birth parents

Closed adoption was intended to protect the privacy of birth parents and the rights of adoptive parents. To the adoptee, however, closed adoption is a legal magic eraser.

After a long night of wiping off seats and sweeping up plastic cups at one of Los Angeles’ largest stadiums, Abraham Gomez rushes home to change his clothes, then hits the open highway just a little after sunrise.

Casey Family Programs has announced the 2019 recipients of its Excellence for Children Awards, a list that this year includes several system leaders, advocates for kin and birth parents, and an alumni of an internship program for former foster youth on Capitol Hill.

The Florida Department of Children and Families (DCF) announced Tuesday that it would not comply with a public records request by a local paper asking for details about the identity and location of foster parents in the state.

A few weeks ago, a close friend came home from work surprised to find the business card of a Child Protective Services (“CPS”) worker wedged inside his door. No letter, or even a handwritten note, accompanied the card.

The first time I set eyes on my son’s foster mother, I did not see her through rose-colored glasses — they were more like fire red! I was angry and resentful that my son had been removed from me, so I was in no mood to be friendly or forgiving.

In 2005, when Lauren Mausbach was 19, she tried cocaine for the first time. Just a year later, she was introduced to meth, and for the next six years she lived out the too-familiar story of an addict.

No issue is likely to generate more emotion than the relationship between a child and his mother. In P.D. Eastman’s famous children’s book, a newly-hatched duckling searches through a farmyard, poignantly asking various animals: “Are you my mother?”

California is one of six states that place decisions concerning psychotropic medication of foster children in the hands of the juvenile court. In 1999 the legislature, at the urging of Los Angeles County Juvenile Court Judge Terry Friedman, enacted Senate Bill 543.