Non-custodial parents have such a difficult path to walk. They miss their children like crazy, have to send child support to the other parent monthly (or to the county!) and often the children are brainwashed into hating them. That’s what happened to me, with one of my children - my middle daughter.

My husband and his girlfriend had control of two of my children, did everything they could to shut me out of their lives, and caused me years of intense grief. Worse, they trained my daughter to hate me, and even now, many years later, she still hasn’t talked to me in any kind of loving daughter-to-mother way. She’s now 29.

So you non-custodial parents who are suffering grief because your children are with the other parent, or with foster parents, or have aged out and now hate you due to PAS (Parental Alienation Syndrome) . . . this is a special day for you. A day of appreciation and love.

Appreciation and love? You may be wondering if your child will ever be able to love and appreciate you. The problem is complex and doesn’t start with your child. If your child has been ripped from your loving embrace, and brainwashed by being given positive feedback for expressing negativity about you, the child isn’t likely to be the first one to recover from the experience. It is essential that non-custodial parents are able to love and appreciate themselves. We can also appreciate each other because we’re aware of the pain this entails.

Do something good for yourself today. Here’s a few ideas: start a journal if you don’t have one going yet. Start writing poetry about your missing child. Take walks to help work out your feelings. Leave a prayer request on my prayer request page which will signal me to pray for you for the next thirty days. Be gentle on yourself, even when others are cruel. You can get through this, and things will get better, of that I am sure.

This is the first Non-Custodial Parents Day ever. I chose it because it is my daughter’s 29th birthday. I couldn’t face writing her name on my calendar another year, knowing she doesn’t care about me one bit. PAS is heart-wrenching! So this year when I looked at my January calendar I wrote “Mother Appreciation Day” . . . and then I thought, why not make it a day for ALL non-custodial parents?

Please spread this message far and wide to other parents who are missing their children. Give them my love, and my appreciation for the strength they show in the face of extreme ignorance and traumatizing cruelty.

(Yes, you can copy and paste this post - I want everyone to know that we’ve got our own day now. I’d very much appreciate if you would give a link back to FightCPS: http://www.fightcps.com)

Have a great day.

In Yreka California a foster child, Craig Britton, is dead. He was almost two years old. He had visitation with his family the day before and seemed fine then. His elderly foster parent didn’t check on him for eleven hours after putting him to bed at 9pm. When she went in to see him in the morning, he was dead. His stomach was empty except for some unidentified leaves.

Did he wake up in the middle of the night hungry, and eat a house plant? Nobody seems to know at this point.

Community members are distressed and confused. Why did this child die? Why was he taken from a loving mother? Why were the grandparents refused kinship care of their beloved grandson? Why are some people blaming the young parents because their non-abused child was in foster care?

Would you like to tell them how you feel about this? Go to: Mother, foster mother want answers in death of toddler by Mike Slizewski, published on September 17, 2009 in the Siskiyou Daily News.

A three-year-old female foster child died in a Goodyear, Arizona foster home, and it sounds like the foster parents are under investigation. They lost their other two foster children and their own two children are now in a foster home.

There’s not much additional information at this time. I searched the news site for updates but there’s nothing newer than the article published on August 3.

The source article: Goodyear police investigate death of 3-year-old foster girl by Elias C. Arnold, published on August 3, 2009 at AZCentral.Com.

Tamekca Evett Walker, 26, has been convicted of killing a 17-month-old girl who was a foster child in her home. She said the child cried constantly and so she held her hand over the girl’s mouth until she was quiet.

Walker was found guilty of second-degree-murder. The foster child also had internal injuries and a diaper rash so severe she’d been bleeding.

Source: Sacto woman guilty of murdering foster child - AP article published July 21, 2009 in the Silicon Valley Mercury News.

My comment is that it is about time that foster parents are found guilty of murder, rather than of some lesser charge like child maltreatment, when foster children are killed.

This is a new YouTube video from CPS Sucks:

Want to read something that will touch your heart?

Check out this new website: Life of a Foster Kid - Foster care in a child’s eyes written by teens, for teens. Click on “My Story” in the side column to read how his life was torn apart by child protective services social workers.

If you’re a teenager you can join the site and share your story with site manager, Jonathan Nickols.

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If you have a site you’d like to have featured here on FightCPS, please let me know. My email link is at the bottom of this page.

This is the place for Fight CPS prayer requests during January 2009.

Please refer to the most recent prayer requests page to leave your request.

A ten year old boy in Jacksonville Florida has had his life ruined by a CPS over-reaction to a false allegation. They ripped the boy from his mother, incarcerated him in foster care with foster parent Leticia Rodriguez, and left him to be molested by two teenage boys they’d already been told were abusing children.

The person who made the false allegation went to jail because of it. Unfortunately the Department of Children and Families dragged things out in court and managed to keep the boy away from his mother for four weeks. Time enough for him to be repeatedly abused by the foster parent’s two teenage sons.

Typical CPS social work abuse of children! Even though they KNEW the mother wasn’t guilty they pursued their case to keep a child in foster care and draw on those federal funding streams they love so much.

Does anyone here understand why I’m so angry at legislators for not changing the federal child abuse laws? Don’t legislators realize how many children they are HARMING? I sadly believe they DO know it and don’t bother doing anything to help because of some pressure from higher authorities. Tell me it isn’t so! Tell me American children are more important than that!

The mother intends to sue the state of Florida. I hope a lot of pathetic caseworkers lose their jobs over this, and that the state goes broke if it isn’t already.

Florida DCF spokesman John Harrell wouldn’t talk about the eight year old girl foster child who complained about being molested in that foster home NINE MONTHS before the boy stayed there. In all that time, how many other children have been abused? Quite a few, wouldn’t you think?

Source: Foster Child Sexually Abused in Foster Home by Jackelyn Barnard, published on November 12, 2008 by FirstCoastNews.Com (WJXX and WTLV).

A foster parent in Detroit, Michigan has been arrested for allegedly molesting two young girls, ages 10 and 12. Robert Carl Davids, 55, may face life in prison for raping the two children who were in his home as foster children.

Their mother lost custody of her five children in 2006 due to a drug raid, but she’s been working on her reunification plan and hopes to get her children back on December 4.

In the meantime she’s been telling Michigan DHS caseworkers that her children were in danger. According to a Detroit News article, she said, “I was making complaints in February 2007 almost every day about the home . . . and I felt no one was taking me seriously.” She thought her daughters were being ‘beaten and sexually assaulted’.

Source: Man charged with abuse of two foster girls” by Oralandar Brand-Williams, published on November 8, 2008 in the Detroit News.

Those publicized pleas for more foster “parents” are an open invitation to child predators who want to harm other people’s children in an unsupervised living arrangement.

Here we have yet another case that proves this point:

“Bergthold admitted that during the time he acted as a foster parent for the Arkansas Department of Human Services, he had sexual contact with and produced several photos and videos of a minor who had been placed in Bergthold’s care and custody.”

“Bergthold also pleaded guilty on the same day to a one-count criminal information filed in the District of Oregon, which was later transferred to the Western District of Arkansas, that charged a separate incident of production of child pornography in Oregon.”

Source: Former Foster Parent Sentenced for Production and Transportation of Child Pornography published by Market Watch, the online version of The Wall Street Journal, on Aug. 21, 2008.

Lynn Paddock, 47, and her husband, Johnny, adopted six children from foster care. For people who adopt so many, I use the term “child collectors”. Now Johnny has divorced Lynn and she is on trial for suffocating four-year-old Sean.

Lynn Paddock is accused of suffocating Sean by wrapping him in blankets so tightly that he couldn’t breathe. She allegedly did this to keep him from wandering around in the hallways. She is also accused of using tape to bind another adopted child. She may stand trial for first-degree murder and child abuse at the same time.

Sean’s grandparents are suing the Paddocks and the social services agencies who placed him with her. Although my source article didn’t state it, I wonder if this is one of those cases where the social services agency refused to place the child with his grandparents. He was originally placed with an aunt and uncle, but was taken from them and sent to foster care. The article states, “The case has revealed flaws in the state’s child welfare system.”

Source: Adoptive mother to stand trial in son’s suffocation - AP article published in The Fayetteville Observer on May 19, 2008.

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Written by Linda Martin for Fight CPS.

Allison Newman’s mother wanted to recover from an addiction to crack cocaine, so she asked an acquaintance to watch her six month old baby temporarily. When Michigan social workers got into the act, the baby ended up in the home of Carol Poole, 42, a barren woman living in an expensive upscale home, who wanted children. She has now been convicted of murdering Allison when she was only two.

Allison’s grandfather, Kenneth Newman said:

• “She cracked that baby’s skull open, dressed her and put her to bed to die.”
• “People (child welfare workers) turned their heads because these people lived out in Canton and had a few dollars in the bank.”
• “There was evidence that Allison started being abused seven or eight weeks before her death. When Ann (the girl’s mother) went into rehab, the date to sever parental rights got postponed and Carol Poole realized she wasn’t going to get to adopt Allison. We think that’s when everything went bad.”

(Source: Doug Guthrie of The Detroit News - see link below.)

Carol Poole has now been convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to 25 to 30 years in prison. She also got 10 to 15 years for child abuse.

Quoting from Guthrie’s article:

“During her trial, two workers at the Childtime Learning Center day care in Plymouth said they noticed scratches and bruises on Allison long before her death. They reported the findings to their supervisor, who was charged but not convicted of failing to comply with state law by reporting the injuries.”

During 2005 and 2006 three children died in Michigan foster and adoptive homes: Allison Newman, Issac Lethbridge, and Ricky Holland.

Source: Foster mother gets 20-35 years in prison for girl’s death - by Doug Guthrie, written for The Detroit News, published February 27, 2008.