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Marion County, Ohio Children Services

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News

All Babies Cry – Abusive Head Trauma

Marion County Children Services · June 21, 2016 ·

In  light of recent tragic events in Marion County we would like to ensure the community has access to the Ohio Department of Health’s “Babies Cry a Lot”  brochure. It is a simple statement that we all know to be true. In some families the babies cry far more often than your “typical” infant. When you couple that stress with either mental health issues, substance abuse, or overwhelming daily stress you are looking at a recipe for disaster. It is fair to say (most of the time) when a parent shakes a baby they are not being malicious. They are frustrated and are acting in the moment. They have not learned proper coping skills and they are past the point of being practical. Many parents do not have a strong support system and have no one to turn to.  They have failed to pause before acting.

Our suggestions? If you are a new parent make a list of supports you can call when you need help. If you know of a new parent please let them know that they can count on you when they are at the end of their rope. Ensure them they can call you for help and you will help them through with no judgement. Are you alone? Place the baby safely on their back in their crib and walk out of the room. It is OK to allow your child to cry but check on them every 5-10 minutes to ensure they are still safe. Lastly, choose your partner and caregivers carefully. Before leaving your child with anyone be sure to do your homework.  As always, if you suspect abuse or neglect please call our agency 740-389-2317. If you know of anyone that needs mental health or substance abuse treatment? Please call 211 for more information.

 

Shaken Baby Syndome Brochure - 01-2016-page-001

Shaken Baby Syndome Brochure - 01-2016-page-002

Why Adoption Is Bittersweet

Marion County Children Services · May 5, 2016 ·

Why Adoption Is Bittersweet

by Liz Block
Scary Mommy

Looker_Studio / Shutterstock

My husband and I became foster parents a year and a half ago. We didn’t have any friends or family who fostered. It was all new to us, and we’ve found it’s all new to a lot of people. But the beauty and brokenness is worth sharing, worth talking about, worth leaning into, because over 400,000 kids are in foster care in America. They are in our kids’ classrooms and at our neighborhood playgrounds, and they need us to see them and know them and love them.

Today, we attended the adoption hearing for a sibling group of three kiddos. They had been our very first long-term foster care placement, and they moved from our home to their adoptive family nearly a year ago. It often takes the legal system a while to catch up. So after being in foster care for two years and eight months, they were finally, legally, becoming a part of their forever family.

This is good, good news for these dear ones. But the news of adoption is complex for me, for them, for their biological parents. These three lived with us for six months last year before moving into their foster-to-adopt home. They felt like ours, but they weren’t and aren’t. And I miss them.

I miss Jen’s unending stories and Victor’s impossibly ambitious projects and Nick’s sweet 2 a.m. snuggles. I miss the simple moments. Our interactions are awkward now; their eye contact, guarded; and their hugs, shortened.

I can’t imagine it being otherwise. They called me “Miss Liz” and then “Mommy” and now “Miss Liz” again. For them to have to process all those transitions in their little hearts, awkward and guarded seem like the most any of us could hope for. This is especially so as the eyes of so many watch their every move: the beloved foster parents before us, my husband and me, the adoptive parents, the adoptive parents’ parents, social workers, court-appointed special advocates (CASAs). Everyone there today watching.

Losing our connection to them is worth all they are gaining. Of course it is. It’s a minor sacrifice.

The bigger sacrifice is theirs—one they didn’t choose. These precious kids won’t grow up with their biological parents. There is tragedy in that. All the “gotcha day” celebrations won’t take away the questions they have over why their parents let them go.

As another adoptee said, “The gains don’t fully replace the losses, nor should we ever expect them to.” All the breaks and shifts in their storyline the past three years can’t be tied up in a bow: all the new homes, new moms, new names.

I’m deeply grateful for their new constant, but still heartbroken that foster care and adoption need to exist for these kids, most of all, but also for their biological parents who won’t know their own beautiful children. My taste of loss is nothing compared to theirs.

And so it’s complex. I’m aching with tears and bursting with them at the same time. Today is a good day, a hope-filled day for their new forever. May their tomorrows look up even when they look back.

Medications are the Leading Cause of Child Poisoning

Marion County Children Services · April 6, 2016 ·

Medication Safety

Keep all medications, including vitamins, out of reach and out of sight.Children are curious by nature, and it makes sense that they would be even more curious when it comes to medication. Many medications look and taste like candy. While it’s important to encourage our kids to explore and discover new things, when it comes to medication, we want to be careful to keep them safe. Here are a few tips to show you how.

The Hard Facts

Medications are the leading cause of child poisoning. In 2011, 67,700 children were seen in emergency room for medicine poisoning. That’s one child every eight minutes. Almost all of these visits are because the child got into medicines during a moment alone.

Top Tips

 

  • Put all medicine up and away and out of sight. In 86% of emergency department visits for medicine poisoning, the child got into medicine belonging to a parent or grandparent.
  • Consider places where kids get into medicine. Kids get into medication in all sorts of places, like in purses and nightstands. Place purses and bags in high locations, and avoid leaving medicine on a nightstand or dresser. In 2 out of 3 emergency room visits for medicine poisoning, the medicine was left within reach of a child.
  • Consider products you might not think about as medicine. Health products such as vitamins, diaper rash creams, eye drops and even hand sanitizer can be harmful if kids get into them. Store these items up, away and out of sight, just as you would traditional medicine.
  • Only use the dosing device that comes with the medicine. Kitchen spoons aren’t all the same, and a teaspoon or tablespoon used for cooking won’t measure the same amount of medicine as a dosing device.
  • Write clear instructions for caregivers about your child’s medicine. When other caregivers are giving your child medicine, they need to know what medicine to give, how much to give and when to give it. Using a medicine schedule can help with communication between caregivers.
  • Save the Poison Help line in your phone: 1-800-222-1222. Put the toll-free number for the Poison Control Center into your home and cell phones. You can also put the number on your refrigerator or another place in your home where babysitters and caregivers can see it. And remember, the Poison Help line is not just for emergencies, you can call with questions about how to take or give medicine.

Article taken from: https://www.safekids.org/medicinesafety

April 2016 events!

Marion County Children Services · April 4, 2016 ·

Events set Child Abuse Prevention Month in April

Andrew Carter, Reporter 5:59 p.m. EDT March 22, 2016
635941708942174755-mar-pinwheel-play-day-02.jpgBuy Photo

(Photo: File photo/The Marion Star)

MARION – Marion County Children Services is planning events to reach out to and educate the community during Child Abuse Prevention Month, which is observed in April.

Francis Hernandez, placement services supervisor for Children Services in the county, said the agency is hosting the Wear Blue and Pinwheels for Prevention events to help increase awareness about child abuse.

She said that in 2015, 1,939 Marion County children and their families received support services from the agency, and 863 assessments of safety were conducted in response to reports of neglect, physical or sexual abuse, emotional maltreatment, or dependency.

Hernandez said Children Services is encouraging locals to take part in Wear Blue on April 13. Participants are asked to photos of themselves with family members, co-workers or friends and post them to Facebook with the hashtags #WearBlue2016 and #marionkids. Photos also can be emailed to moreinfo@marionkids.com.

“What we have done over the last couple of years is really reached out to the community and done a lot of social media,” she said. “We’ve asked individuals and corporate entities, our partners, to help show their support by wearing blue and taking a selfie that day. We use those photos to show that you are supporting our agency and supporting the cause. Last year, Marion County had the most hashtags posted of any of the 88 counties in Ohio for Wear Blue. We’re hoping that Marion County will continue to show that support again this year. We find that our social media page is really what is connecting in the community.”

Hernandez said agency officials were encouraged by the number of people who participated in the social media effort.

“The important thing is that we are really blessed and excited to see that the community is really understanding the role that we play in this community and the role that they play,” she said. “Without people being the voice for a child, we wouldn’t even be in existence.”

The Pinwheels for Prevention initiative will kick off March 31, Hernandez said, when the agency will plant 863 blue pinwheels on its campus, which is at 1680 Marion-Waldo Road. The pinwheels represent the number of assessments the county’s Children Services completed in 2015. The month will wrap up with Pinwheel Play Day on April 30.

“Since we’ve been doing Pinwheel Play Day, this is the highest number of pinwheels we’ve planted,” she said. “All of our staff will wear blue shirts, and we’ll go out and plant the 863 pinwheels this year. We have a few Girl Scouts that are going to be joining us. I’m excited that they’ll be on spring break and have the chance to come. It’s a representation of the services that we do for the children that live in the community.”

Pinwheel Play Day will take place from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. April 30 at the agency’s campus. That event is free and open to the public.

“We’re inviting the community to come out and have a fun family day,” Hernandez said. “We’re inviting all of the nonprofit, prevention partners in the community. That’s just a great time for people to come out and see what these organizations have to offer in our community and mingle with them. We’ll have inflatables for the kids and face painting. It’s just going to be a fun day.”

Children Services offers child abuse and neglect training for the public. The training is provided at no cost for Marion County residents. Three-hour and six-hour sessions are offered. Hernandez said the next training session is March 25.

“This training is geared to educate mandated reporters as well as the community to learn more about our screening guidelines and what does child abuse and neglect really look like,” she said. “The community needs to know what to look for, and some people just don’t know. Understanding what the state guidelines are is important, too.”

For more information about the child abuse and neglect training sessions, contact Erin Turner at Erin Turner at 740-386-0428 or Erin.Turner@jfs.ohio.gov.

For more information about Marion County Children Services, visit www.marionkids.com. The agency’s Facebook page is Marion County Children Services. It also maintains a Twitter account, @Marion_Kids.

eacarter@gannett.com

740-375-5154

Twitter: @AndrewCarterMS

American policy fails at reducing child poverty because it aims to fix the poor

Marion County Children Services · April 4, 2016 ·

American policy fails at reducing child poverty because it aims to fix the poor

If we want to help kids, it’s time to focus on money, not marriage.

By Philip Cohen April 4 at 6:00 AM


Kindergarten students play at Guilford Elementary  School in Loudoun County, Va. Due to high rates of poverty, Title I schools like Guilford receive special federal funding to provide full-day kindergarten classes. (Photo by Evelyn Hockstein/For The Washington Post)

From the first federal social welfare program for Civil War widows to Social Security and the 1960s War on Poverty, government support for poor families in the United States has attempted to enforce a moral hierarchy based on marriage: Widows got pensions they were considered to have earned, for example, while single mothers got shame and stigma for their moral misdeeds.

Since the 1960s, as marriage rates have fallen and women’s employment opportunities have improved, fewer and fewer women rely on husbands for their material needs. Now, the majority of children no longer depend primarily on the income of a married father. And yet, our policies to alleviate poverty still remain focused on correcting the behavior of poor people – especially their marital behavior – rather than addressing poverty itself.

The stated goal of the 1996 welfare reform law, for instance, was not to alleviate poverty but to encourage marriage and reduce single parenthood. The problem was seen as poor character rather than poor income, and the solution was imagined as a matter of replacing the dependency of so-called “deadbeat” parents on the state with dependency on a spouse. Those who insisted on remaining unmarried were singled out for special censure: In the words of one architect of the reform effort, Ron Haskins, “mothers on welfare, even those with young children, should be encouraged, cajoled, and, when necessary, forced to work.”   Today, many policymakers still want to impose conditions on families receiving food stamps and housing support, and as of 2015, marriage-promotion programs aimed at reducing poverty through matrimony had cost the federal government nearly a billion dollars.

One wonders if the money could have been better spent. There are about 6 million poor families with children in the United States — which means nearly 1 in 5 families with children in the wealthiest nation on the planet are living in poverty. My analysis of the latest federal data shows that, on average, these families’ income — including tax credits and all sources of welfare — is about $9,000 below the poverty line. That means ensuring no children grow up in poor households would cost $57 billion a year. (To put that in perspective, that’s how much money we’d get if Apple brought back the $200 billion it has stashed overseas, and paid just 29 percent tax on it – it’s a big problem, but it’s small compared to the wealth of our society.)

We know growing up poor is bad for kids. But instead of focusing on the money, U.S. anti-poverty policy often focuses on the perceived moral shortcomings of the poor themselves. We don’t try to address poverty directly, or alleviate it; we simply try to change the way poor people behave, especially poor parents. Specifically, we offer two choices to poor parents if they want to escape poverty: get a job, or get married. Not only does this approach not work, but it’s also a cruel punishment for children who cannot be held responsible for their parents’ decisions.

Policy that addresses poverty by punishing the poor for their perceived misdeeds plays on some popular misunderstandings, especially about marriage and parenting. Many non-poor people mistakenly believe that our lax attitude toward marriage is behind the child poverty problem. That’s why a Heritage Foundation claim that marriage reduces the chance of living in poverty by 82 percent has been a staple on the Republican campaign trail this season, and welfare money has been diverted from alleviating poverty to promoting marriage among the poor.

Yes, the children of single parents face steeper odds of success than their fellow citizens whose parents are happily married. Many single parents – the vast majority of whom are women – experience chronic shortages of money, time and social support. Their children are less likely to be closely supervised, to be well prepared for kindergarten, to graduate high school, and to make it through young adulthood free from entanglements with the criminal justice system. The intuitive case for more marriage is easy to see.

How then, as the share of children born to unmarried mothers has risen from just 1-in-20 in 1960 to 8-in-20 today, is it possible that child poverty has fallen, educational attainment has risen, and (at least since the 1990s) crime rates have fallen dramatically? There are two answers.

First, single parenthood doesn’t just cause these social ailments, it also reflects them. Some of these problems are merely the consequence of whatever caused their parents to be single in the first place: poverty, illness, incarceration, weak relationship skills, and so on. In other words, successful people are more likely to raise successful children and to have successful marriages. Research on marriage among poor Americans clearly shows that the majority want to be married, but they aren’t for a variety of reasons related to their poverty. Faced with poor prospects in a marriage partner, some women reason, “I can do bad by myself,” as reported in the book “Promises I Can Keep,” by Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas. Some couples place marriage on a pedestal, and plan to postpone it until they are financially stable. As one young man with a pregnant girlfriend put it, “I’d rather get engaged for two years, save money, get a house, make sure … the baby’s got a bedroom.” For too many, however, that moment never arrives.

Poverty clearly lowers the chance of a successful marriage, even as being single may make it harder to escape poverty. This pattern is the subject of a long-running debate among social scientists. Although we can’t agree on the exact breakdown of cause and effect, any reasonable researcher will concede it runs both ways.

But the second answer is perhaps more important for today’s poverty debates. It is that the number of single-parent families doesn’t drive the poverty rate – rather, it mostly helps determine which families and children will be poor, not how many will be. How many people live in poverty is largely the outcome of our policy choices, about jobs and wages, and support for poor families. A key study compared poverty rates and family structure in 18 countries, finding that the United States had the highest rate of poverty among single-mother families – more than 40 percent, compared with 5 or 10 percent in the Nordic countries. No country had as large a difference in poverty rates between single mothers and the rest of the population as the United States  – that’s our unique penalty for single parenthood.

Raising children takes work, and it’s work that produces something of value: adults. Somehow, a slice of our national income needs to be allocated to cover that expense, the future benefits of which mostly won’t return directly to the parents who raise them. We pay for this work in the formal economy all the time, in daycare centers and schools and doctors’ offices – all the places people are paid to care for children. (Paid poorly, however, as Paula England recently explained in a brief for the Council on Contemporary Families.) The one time we don’t want to pay for it is when parents do it for their own children at home. So the support is indirect, from a spouse, or parents pay themselves to do it – using their income from a paid job to give themselves time to raise their children. And when there’s not enough income to cover the children’s needs, we need government support to make possible that unpaid work of raising children.

So how could we actually do it? A new report from the Century Foundation – by the respected poverty scholars Irwin Garfinkel, David Harris, Jane Waldfogel and Christopher Wimer – lays out some of the options. They take two approaches, expanding the current child tax credit (CTC), or joining much of the rich world in using a child allowance that gives families with children cash without conditions.

Our current tax policy (principally the CTC and the Earned Income Tax Credit) reduces child poverty to the shameful 17 percent it is from the catastrophic 24 percent it would be otherwise. The problem with these credits is that they only help people with jobs, leaving those who can’t work – which is most of the poorest families – without assistance. They mostly aren’t working because they don’t have valuable skills, have health problems, or can’t manage a job (or jobs) while caring for their families. Yet you need a job to claim the CTC, on the cruel logic that the government doesn’t want to “disincentivize” work. The current CTC costs about $50 billion per year but does almost nothing to help the very poor, because coercing or cajoling them into getting a job is useless. So we have 3.4 million children living in “deep poverty,” in families with incomes less than half of what the government says they need (again, after accounting for all government benefits).

On the other hand, a universal child allowance could help everyone, and it might be more popular since middle-class voters would get a check, too. Although you end up giving non-poor people money they don’t really need (some of which you could tax back), this is better than the tax credits because it more efficiently reaches the poorest families. Using a child allowance, the report says we could cut child poverty in half, and reduce deep poverty by two-thirds – for about $200 billion per year. That seems like a lot – it is, after all, about one-eighth of the annual Pentagon budget for Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq – but wouldn’t you sleep better at night knowing your poorer neighbors were sleeping better at night?

What about those pro-marriage policies? In short, they have failed; despite more than a billion dollars, marriage promotion programs have produced no increase in marriage. Furthermore, just as our tax policy doesn’t help people who can’t work, marriage doesn’t help people who can’t marry workers capable of supporting them and their children. A child allowance would provide an income floor for those who aren’t married (they’ve been widowed or divorced, had abusive partners, have no one to marry – or, more rarely, don’t want to get married). And it would do so without coercing them into marriage or shaming them for being single, because all parents would get it, married or not.

Our social policy – especially in the post-1996 welfare reform era – says a spouse’s income is a good way to pay for children, and a job is a good way to pay for children, but government support is not. And the people behind our policy feel this so strongly that, rather than shape welfare policy to provide for the needs of children, they have crafted programs instead to pressure parents into either getting a job or getting married. And when neither of those is possible – or they are practically so undesirable that they may as well be impossible – then the suffering of the parent and her children is the cost of teaching that lesson to everyone else.

We know enough now to see that this approach doesn’t work: It doesn’t increase compliance with social norms on marriage and employment, and it doesn’t stop the scourge of child poverty. We can do better.

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