One Day in a World of Hard Cases and Harder Decisions : Juvenile Court: ‘Dependency’ hearings weigh the fates of children, parents and would-be parents. Sometimes there is no right answer.

The couple had been foster parents for the baby born addicted to drugs. Now they wanted to adopt him, but were worried about possible medical problems--and big bills--in later years.

“You can’t bring him back like a Mercedes,” lawyer Harold LaFlamme warned them in a Juvenile Court corridor. He said later that, as he spoke, he wondered if he could “rely on these parents to adopt the kid,” or whether he should take the boy away now and give him to another couple waiting to adopt a child.

LaFlamme, who with his assistants represents children in “juvenile dependency” proceedings in Juvenile Court, decided to let the would-be parents keep the child for at least a little while longer.

An outsider spending a day at Juvenile Court in the city of Orange is almost guaranteed a headache, gut pain, depression. How can parents do this to their children?

Among the cases on one recent day, with a reporter allowed to observe proceedings if he didn’t identify those involved and if he changed some of the details:

* A mother was charging that her ex-husband had been sexually abusing their 9-year-old daughter. He denied it. The judge ordered that the father be allowed to visit the girl, but that a monitor be present. The mother said her older daughter, by a previous husband, could be the monitor. The father said he would not go to the house where his ex-wife still lives. The judge told the couple to arrange visits on a neutral site.

* A mother and father were brought from the county jail, in prison garb. The judge tried to figure out where to put the couple’s three children--who were not present--when the father finishes his term. The mother has longer to serve. The children were in a county group home, and the parents had no money for an apartment of their own. The judge ordered the county to see what assistance was available.

* A mother took her children to a fast-food restaurant, told the 9-year-old to watch the 3-year-old and 2-year-old and went off to buy groceries. When she hadn’t come back after three hours, the restaurant manager called police, who took the children to an emergency shelter for abused, abandoned and neglected children. The mother was in court trying to get the children back. The lawyer appointed to represent the children said he wondered why the woman didn’t take the children with her, or at least phone the restaurant when her car broke down, which was her excuse for not returning. A social worker who visited the house said there was only a pint of milk in it--no food. The ex-convict the mother is living with was suspected of drug abuse, but police hadn’t been able to prove anything. The judge ordered the children kept in county custody pending further hearings.

* A businessman listened as his new wife said of the husband’s mildly retarded 16-year-old son: “I despise him. I don’t want anything to do with him.” The boy’s mother doesn’t want him either. A social worker said the teen-ager will live with anyone who wants to take him. He says he’s “used to” being shunned. The judge said he would think it over.

Children not returned to their parents wind up in the care of the county’s Social Services Agency, where Gene Howard is the director of children’s services.

Howard said that compared to when he started, nearly eight years ago, he’s seeing more children being taken from their parents. And they’re in worse shape.

“It seems like we are getting more of the extreme cases than we ever used to, kids with multiple broken bones, kids with sexual battering, very young kids exposed to sexual molestation,” he said.

Experts on family relationships believe that a bad economy makes things worse. As the money runs out, so do tempers. Parents “oftentimes tend to take it out on kids, because the kids are available and don’t have the same kinds of defenses the adults do,” Howard said.

“But I think if you look at society in general, the level of the gang problem, the level of personal violence, you see it’s increasing societally. And that’s going to have an effect also on the kids who have to live in society.”

Superior Court Judge Robert Thomas, who has sat in Juvenile Court for the last two years, said more than 80% of the cases in the court involve parents using “every kind of substance that can be abused,” from sniffing glue to injecting heroin. He also said that in most cases, the parents are not married.

He agreed that a bad economy increased stress on parents, some of whom simply were not paying “attention to the raising of children.”

Thomas said that sometimes judges will allow a family to keep a child at home, but have a social worker’s assistant visit the home two or three times a week and help with “scrubbing the floors, cleaning the refrigerator, purchase of food, purchase of a refrigerator, whatever is necessary, including placing window panes into windows, putting a front door on.”

As for the county’s 300 social workers, they’re the ones called if, for instance, a child shows up at school with a black eye and says her father hit her. “At that point, a social worker has 100% of the power,” LaFlamme said. The social worker “can take the kid into protective custody and keep her there until there’s a court hearing,” which is required within three days.

LaFlamme, who represents children in Juvenile Court, estimated that 25% to 50% of them are sent home with the parents after the first hearing. If they are kept as wards of the court, there are hearings every six months to determine if the parents should get the children back, until the 18-month mark.

“We’re not going to provide services for mom and dad forever,” such as social workers, psychologists and others helping them to keep the family together, LaFlamme said. At the 18-month mark, “there’s an excellent chance the parents will lose that kid forever.” And because the stakes are higher, there are a lot more lawsuits in which parents seek to get their children back, the lawyer added.

Another lawyer, but one who usually represents parents, is William T. Monroe. He said that social workers “have a tremendous amount of power.” Generally, they use it well, “keeping in mind that they’re concerned with the protection of the minor,” Monroe said.

“I fight with them all the time” in an effort to help his clients, Monroe said, but he believes “they really are fair, and they really do try to get the parents back with the kids.”

Monroe said that in nearly all the cases, if the parents do what the Social Services Agency and the court requires in terms of getting counseling or going to parenting classes, the child is returned. When they don’t, the “child winds up in long-term foster care, or guardianship” or adoption, he said.

LaFlamme said the social workers, judges and lawyers who work on the juvenile dependency cases “are not in a business where you can afford to make mistakes. You are interfering with a most fundamental right, which is to raise a kid the way you want. You are making a decision that will affect these people the rest of their lives, often on little information.

“If you make the wrong decision and send the kid to the wrong parent, you can get them killed. Or if you don’t send the kid home at the right time with the right parent, you cost them their family.”

Juvenile Filings Juvenile dependency filings--the first step in removing a child from a parent’s care--jumped 12% in Orange County during the 1991-92 fiscal year from the year before. The total for the urbanized Southern California region increased 1%. About six in every 10 cases statewide take place in the six-county area.

County 1990-91 1991-92 % change Los Angeles 13,772 14,051 +2 Orange 1,614 1,803 +12 Riverside 866 1,550 +79 San Bernardino 2,260 2,344 +4 San Diego 3,408 2,466 -28 Ventura 529 503 -5 Region 22,449 22,717 +1 State 38,556 37,749 -2

Source: California Judicial Council