[DebCsMom]

LONG STORY so please bare with me...

A couple of weeks ago my oldest DD called me from work. A co-worker of hers has a 2 year old daughter. The STORY is, the family recently moved. Sometime during the night the little girl woke up. Got confused & wandered out of the apartment. In the morning they found her in the hallway of the building, in front of the door, laying in an ice cold puddle of water, FREEZING! The parents brought her in and later noticed her feet were blue. They took her to the Children's Hospital were the Mother says, she was diagnosed as having Frost Bite & had surgery. DD called to tell me this because social services would not release the baby to her parents & the parents asked if we could take her. Of course we said yes.

Later in the day the Social Worker called me. I told her we aren't licensed for foster care but that we have adopted, we can do the 30 days emergency care while we start the process. She tells me that would be fine & get started but to know that this would most likely a long term thing. She also tells me that they do have a family already in mind who is trained with handling burns. "BURNS??" I said, "We were told it was frost bite." "NO!!" she says, "they are BURNS!!"

Now it makes sense to me. I wondered why if it was an accident they wouldn't give the baby back to them. I couldn't figure out why no one in the building heard her screaming or crying. If she had gotten frost bite I'm sure she was crying because she was so cold. Plus lost in the new apartment building!

So we tell the social worker to go ahead with the other family since it makes sense. We'd start our part.

Well the Mom keeps calling us. Her & her husband really want Sean & I to have the little girl. She asked me 2 things about that. So I need some help from you ladies because I don't know the answers.

Last week she called & told me that because they don't have the little girl, they cut their child care. So now they don't have enough to pay for the child care for their 5 year old. She is not in school yet. They asked if we took take the 5 year old as well.

Okay now last night she calls again. This morning they have a court hearing because now they are being told they have to pay child support for the daughter in foster care. The husband only can work 20 hours a week or they don't get any state help. He is in Landscaping or something like that. She works with DD & makes about $9.00 an hour. They also have a 9 year old son who is in school & then goes to after school care.

Okay here is where I need advice, has anyone ever heard of the Natural Parents having to pay child support for their child in foster care? The other thing they wanted to know is if they gave us Legal Guardianship, does that over-ride the foster placement?

I don't know enough about this to answer their questions. Any help would be greatly appreciated!!

Deb

[inhiswill]

Relatives of mine had a daughter who was placed in foster care. She was a teenager and had many emotional and behavioral issues. They had to pay for part of her foster care (which was almost $800 a month!). However, both parents worked in well paying jobs.

Hope everything works out in your situation. Prayers and hugs!

[danhanan]

One of my daycare kids was put into foster care and mom received a bill for it. She also received a bill for many needless tests theyput him through. As for the guardianship, if the child is already in the custody of the state, I'm not sure you can do it. I believe that everything that happens now will be decided between the court and the state. You may be able to do guardianship for the other child unless they have already filed to take custody of him too. If their concern is about what they will lose financially, I'd be very careful as to how I would proceed with them.

[minibus]

Originally Posted by DebCsMom

LONG STORY so please bare with me...

Okay here is where I need advice, has anyone ever heard of the Natural Parents having to pay child support for their child in foster care? The other thing they wanted to know is if they gave us Legal Guardianship, does that over-ride the foster placement?

I don't know enough about this to answer their questions. Any help would be greatly appreciated!!

Deb

This is my understanding, having worked in foster care for a while, though the system widely varies from state to state and from worker to worker.

If a parent still has custody and the state is taking care of the child, he/she must pay for the child's care. I believe this is a percentage of the parent's income, not a set amount. To get out of paying this, a parent must make the child a "ward of the state". This gives the state the right to make decisions for the child.

I'm not sure of the legal status of the child, so I don't know if the parents would be able to sign over guardianship to you. It would depend on whether they're moving to terminate parental rights, I suppose and how badly the child was injured.

Good luck!
Michelle

[bnhmama]

My question would be, if it was bad enough to take the 2 year old, why did they leave the other children in the home? If they are going to be taken, the state would have the say.

[DCMomLady]

Our's was a kinship foster care placement through CPS and the parents were court-ordered to pay child support to us -- $25 a month for her and $3,000 a month for him. Of course, we never saw a cent of it and neither did CPS. Later, when I sought TANF benefits for the baby, a child support enforcement case was opened against both. They would have been required to repay the state for the benefits the baby received but the state gave up on the case, deciding that birthmom couldn't pay (!)and birthfather couldn't be found.

I don't know how close you are to the people involved in this case, but I think I would hesitate to get involved under the circumstance you've described.

[Tudu]

In GA, DFCS loves for the family to sign over legal guardianship. As long as you pass the background check they will let the parent choose the guardian. When we took LG of our former fd's child they didn't even check out our house, that surprised me.

They also file for child support here but not in every case. For ours it was used to push their hand in signing off on the appeal.

[Sleeplvr]

I'm in Georgia and child support is a standard part of caseplan for the bio parents to get the child back in my county. The amount of the child support varies... most of the foster kids we've had very low amounts set for their child support... we are talking $20 -30 a month. As low as that amount happens to be I don't think any of the parents paid it. One of the parents had the nerve to tell me that the child support was killing him... he didn't realize that I knew what he was supposed to be paying each month. He was supposed to be paying $20 a month.

Lack of child support is often used as part of the grounds for termination of parental rights. Not paying child support alone is not enough to terminate rights. If the parent is working their caseplan and doing visitation the state usually forgives the non paid child support.

[Hadley2]

Foster parent here, so while I'm not an expert, I have some thoughts and info that might be useful.

Goodness, of course the parents are billed for child support. If they are parents, they are responsible for their child's support--that is a parent's first duty to his/her child.

If the child is in the care and custody of the state, no, the parents cannot necessarily just jump out of the foster care system by trying to grant you guardianship...a court would have to approve that and most likely wouldn't if social services recommended against it.

As for the other children, the state doesn't always pull all children at once but it may yet happen.

And of course and unfortunately many states are happy to palm children off on well intentioned relatives or others with a simple custody or guardianship. It gets them off the time and $ hook and puts you on it. They can close the foster care case but the custody case remains open--with you as the new defendant facing and paying for parental challenges--for return, for visitation, for decision-making, etc.--in court. The child gets no real permanency, legal security, or even safety. Once the foster care case is closed, the agency has no obligation to provide placement or adoption support and services and often doesn't. Sometimes the child loses Medicaid eligibility, too, and must go without the kind of intensive therapy many of these children need--employer plans just don't usually cut it.

Or they may keep the case open and give the parents a case plan and still give you guardianship to get out of their support and services obligations to the child. A lot varies by state and often by local practice within a state.

Some caseworkers toss around terms like "temporary guardianship/custody" and "permanent guardianship/custody" but in most states, there is just "guardianship." Guardianship can be overturned at any time...a judge may grant guardianship for a set amount of time or until certain things come to pass, but even if no end date is put on it, it can be challenged and overturned.

Sometimes it works out fine, sometimes it doesn't; either way, it's anxiety I didn't want to live with. FD's agency tried this with us but we stuck to adoption, not custody, as the goal.

We have friends who took placement of a little girl about six months after fd joined us. Their little girl's father and grandmother had asked them to take her temporarily, an arrangement that shifted to guardianship when it looked as if social services was moving in on him. Well, three years later, they have spent over $20,000 on the private TPR process and may easily double that before they're done. Had it been a social services case from the start, the father's rights would have been terminated over a year ago. But because the little girl is in private custody, the state has no reason to proceed against him.

You sound conscientious and concerned, but it sounds as if you are being tapped by this family as some kind of strategy to keep their parental rights while avoiding their responsibilities and a rehabilitative case plan for reunification with their daughter. Unfortunately, child services is often spread so thin that such a solution, even though it flies in the face of the intent of federal law and regulations, is viewed as a better gamble than RU and cheaper than running the case.

Finally, on the personal aspects, if you took placement of this child, you would need to very quickly set much stronger boundaries with the parents and get up to speed very quickly on fostering principles, issues, and procedures. First and foremost, their problems will not be your problems--you will owe them nothing (except, possibly, to support RU by not interfering with their efforts to change or alienating their child) and your focus will be on the best interest of the child, period. If it--whatever "it" may be, even if "it" is something needed to reduce your stress and anxiety and promote the health of the household--is healthy and beneficial for the child, it will be healthy and beneficial for the parents, no matter how they feel about it or what they want. That sounds tough and harsh, but believe me, when you try to balance adult "wants" against children's real needs out of some sense of empathy or obligation to the adults, everybody suffers.

So your dd's work relationship might be affected. Your relationship with dd might be affected if she is tied strongly to these parents. You don't know these parents but they already know who you are, where you are, your phone number, etc.

It's a lot to think about. My own feeling is that it sounds as if this child will probably need a therapeutic level home and if you haven't even had basic foster training, she probably presents needs you won't know how to fulfill. Add to that the personal entanglements with the parents and the potential risk those pose for the child (and you), I would be thinking it might be better to pass.

[Suziebearhugs]

They could give you gaurdianship of the child still in their care (but like another poster said gaurdianship is not permanent).

It would be better if the family choose to sign over their rights to the state (leaving them with NO parental rights) then you could adopt the child/children through the state.

That way the family can't come back later and say they want their child(ren) back.

Usually, when a parent signs over their rights ALL charges of neglect/abuse are dropped against the parent. But if the circumstances were bad enough...the parents might also be facing jail time aside from whatever happens with the kids.