"Your Father Is As Worthless As Your Mother"
“Your father is as worthless as your mother.” Those words – said by a caseworker to a 13-year old child whose parents were addicted to heroin – jumped out at me as I read the casefile. My heart immediately sank. I tried to imagine how I would have felt if someone had uttered those words to me as a child. And I tried to visualize the sadness on my children’s faces if they had heard those words. Devastated is the one word that kept coming to me. No child should ever hear someone talk about their parents that way. Ever. Many argue that the biggest challenge confronting child welfare is a lack of resources. We lack funds for prevention services. We don’t have enough foster parents. We need more high-quality lawyers. The list goes on and on. But perhaps what we lack most is compassion. Will we ever be able to engage families if we think of them as “worthless?” Or if we think they are “too dirty to parent,” as I heard one lawyer tell his client? Or if we ignore their pain in our