Richard Chycoski wrote: > > Please help Adam's friend with best 'make do' answers that this very > creative group can come up with - it's a tough situation to be in (I > know parents who have been in similar situations too) and technology is > making many things worse while it's making other things better. There is > definitely no perfect (or even near-perfect) answer - but if you were > thrown into a situation with a new adoptee/foster child who needs > protection - what are all the things that you could/would do? (Think: > cell phones with location monitoring, looking at cookies and logs of > searches and locations visited). Remember that children do not generally > have the same right of privacy from their parents that adults do - but > IANAL, so you may want to research the law before you go too far.
What would I do ? I will obviously never know until facing the situation, but here are two extremes I can think of: 1) birth parents are "ok" in my opinion, the need to cut contact is purely legal due diligence: I would contact the authorities and ask THEM to tell me what is sufficient, highlighting all the loopholes. I would have this documented in writing with a letter to the judge, explaining who I met, what they told me, and what I am doing about it. actions: -talk to the kid about why she is legally not to talk to her birth parents -talk to the kid about what impact her talking to her birth parents can have on me, and on my ability to keep her (if the police finds out, they might remove you from me) -follow the usual advices around kids and computers, put the computer in a "public" place (living room, kitchen). -have the same talk as above every time I catch her emailing her birth parents until she gets good enough not to be caught. 2) birth parents are dangerous to the kid I definitely would ask the authorities about help, we are now talking about not letting that "kid" (12 year old and growing up) going out on her own (she could use a pay phone, hop on a train), sitting down with her every time she uses the computer (yeah you can filter gmail and yahoo mail out, but aren't there a million of other less known equivalent services out there ?). Yes I would talk to her about consequences of making contact with her birth parents, but from the little information we have, it seems that she is determined to contact them, so trust alone here won't do it. -- Yves. http://www.sollers.ca/ _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
