♣
black hole
— n.
A dysfunctional family involved in the child
protective system that absorbs infinite government
resources with little positive effect.
These are the cases that make caseworkers and
judges cry, "Aggggh!" and pull out their hair.
"I just don't know what to do," says one Family
Court judge, head in his hands,
commenting on the family standing
before him. The family is surrounded (at least
virtually) by a small army of caseworkers,
counselors, court-appointed lawyers,
juvenile probation officers,
psychiatrics, visiting nurses, special ed
teachers, parenting instructors and clergy.
Of the
large, indeterminate number of children in the
family, only a few are present in the courtroom.
Three have extensive arrest records; one
is a runaway; one is currently in juvenile
detention; and two are currently in therapeutic
foster care. Dad has just got out of jail—again—and
Mom has been working
two jobs to try to support this mess, leaving the
children largely unsupervised. There has been a
lot of activity since the last court
hearing—catastrophes of all kinds—but little
progress toward completion of the case
plan.
"Someone left the barn door open," says the
judge.
Black hole parents might dabble in drugs and petty
crime, but they never do anything bad enough to
fulfill the high standards of
Termination of Parental Rights. They
are usually well-meaning sorts who try their best
but simply don't have the intellectual capacity or
mental stability to manage their children.
Their family life is one stupid crisis after
another, which eventually brings them to the
attention of the county. Intensive services are
brought to bear: in-home intervention, parenting
classes, counseling, social support services of
every kind. And it has no appreciable
effect.
"We's try'n, judge," say the parents in court,
"but them kids is always misbehav'n!"
Some of the younger kids
have been taken into foster care, where they
thrive. The others run wild and become
involved in the Juvenile Delinquency system. Every
day there's a new disaster, and the common refrain
of service providers is, "You put out one fire
here and another one starts over there."
The parents respond to the chaos in their home in
the logical, Constitutionally-protected way: They
have more babies.
"That old 'uns will take care of the young 'uns,"
they explain.
Observing cases like this from the back of the
courtroom, I too go, "Aggggh!"
Seeing the helplessness of the system in the face
of such idiocy turns me not just into an
interventionist liberal, but a fricking
Nazi interventionist liberal.
I don't just support abortion and tubal ligation
anymore. I will perform these procedures
myself.
I am tempted to give these people some money and
say, "Please buy some drugs." If these
parents were incurable addicts, then the system
could do something, but often they're not. They're
just dim bulbs, perhaps marginally mentally ill
but not technically a "danger to self or others."
The state has few effective tools for dealing with
this situation.
The more support the family receives, the more it
adjusts to this support and goes right back to
the way it was. (See the
Pigeon Paradox.) Ultimately, the
government has to neglect these black hole
families, at least to some extent, because no one
client can be allowed to absorb all of the state's
resources.
When you neglect the family, bad things are going
to happen. Kids die, and the press demands: "Why
didn't the system do anything?" The answer often
is that the system tried, but the needs of the
family were too great for any mortal agency.
[1/21/06]