I could scream

Again, for reasons of confidentiality, I can't go into huge details, but I got a new advocate case last week. I was able to spend some time with the kids today. These kids were removed from their mother for ample, legitimate reasons. Now it's 18 months later, and they've been in foster care the entire time. Not for one second has the state made any attempt to find a suitable family member for these children to live with. Despite the fact that a bazillion studies have shown that children need desperately to know their families and where they come from, the state has been too lazy to look into it. It's really easy when the foster families want to adopt to just let them sit there and not encourage the mother to learn to be a mother, or find a family member to raise them. I'm not about to say foster families shouldn't adopt, because I've recommended that very thing WHEN THE MOTHER IS OUT OF THE QUESTION AND THERE ARE NO OTHER SUITABLE FAMILY MEMBERS. This isn't just my opinion, it's the law. Yet these kids have had 18 months of pressure from a foster family telling them that they are the ones who love them and care about them. Now that an excellent family member has accepted that their niece is never going to be able to be a mother to these kids (until last month, the plan was for the children to stay in foster care until being reunited with the mother), they are having to fight the state, and being sabataged by the foster parents for trying to be a substitute parent to these kids. The foster parents have deliberately kept these kids in an infantile state, and when the mother was trying to do her services, the foster would call her all the time asking her to just bring the kids over any time and leave them as much as she wanted. They were enabling someone who needed encouragement and boundries, not a free ride. When she took it, they reported her to the state for negligence. The fact is, it was grossly inappropriate for the foster parents to even be having contact with the biological mother in the first place. She was negligent, and even she has admitted she is probably not going to be able to parent these kids, but for Gods sake, don't punish the relatives because they hoped the childrens' mother would pull her head out of her ass and be a mom! I know the fosters love the kids, but when they accepted the responsibility of being foster parents, they were told in training to not expect to ever keep these kids. The training stresses this over and over. Three kids from 2-4 and all are in diapers and not one is even pee trained. All are still drinking out of a bottle. This is a good relative placement, and if the state thinks I'm going to go along with this, they are in for a big shock.