The debacle surrounding the Nebraska Safe Haven law highlights a hidden crisis within American families.
Last week Nebraska amended its Safe Haven law and social workers and hospital employees across the state breathed an uneasy sigh of relief. Now, only infants 30 days or younger may be dropped off at hospitals and firehouses with no fear of prosecution for the parents. For the last two and a half months, parents have been able to drop off kids as old at 17, and many have done so.
While the state scrambles to find homes for the 36 kids- mostly teenage boys, sometimes from other states- abandoned since September, America needs to start analyzing what conditions exist that drove parents to do the unimaginable. Society wants to blame the parents, but that won’t explain the good-bye scenes that were caught on tape.
“I’ll be good — I’ll be good, I promise,” one youth begged as his mother walked away, Ann Schaumacher of Immanuel Medical Center in Omaha told the judiciary committee. “It is not the right place for relinquishment to occur,” she said of ER abandonment.
Schaumacher describes an exchange well documented in Nebraska. Parents tearfully, but deliberately, dropping their kids off at hospitals and firehouses. These were not parents bent on cruelty, kicking their kids out of the car and fleeing happily off to the mall, but rather, already regretful parents and teenagers with overnight bags hugging goodbye.
A majority of the kids abandoned were diagnosed with a mental illness and 90% of the parents or guardians had tried to get help from the state. Indeed assistance is hard to find. Nebraska’s Department of Health and Human Services (NDHHS) runs a website called Answers4Families that has an avalanche of information and brightly colored links, but I couldn’t find a single contact number. The NDHHS is arguably under-funded but for families in crises reading an article on autism will not provide the real help their kids need.
Prolonged social and increased economic stress is taking a huge toll on the American family. For a lot of people, life has gotten harder, not easier, over the last 20 years. Food, gas, childcare costs and health care have all risen, while incomes have stayed mostly the same.
To add insult to injury, we live in a society that bombards our families with contradictory parenting messages. For example, breast feed or bottle feed, pre-school or home school? Then add to that a multitude of disciplinary methods to choose from. Don’t believe me? Go into your local bookstore and gasp at the hoards of parenting books available, not to mention the Super-nanny’s and Dr. Phil’s of primetime television.
Many parents also had less than ideal parenting models themselves. As a good friend of mine, and long time school principal, likes to tell her teachers “All parents love their kids. They don’t always do the best they can, but they do the best they know how.”
If the parents of those 36 kids considered abandonment their best and only option, how many hundreds more sympathized with them and went to bed praying for better options for their families? Nebraska’s amended safe haven law sends a “we can’t help you” message to struggling families and pushes them farther down a tunnel with no light in sight.