I’d go with like Daniel Dae Kim or another Asian actor, preferably wearing a fat suit and whiteface, in order to pay him back all the cultural appropriation debt Segal has accrued over the years.

I’d be surprised to find out that any of the following are/were sexual predators: Harry Belafonte, Martin Sheen, Sidney Poitier, Patrick Stewart, Idris Elba, Paul Newman, Kevin Bacon.

Paul Feig? The MRAs are convinced he’s part of a feminist conspiracy because he makes movies with women, and his favourite colour is purple (they insist his mother raised him as a woman). He seems secure in his masculinity.

Tom Hanks? The Rock?

The partying is the thing that got me fired up the most. They had better find some actual stories of racial discrimination in the system BECAUSE IT DOES EXIST or this series is just going to reinforce some ugly, entrenched beliefs about poor people.

Okay, as someone who takes public transportation because I can’t afford the car, who sees families with strollers all the time on it, this isn’t classism. No. The bio family was being dumb and thoughtless with *weeks* of time to think of it and that doesn’t bode well for the baby.

Thank you for your story and I’m so glad you survived. I feel great compassion for these women, but I did notice how completely centered their stories are on themselves and their own feelings. Maybe that’s just human nature...the second story especially seemed like it was narrated by a very hurt person desperate for…

So...next time they’ll probably do better. Maybe they didn’t realize there was that much gear. Maybe they planned poorly but are willing to learn. Maybe they don’t have a car, in which case a car seat would not be a particularly important purchase.

Seriously, I’m kind of blown away that she still expects to be seen as a parent after over a decade of separation. The self centered nature of this thought process is not striking a sympathetic note with me at all. Most of the stories in this series don’t.
 

I’m definitely white. Mine was a classic white-trash-as-seen-on-COPS type situation. I can’t speak to minority experiences with CPS at all, but for a white mom to be stripped of her parental rights...she had to be really, really bad. And she was.

I’m from the Midwest and my experience with CPS in this area matches what you say. At least, for white parents. If your mother lost her parental rights.....well, I can only imagine how awful things were.

it’s not that they take the bus, it’s that they didn’t put any thought whatsoever into getting the baby and its gear home safely

I don’t know why taking the bus precludes them from being able to take care of a baby.

The only one thus far that I REALLY felt for was the one who’s kid randomly got a fractured skull, but had no idea how it happened because she wasn’t around when the injury happened and nobody would fess up about dropping the baby.

I keep reading these stories hoping to learn something and empathize, but I keep getting farther away from the conclusion I feel like I’m supposed to draw. The women are sad and depressed because of their feelings, not because of concern for their kids or what is best for them. As an adult, I went back and read the…

Usually I see this post too late to comment, but I am enraged by it every week. My mom’s story would sound exactly like this, that she was a good mom and every external force in the world separated us - it was my dad’s fault, it was the neighbor’s fault who reported her, it was my fault for telling my teacher I didn’t…

It’s interesting that you say that. When I read the story, I felt awful for McCabe, and I think that as a society we need to do a better job with incarcerated people in general. But without knowing all three sides of the story—the foster parents’, the kid’s, in addition to hers, it’s difficult to say if the foster…

Thanks so much for sharing your perspective on this. I know that the purpose of this series is to highlight the parents’ perspective in the system, but having worked on the “child’s” side of the system, I think the children’s stories are necessary to give a complete picture.

I’m an adult now with a good life, but I was a child with a mother like the women in these stories. She was stripped of her parental rights by a Midwestern state in the early 90s. I don’t know how much you all know about the Midwest, but for my home state to decide that a woman was not fit to parent, her behavior had…

So when I was around 6 years old I slept with this old, mustard yellow blanket. And every night I would have a dream about a monster that would creep into my room, stop at the end of my bed, and eat the blanket. In the morning the blanket was gone, when I got home from school the blanket was back. This went on for…