Child protection must include protection for children, generational trauma healing for the entire family, preserve birthfamilies, find adoptive families ASAP or reunite the child with birthfamily with supports

[LaurieA.Couture]

I will advocate for and help build a Constitutional child protection and foster care program that protects, supports, and heals children, youths, and families. The focus of this system should be to protect ALL children who are suffering trauma, provide crisis intervention and needed supports to families, keep families intact, prevent the need for foster care and residential placements, and restore birthfamilies when adoptive parents cannot be found for children in the foster care system. Far too many children suffer more trauma, abuse, harm, abandonment, neglect, (and even torture) in residential facilities and in foster homes than they did in their birthfamilies or they languish in the system for years with lost hopes of ever being adopted. Children with histories of trauma often come from families with profound generational trauma, and this generational trauma should be healed in families through crisis intervention, supports for needs, and evidence-based brain-body-sensory therapies to heal trauma, attachment wounds, mental illness, and addiction. This investment in generational trauma and attachment healing would prevent the need for most children to be removed from their families. It would also prevent the more common practice of DHHS screening-out most reports of abuse and neglect or allowing children to remain in abusive and neglectful homes, sometimes resulting in their deaths. Adoptive families must be found for children who are permanently in state custody within one to two years, or intensive efforts to help the birthfamily heal and reunify must be considered (if safe for the children).