Forgotten Children

Before I begin my diatribe about the children in our country that nobody seems to want or even care what happens to let me say this, there are a lot of children in this country who are loved and protected and given all of the things that children need to lead productive happy lives. Unfortunately, that is not the case for all children, and there seems to be a critical breakdown in our social services system that allows children to linger in homes that are unfit much longer than they should. Allowing them to stay in homes that are filthy with guardians that are either not there at all or do not care what is happening to the children. The social service system alone cannot be left to bear the burden of this problem though, whatever happened to community action? Does it not make sense that if there is a child in a community being abused and/or neglected, that someone would notice and try to intervene?

For as long as I can remember there were always "extra" children in the house that I grew up in. They tended to be of the group that no one else wanted, including their parents. I watched my parents struggle with a social service system that refused to remove them from guardians who simply did not care or managed to abuse them in the times that they were at home. I have literally seen social workers cry because their hands were tied in situations they knew were horrible, because the system is set up to protect the rights of the parent. What about the rights of the children? Do they not have a right to be swiftly removed from a situation that is imminently dangerous?

For instance, my parents have a young man of 13 who currently stays at their house about 6 nights of any given week. He has been in the foster care system, and was returned to his mother once she was rehabilitated. The rehabilitation lasted about 3 months after she regained custody of him. Now, he at 13 is left to fend for himself while she feeds her latest addiction with the Aid for Dependant Children's checks that the government sends her monthly for his care. Meanwhile, my parents buy his clothes, school supplies & any other necessities out of my dad's social security check, which I might add is their only income. The other people in their community avoided this little boy when he was younger, because he came from a bad home, had a bad mouth, and a bad attitude. No one stopped to see the pain in his eyes, or understand the attitude and the mouth were simply his childish way of trying to be tough enough to make it on his own. This is only one of the classic examples of how not only our social services system is failing, but we as communities are failing as well.

It is time that our communities stand together and take control of this problem. Stop turning a blind eye to the children who are being neglected and abused on a daily basis, and look beyond their family ties and attitudes to help them. Work with the social services systems in place to either help them fix the problems within these children's lives or find them alternate places to live until the problems are fixed. Help them keep an eye on at risk families, and make sure the situations remain safe for children returned from foster care. But most importantly, we as communities should learn to guide these children and protect them as if they were our own children, because in truth they are. They are everyone's children, and no one's all at the same time. These children will make up the next generation of our country, do we really want them to lead the way when the only lives they have ever known are of pain, neglect and abuse? Can we accept the fact that tomorrow's leaders are being taught if we ignore a problem long enough it will go away?