Plain Advice

As a child welfare worker of 8 years, I have compiled a list of things to do if you no longer wish to parent your children. Maybe you are tired and just need a break. Or maybe you want to move forward with your life, without children holding you back from what you really want to do. So here it is!

1. Leave the door unlocked, or open, and take a long, long nap while your 2 year old is allowed to wander the neighborhood. This one works best if you are not the type of person who knows your neighbors, and your kid is non-verbal. This way, nobody can figure out where your child lives. 
2. If you have any type of mental illness that is being treated, stop the treatments. Be sure not to follow any of your treating doctors recommendations. In fact, stop seeing the professional altogether. Things will probably unravel pretty quickly.
3. If you are a single mom, look for the creepiest guy in the neighborhood and then start dating him. Marry him. Don’t be surprised when you find out he has been molesting your kids. When your kids tell you this is happening, tell them you don’t believe them. Let them tell their friend or teacher, so it can get back to the authorities.
4. Do drugs while you are pregnant, so your baby will test positive at birth.  The more addictive the drugs,  the better.  It tends to get people super upset when they see a baby going through drug withdrawals at such a tender young age.
5. Do lots and lots of drugs, with your kids right there in the room. Better yet, do drugs with your kids (someone has to teach them, right? Why not you?). While you are at it, teach your teenage daughter how to prostitute to pay for the drugs.
6. If you really want your kids taken away in a hurry, methamphetamine labs in particular tend to alarm the authorities. Something about how they can explode and kill a child at any given point in time. Not to mention their incredible amount of toxicity.
7. Hit your kids, and do it hard enough to leave a mark. Several bruises in differing phases of healing will make the social workers feel even stronger about taking your child. Or bones that have broken and healed at different rates.
8. Fight violently with your significant other while your children are home. If you aren’t the type to be aggressive, find a partner who is, and let them hit you, push you down, call you degrading names, etc. Make sure your children see this kind of stuff happening. No matter what anyone says about how dangerous this relationship is, keep going back and trying to work things out with this person.
9. Don’t clean your house. Ever. If you have pets, don’t house train them. Make sure there are feces on the floor, where your baby needs to crawl to get anywhere. Leave food out on the counters so that rodents will frequent your kitchen.
10. Don’t do the basic things you should be doing for your kid. Make sure not to get them to school, doctors, dentists. Don’t feed them, don’t do their laundry, don’t help with homework, don’t nurture them, don’t supervise them… this approach may take longer, but eventually somebody will notice that your kids are being neglected.

OK, that’s the end of the list.   Now you know what 8 years of working in child welfare will do to you.

Just as a disclaimer, NO I am not seriously suggesting that you do any of the things listed above. Sadly, most of these do happen to children on a regular basis, which is why the job of a child welfare worker is never done.

Seriously, if you are struggling as a parent, there are ways to get help that don’t involve hurting or neglecting your children. For support and ideas, visit Prevent Child Abuse America, or call 1-800-CHILDREN.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, July 26th, 2007 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.