Another Kind of Homelessness

 by Kathy Reynolds

She is seven years old this month.  She is beautiful. He blond hair and blue eyes shine in the sunlight as she speeds her little pink bike up and down the short stretch of the quiet dead-end road where she lives. The woman she calls Mommy watches at the side of the road to watch for cars.

At 12:15 the man she calls Daddy drives up and they go in for lunch together. No matter what is on the menu for the day she asks for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, her favorite. Of course she gets her way. She is a little bit spoiled but she is a good kid and deserves it.

She lives in little blue house by the lake. The refrigerator is decorated with her drawings and the poem she wrote about the love of her dog. Her room is painted blue and white with a border of dragonflies and butterflies that match the quilt on her bed. The toy box overflows and Junie B Jones books litter the table. She has a little white dog-named Princie who follows her everywhere.  Her back yard has a big wooden playscape with swings, slides and a tree house big enough to hold all her friends. She has lots of friends to play with. 

Soon summer will be over and she will start the second grade. She can’t wait to see the schoolmates she has known since preschool. She loves school. 

If you have read so far you might think this child sounds like most middle class children everywhere. You might think she has a great life. You would be wrong. Yes she is healthy beautiful and loved. But she is also homeless. She is not homeless in the sense that she is poor and her parents cannot supply her with a place to live. This child has many places to live. Too many!

This child is homeless because the people she thinks of, as her parents are really her grandparents who have provided her a home since she was 2 months old. They took her in when her drug-addicted parents could not take care of her.  She knows they are grandparents but feels they are parents because that’s the job they have done for her all her life.

Now seven years later this child faces losing the life she has known because her birth parents have decided that its time for the child to come “Home”. They say that they have cleaned up their life and deserve a chance to raise their daughter. They say they have rights. 

Her parents do not live together. Her father left her mother when she was 4 months pregnant and denied paternity for the first year of the child’s life. He said he was high on heroin so much at the time and he could not remember having relations at the time the child was conceived. A later paternity test proved him wrong. But he has cleaned up his life now. He has a rented 4-bedroom home and a live in girlfriend and a good job and says he can provide for the child now. It does not matter to him that she does not even like to visit there. He expects her to live there and get used to it.

Her mother has a home too. Since July she has had an apartment and a job. She really would like to raise her daughter but she knows that the recent Risk of Injury to a Child conviction of her live in boyfriend will probably make the courts decide against that. So Mother supports removing the child from her grandparent’s home and sending her to live with her father.

So the child now lives with the prospect of losing the only home she has ever known.  The parents have a great chance of winning in court. There is a thing called PARENTAL RIGHTS that allows them to place a child on layaway in another home until they feel like parenting. The child and the grandparents who have cared for her for seven years have no enforceable rights. In a recent court hearing the grandparents were not allowed to speak. Only the parents were asked what should happen to the child. It does not matter that neither parent has supported the child financially or in any other way for seven years. They still have the legal right to disrupt the child’s life.

According to the 2000 Census over two and a half million grandparents and other relatives are parenting grandchildren with no parent present in the home. Over three and a half million children face the same fate as this child. Every day children are ripped from safe stable homes with relatives and returned to questionable parents. 

It is time for all  states to pass a de facto custodian law. In the states of Kentucky, Indiana and Minnesota a grandparent or other person that has acted in place of a parent for a year or more has the same standing in court as a birth parent to protect the best interest of the child. Other states are considering adding a de facto custodian law to their statutes.

 A de facto custodian" as an individual who has been the primary caregiver for, and financial supporter of, a child who has resided with the individual for at least 6 months if the child is younger than 3 years old or for at least 1 year if the child is 3 years old or older. Once it is shown by clear and convincing evidence that such a de facto custodian has cared for a child who is the subject of a custody dispute, the court is required to consider all of the following additional "best interest" factors: (a) each de facto custodian's wishes; (b) the extent to which each de facto custodian has cared for, nurtured, and supported the child; (c) the intent of the child's parent in leaving the child with a de facto custodian; (d) the circumstances under which the child was allowed to remain in a de facto custodian's custody to allow a parent who is now seeking custody to work, seek employment or attend school. The bill would also give de facto custodians the same "parental preference" that natural and adoptive parents enjoy.

If the child was in the legal custody of the state this would not be happening to her. The adoptions and Safe Families Act states that a child that has been in the custody of the state for 15 out of the most recent 22 months may have her parents rights terminated and be freed for adoption to a safe permanent home. I think the children in the care and custody of their grandparents and other relatives deserve the same security and permanence.

Children are not property that can be set aside for years on end with grandparents and other relatives then reclaimed at a later date when the birth parents feel ready to care for them. Children are small people in need of protection. Since they have small voices that are rarely listened to, children need us to lend them our voices.

PLEASE lend the Layaway Kids your voice. Don’t let children with good homes be homeless. Write your representatives and ask them to pass a de fact custodian law in your state.