Posts By: Piazadora Footman

In my five years of dealing with my daughter’s father, he only put his hands on me once. For three months he had been out of work. I noticed him becoming more snappy and less excited about going out to eat,which we did every weekend night. That didn’t stop me from putting the pressure on him. One night he exploded and even started choking me. I stabbed him with a pen. He called … Read More

When children have been in foster care for more than 15 months, federal law requires in most cases that child welfare agencies file toterminate their parents’ rights and move the child as quickly as possible into a permanent adoptive home. The idea is that children do best when they grow up with stability, but courts are finding that, for too many foster youth, adoption isn’t always permanent. Family court lawyers and judges often … Read More

On Dec. 22, I saw my neighbor’s son being stopped and frisked by the police. In New York City, police stop and frisk hundreds of thousands of young men of color in poor communities. Of the 686,000 stop-and-frisks last year, 84 percent were of blacks and Latinos. I have five sons, and my sons have been stopped and frisked so many times.

That December day, I asked the police, “What’s going on? … Read More

This spring, New York City’s Children’s Services (ACS) announced a new initiative to keep teens safe at home and out of foster care. The“Teen Preventive Initiative” will expand access to two intensive, short-term supports—Multi-Systemic Therapy (MST) and Family Functional Therapy (FFT). Both focus on supporting the whole family and have been proven to help families of teens during a crisis.

Here, Sara Hemmeter, NYC Children’s Services Associate Commissioner of Family and … Read More

At Rise, we have heard from a number of parents who told us that child protective workers had mistaken signs and symptoms of autism

in their children for abuse and neglect. Children with autism show a wide range of behaviors, but what’s true for most autistic children is that they have difficulty with social interactions and with new experiences, and they often become very stressed in unfamiliar situations, sometimes to the … Read More