GRANDMA VS. THE Rx PAD (Grandma Knows Best!)

GRANDMA VS. THE Rx PAD

But there is only so much government can do when it is trying to substitute for family. That lesson is driven home by the data DCF uncovered while investigating the Myers case.

It found that when foster children are institutionalized, 26 percent of them are medicated. When they're placed with strangers, it's 21. But when foster children are placed in kinship care, with extended family, usually a grandparent, only four percent are prescribed psychiatric meds.

It's not hard to figure out why: Grandparents and other relatives are more likely to love these children, and so will tolerate more difficult behavior before demanding a prescription. And that's just one indication that the best solution to the misuse and overuse of meds on foster children is not a new law – it's grandma; or, better yet, keeping more children out of the system in the first place.

Still another indication came from another Herald story. It described how, apparently with no difficulty at all, residential treatment providers got the sponsor of such a proposed law to weaken it so drastically it might actually be worse than existing law. Under the proposal, as amended, once a child is in an orphanage, the people running the place would have what amounts to a three-day free pass to dope up any child, no questions asked.

Here again we see what we see in Georgia: the enormous power of the foster care-industrial complex to put its interests ahead of those of children.

And that's what the Herald itself still doesn't get. Even as it runs stories about the terrible things the foster care system does to children once it gets hold of them, the same reporter has been writing misleading stories attacking the reforms - reforms which, according to independent evaluations, have safely reduced the number of children taken from their parents. And some of the same people are sources for both sets of stories. It's a bit like sounding the alarm about a fire and then throwing up barricades in front of the fire engines.
Posted by NATIONAL COALITION FOR CHILD PROTECTION REFORM at 6:55 AM

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