Finally able to use my tablet again, how I missed you. Anyway here's a Michael sketch
Low res cause it's just a screenshot (sorry)
Do you still have that Jellicle name generator saved anywhere? Some friends and I used it for our OCs and it was an absolute blast!
The name I got was Callio the convivial cat, which is short for Calliope, who I played in Xanadu. She has a whole costume and everything now!
Even if you don't have it anymore, tysm for making it ;-;
Xanadu mention! Also I do still have it saved! This one is revised a little and I might make more changes later, but here it is in text form:
This will give you a name that is relatively in-line with the naming conventions seen in Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats by T.S. Eliot and later adapted into the musical Cats by Andrew Lloyd Webber - and unlike those shitty “last name and your birth month” name generators, this one won’t doxx you in the process.
How do you think we can make the foster care system better?
Honestly, by making sure as few kids end up in it as possible.
Contrary to popular belief, physical abuse is not the most common reason that kids end up in foster care. Only 13% of kids taken into foster care are there because their parents physically abused them. The biggest reason that kids end up in foster care is actually neglect - neglect is the primary cause of 62% of foster care referrals.
When you look at those numbers, though, it’s important to remember that “neglect” doesn’t necessarily mean that parents withheld food and necessities from their children because they were careless or lazy or cruel - it often includes parents who desperately want to provide the necessities to their children, but can’t afford to do so. Many jurisdictions don’t really make a distinction between kids whose parents purposely starved them and kids whose working parent left them home alone because she couldn’t afford daycare - that makes it hard to really know what we’re dealing with here.
And you might be surprised to learn what child protective services considers to be “necessary” for children. In most parts of Canada, for instance, it is legally required that children over the age of 5 not share a bedroom with opposite-sex siblings. Having six-year-old fraternal twins share a bedroom would be categorized as neglect; technically, the parent is failing to provide the children with adequate housing. But of course, the genders of your children don’t influence how much money you get from your employer or from public assistance. In my area, a mother with a boy and a girl is legally required to rent a larger apartment for her family than a mother with two boys - but it’s up to her to find the money to afford that. Partitioning one room or co-sleeping with the children is not allowed, and is also considered neglect. It might sound ridiculous, but I have worked with multiple families that have faced the potential removal of their children because of this, even if family co-sleeping is the norm in their culture.
1 in 10 children in the US foster care system are there at least partially because their parents don’t have adequate housing. Keep in mind, there are 424,000 children in the US foster care system on an average day - that means that housing was a major factor for more than 42,000 of them. Before we can truly reform the system, we need to understand what it is, exactly, that we’ve created - and what we’ve created is an incredibly expensive, inefficient and culturally insensitive system that is stretched so thin by the task of “solving child poverty” that it can’t do what it was actually designed to do, which is protecting abused children. Instead of a child protective system, we have an intergenerational meat grinder that effectively turns traumatized children into traumatized adults who create more traumatized children to go back into the system. Around and around we go.
The question of how to “fix” foster care could be a doctoral thesis, and it’s a far bigger problem than any one person can solve. But my few cents as someone who has worked with at-risk and homeless youth for nearly a decade now would be:
This is just barely skimming the surface of what needs to change - there is so much that’s wrong, and I’ve barely touched on how to fix it. But when it comes to foster care, I really believe that an ounce of prevention is worth 100lbs of cure.
MM