A closer look at what's NOT in The Home Study
For the sake of "making room for suggestions", I'm creating a clean-slate for the following suggestion made by Almost-Human:
with the consideration of protecting children paramount, how would we re-frame these questions? which questions would you throw out? what questions would you include? - these questions should not be leading in any way yet should be be able to filter out abusive parents. Gosh, I wish we had a wiki in a private area so we could collectively draft documents... (http://poundpuplegacy.org/node/20605#comment-4776)
In terms of weeding-out child abusers, I think more personal-relationship questions need to be explored by the prospective-parents. Just for starter's I thought of the following "open discussion" questions:
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How would you describe you relationship with your parents, and their relationship with their parents? [Is there a history of estrangement or strain between generations?]
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What is a typical holiday-season like, and what are some of your favorite family traditions? What is your least favorite tradition?
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What sort of hobbies, as a couple do you share?
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What would your reaction be if you learned your adopted child was homosexual?
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When should a child start taking baths, alone? [When should a parent stop bath-time with a child?
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Do you think it's wrong to find a child masturbating?
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How would you comfort the child who says, "I miss my real mommy/daddy"?
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What do you do for stress-relief?
Comments
questionable questionnaires
I think the problem with every questionnaire is that people can prepare themselves to give compliant answers. Especially those that have the intent to do wrong and those that have something to hide, will certainly do so. It's not exactly rocket science to figure out what a social worker wants to hear, no matter how you phrase the questions. So those determined to adopt and smart enough to prepare themselves well will be able to adopt no matter what.
Despite my general objection to questionnaires, I like the idea of "open discussion" questions, because those can be analyzed for inconsistencies and immediate red flags. What I would like to see is social workers having a huge list of questions, many of them not at all related to child placement, all in "open discussion" format, where the desired answer is not all that obvious. Each home study would comprise of a random selection from this huge list, so no preparation would suffice.
very cool
can we enlist the aid of a psychopath specialist?
no, seriously. someone who's had hundreds of open discussions with psychopaths about all kinds of normal activities and noted inconsistencies with their responses.
basically, what this open discussion sounds like is the psyche evaluation that it turns out they don't do.
what i don't understand is why it isn't in the adoption agency's best interest to screen better? are no adoptive parents taking these people to court?
maybe in america this should be legislated to be an insured operation - and then the high price of insurance would cause the agencies to be more careful?