Are we failing parents whose children are taken into care?

Social services can remove child after child from the same mother, without her being offered the help she needs to become a good-enough parent. The result is heartbreak, and very expensive – but now judges are calling for a new approach

Leah can’t stop wringing her hands. Every fingernail is bitten to the quick. This 23-year-old mother of two boys wears a silver ring that spells out “Mum”: she’s never taken it off, she tells me, since being given it for her 20th birthday by the foster carer at the mother-and-baby placement where she lived briefly after her eldest son, Jamie, was born.

But Leah isn’t able to be a mum. Jamie was taken into local authority care at four months old and has been adopted. In December she lost Harley, born last year, after caring for him for nine months. The anguish of each loss is plain.

Related: Thousands of mothers have multiple children taken into care

Related: Radical thinking to break cycle of repeat children taken into care

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from Children | The Guardian http://ift.tt/1ITRk3c