Foster children

CHILDREN have a right, as recognized under the Convention on the Rights of the Child, to a family. This means that children have a right to a family environment, with adults responsible for the child’s growth and development. Thus, nurturing child care is deemed of utmost importance for children to possess the qualities of independence, maturity, responsibility, and values that are necessary once they are emancipated from their childhood. Such caring nurturance is supposed to be provided by a family, where responsible, loving, and mature adult(s) are obligated to imbue the children under their care with such qualities.

Unfortunately, in an impoverished third world country like the Philippines, children are left to their own resources. Children live on the streets, in the parks, in the cavities of the rocks along breakwater walls, under bridges and flyovers, forever condemned to eat inedible food salvaged from trash bins around the metropolis. While Congressmen spend their development assistance fund on their attendance at the matches of boxing legend Manny Pacquiao and absent themselves during daily sessions of Congress, the plight of children remains deplorable. There are very few bills on children that have been filed in Congress, mostly pending for the past 12 to 14 years, simply because the legislators consider their own aggrandizement of utmost importance over the plight of our children.

And so, the Foster Care bill, which intends to uplift the plight of children through placement in foster families, has remained unattended for the past 14 years.

Foster parenting is an alternative form of placement for children without a family. It is totally distinct from adoption, which provides a child with all rights, including succession or inheritance rights, of a legitimate child. Adoptive parents possess equal parental responsibility as biological parents. On the other hand, foster care is a short-term option while determining the long-term life plan of the child in question. Thus, certified, stand-in “foster parents” possess responsibility for the minor child or young person who has been removed from birth parents or other custodial adults by state authority.

Three permanent life plans have to be determined by state authority while the child is in a foster home.

First, reunification or reintegration with the biological parent(s). Efforts must be exhaustive to rehabilitate a biological family so they can provide proper nurturance for their child. A parent who has physically abused a child can oftentimes be rehabilitated through anger management training and providing regular monitoring and counseling in weaning away the parent from a mode of corporal chstise­ment to positive parenting. In cases of sexual abuse, a parent deserves incarceration or exile as sexual compulsions are almost untreatable, and any form of reunification will only endanger the stability and security of the child.

Second, the state must consider, as the next strongest alternative to reunification, the conversion of the foster parents into a legally-permanent guar­dianship or adoption. Foster parents, who have come to love their foster child as their own with the strong bonds of friendship, affection and nurturance developed during the course of the fostering period, must be deemed the alternative family.

Third, if the foster family does not manifest their willingness or capacity to take in their foster child on a more permanent basis through guradian­ship or adoption, then permanent placement of the child can be made with another more legally permanent family, again through guardianship or adoption.

The Foster Care bill being pushed by the Parenting Foundation founded by British-educated psychologist Pazi de Guzman promotes different kinds of foster arrangements in view of the deinstutionali­zation trends in caring for children. Foster arrangements, being family-oriented and State monitored, are deemed much superior to institutional care in orphanages, especially in the run-down, neglected, and deleterious environments provided by government welfare units and agencies in their reception centers. To the child, who feels imprisoned and abused in such reception centers, the streets and parks offer a better alternative than such centers masquerading as children’s homes.

In light thereof, de Guzman pushes for a more enlightened approach in the promotion of foster parenting. Licensing foster parents must be expeditious once there is a determination of their skills and capacities to take in children, especially those with be­havioral problems requiring specialized treatment.

Foster parents must also be financially subsidized, especially for the child’s medical contingencies. Monetary reimbursements are not the primary aim of foster parents, and this is part of the assessment that social workers and psychologists conduct in their licensing of foster parents. The primary standard in the determination of foster parents has been their capacity for nur­turance and their skills in parenting. But financial subsidies are important.

These are among the aspirations of the Foster Care bill that, of course, our congressmen are not aware of as they are more concerned about their pretentious display of nationalistic fervor at boxing matches in Las Vegas as they freely spend people’s money for their entertainment and pleasure.–Eric F. Mallonga, Manila Times , ericfmallonga@yahoo.com