains are severely damaged by the home life they endured before the state removed them, are possibly too organically damaged to really fix. And that leaves us as a society in a terrible bind.
No one wants to give up on a kid. No one wants to ever deny them a service because it just doesn’t seem worth it. And god knows no one in the field of children’s work ever wants to look at a child and say, “Sorry, but you have been so damaged by causes beyond your control that there is nothing we can do for you.”
And so we plow ahead with these kids and try again and again to somehow make a difference in their lives despite the odds against us. I’m thinking of one young person I know who has tried and fallen so often that he/she should have kneepads permanently implanted to soften the fall. But this young person has never stopped trying and never stopped fighting to be healthy. So I feel I can do no less than to stand by his/her side for so long as he/she continues the battle towards health.
It’s just so heartbreaking when you see kids who try so hard to get it right but, through no fault of their own, are simply not capable of achieving that goal. They try and they fail, again and again. And no one is more bewildered by their failure than they are. Because each time they recommit to trying, they really mean it insofar as they are capable of holding that resolve. The problem is that they seem unable to overcome the impulsivity that inevitably leads to such dire consequences for them.
Life will always be a lot harder for these kids than it should be. And for some, normal life will prove beyond reach. On so many levels that’s just seems so unfair because it was really never their fault to begin with.