Turn left! Not left, right! Not right! I said turn left. Don’t you know the difference between left and right? What kind of parent are you? How can you be a parent?
In a nutshell, this is how Child Protective Services (CPS) workers treat you and make you feel once they are in your life.
Rule Number One: Never let them in your life.
If you’ve read the Nancy Schaefer piece, which is the headline piece for this material, you can see that messing with Child Protective Services is dangerous even for a prominent politician. At best, CPS is a benevolent broker of children that fashions itself as a champion of children who need protection. At worst, and this is the case much, much more than as a do-gooder, it is a for-profit dealer in human flesh whose tentacles reach into the darkest worlds of child prostitution and child slave trade.
Like every large government agency, CPS was begun with earnest humanitarian intent but has morphed into a money-hungry viper intent upon only one thing: its own survival at any cost. This is, by the way, Social Darwinism.
Testimonial:
We broke Rule Number One. It happened in New Jersey and the Agency was DYFS, the Division of Youth and Family Services. Toward the end of our struggles with DYFS they changed their name to the Division of Child Protection and Permanency. That is issue for a different discussion. Painfully noticeable in the name change, however, is the elimination of any pretext of working with families. We can’t underscore enough the enormity of the significance of such a change in focus and scope.
I tried to turn left. I really did. But I told you to turn right. No, you told me to turn left. Are you telling me that I don’t know which way I told you to turn? (Implication: how dare you correct me? How dare you argue with me?) Okay, I’ll turn right. But I told you to turn left.
This was pretty much the demeanor of every DYFS visit once they were in our lives. The caseworker would go through our house as if it were public domain. One time she found a yogurt that had expired the day before and accused us of feeding our kids expired and no-good food. She suggested that we could go to the grocery store together (of course not her, but one of the DYFS aides) so she could show us how to read the expiration dates and pick the freshest food. That one of us had three advanced degrees including a Doctorate was of no import. In fact it was a negative because the caseworker was self-conscious about her own lack of education.
Another time, the driver, the same aide who was to take us shopping, commented to her that our child’s clothes were too small. In fact the foster mother had dressed our child that day in the second-hand stuff she always put our child in. The result of this comment was the caseworker’s demand that we go clothes shopping with—you guessed it—the aide, not the caseworker herself, so we could learn what sizes our child wore. We actually agreed to this but insisted that the caseworker take us since we wanted to please her and wanted to make sure what we bought fit correctly. Of course the shopping trip never materialized. But the judge would read in her case log that we refused to go shopping to learn how to dress our child.
–Anonymous
Sound familiar? Ring a bell? CPS workers are known for making parents second guess whether it is time to take a breath. That is how devastating their criticisms and recriminations, their antagonistic, demeaning, belittling manners, are. Their goal is to make your head spin so that in the end they are sure to have justification for keeping your children once they’ve seized them. They want to keep your children for profit, nothing more.
Rule Number One: Never let them in your life.
