Here is the last segment of Dr Phil. It’s the legal disclaimer section. Dr Phil makes sure to document her passed Nadya off and he’s done. Linda Pate Wallace is on again (she was on the previous show as well)
(4-21) Updated list of octuplet posts
(3-25) Octuplets: Dr Phil Part 1: Nadya; *Angels in Waiting* firing
(3-25) Octuplets: Dr Phil Part 2: Jeff Czech: “Hogging the media”
(3-25) Octuplets: Dr Phil, Part 3: No more Nadya for him
(3-26) Octuplets: Dr Phil, Part 4: Tuberculosis, nannies
(3-26) Octuplets: Dr Phil, Part 5: Allred vs Czech
(3-26) Octuplets: Dr Phil, Part 6: Foster care, legal sign off, thanks
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March 26, 2009
Dr Phil’s website (pix, too)
Dr Phil starts out with his legal disclaimer.
When I got involved in this story, it was because Robin and I have spent a long, long time with The Dr. Phil Foundation and other efforts to work with foster and disadvantaged children, and those children who are at high-risk, and these were certainly children at high risk. I said, ‘I’m going to step into this and see if I can figure out what’s going on and get some kind of way for these kids to have a chance, to have a chance at some kind of reasonable treatment.’
Of course, everybody in America was yelling, ‘Take those children away and put them in foster care.’
The truth is that A) that’s not a good option and B) you just can’t do that.
Public policy in America is that the biological parents really have powerful rights and big responsibilities with regard to kids. You just can’t step in and say, ‘Well, I don’t like this woman’s decisions. I think we should take those children and give them away.’ Fortunately, it’s not that easy. You can’t do that.
Then Dr Phil introduces attorney and child advocate LINDA WALLACE PATE. She was on the previous show as well, chronicling the horrors of foster care. This time she talks about the procedures involved in removing a child from her/his parents. Note the criteria includes: “immediate threat to the children’s health and safety”, which is why Angels in Waiting made their reports. There’s no doubt in anyone’s mind that the night she brought home the first two octuplets was extremely dangerous and showed a monumental lack of maternal judgment. Even Kaiser threatened not to send any more of the preemies home.
Then there were the intruders in the yard and at the door and ther resistance to hiring security. Nadya didn’t do anything about security until after the car seat that was on her porch was thrown through the back window of her vehicle. They could have just as easily broken into the house and, yes, abducted the babies. And then the health risk of Tuberculosis.
All three were reports were not only justified, by law, AIW had to act.
LINDA WALLACE PATE:
In order to remove children from their parents, the children have to be in immediate danger of physical abuse or sexual abuse, or the environment is an immediate threat to the children’s health and safety. That’s to remove the child without a court order. You’re essentially arresting a child. Social workers have the police power to come into your home, if the child is in immediate danger.
In this case, although Tuesday night when the first babies came home, I don’t think we got to that point of immediate danger, but I do believe that it was very toxic to the children. I believe that when you over-stimulate premature babies like that, that that can have a long-term effect on their development. They have a problem with sensory integration as adults. These are very serious issues.
The preemies went from the womb to the neonatal ICU to that mob scene. An adult who had just emerged from a coma wouldn’t have tolerated it.
DR PHIL:
I did speak to L.A. County Department of Child and Family and Services. I did talk to Kaiser Permanente, and I talked with Dr. Reilly from Orange County. He’s the chief deputy director of social services there.
Basically, what I said to all of these people is, ‘My involvement was to get into this story to help facilitate the best situation for these children. We’re now in the second chapter of that, and it seems to be running more smoothly, so we are going to step out of this story,’ because I don’t want to be a part of any [media] frenzy.’
He washed his hands of all liability by talking to these folks directly. He made known his concerns - made sure they documented them and then told them he was done. Bye bye Nadya. Then he goes back into the transparency issue to make his concerns known to the audience and general public.
Dr Phil relates the conversation he had with DR REILLY regarding Nadya and her new babies.
DR PHIL:
[Reilly] said, ‘Our approach is that we have all of these wonderful community centers throughout Orange County, lots of them, that offer everything from parent training to stress-relaxation sort of things, fun things for the family to do on a budget, all of these different things they can do to help the parents rise up to the occasion and not take the kids away.’
[To Pate] That is only as a last resort that they [remove children from the home]. It’s very difficult to do, and that is not the prime directive of Child Protective Services or social services, correct?
LINDA WALLACE PATE:
That’s correct. The paradigm shift for the last 10 or 15 years has been to keep the family intact. The outcomes are so poor in foster care. Children are, as we talked about before, four times more likely to be abused and neglected in foster care than with their biological parents or their relatives. Every effort must be made. We need to circle the wagons, we need to take all the resources that we have, we need to let all the drama subside. We need to get very Zen in this environment and give this family some privacy.
I’m all for transparency, but families have to have privacy too.
DR PHIL:
Private transparency, but nonetheless, a transparency to the agency. That’s all I’m saying in this situation. Having a mandated reporter inside the house helps a lot, because they are taken much more seriously, because they are informed reporters.
DR PHIL to Czech - more legal disclaimer to make sure she is not at risk t her self or others.
I don’t think there’s a mean bone in Nadya’s body. When I say that the children are at risk, I don’t think she would do anything ugly with children. What I mean is just getting overwhelmed and things falling through the cracks if there isn’t enough support. That’s your concern, right? Just making sure she has enough support.
JEFF CZECH: Absolutely.
GLORIA ALLRED:
Dr. Phil, let’s face it: Kaiser Permanente is not going to be in that home 24/7. That’s what we’re concerned about. What we’re concerned about is the record of Nadya in the next week, which should be a good indicator for what may happen in the future.
I want to make sure that everybody understands that Angels in Waiting wanted nothing more than for Nadya to succeed. They made every effort to help her, to support her, to train her, to educate her.
If she felt like a stranger, it’s because she didn’t come in to be with her babies except very little, a lot of the time only when the media was filming, and these babies need bonding, they need to be held by their mommy. They need to be fed by their mommy. They need to be changed and bathed by their mommy. They need to be loved and hear the sound of their mommy’s voice. That is how we create bonding, that is how we create trust in babies, and on that score, Dr. Phil, she failed miserably, and the record supports that.
We hope the future will be different for the sake of these babies.
DR PHIL:
I think she says, clearly, she was made to feel uncomfortable, she was made to feel like she was doing something wrong, that she wasn’t being helped, that she was being criticized and judged. That is no way to feel in your own home with your own babies.
LINDA WEST-CONFORTI:
We reached out to help this woman. We tried to show her the proper bonding. Dr. Phil, she wasn’t at home.
We would ask, ‘Where’s Nadya?’ Nobody knew where she was. She would come home at midnight with Gap bags in her hands. She wasn’t available to us for teaching. She wasn’t available to us to tell, ‘Nadya, come on, let’s do a feeding on one of your babies,’ or ‘It’s bath time.’”
Now this next question is plain crazy. Why does a woman with 14 children - only eight of whom are new need to be told what to do? To be told not to go shopping? To be told her baby needs a bath or a feeding? And how are they going to “sit down with her if she isn’t there and doesn’t trust them?
DR PHIL:
Did you sit down with her and say, ‘You seem to be absent. We need more time’?
LINDA WEST-CONFORTI:
Yes. I sat down with her. Annie Young sat down with her. We sat and we had a conference. She was supposed to give [her octuplet son] Elijah a bath, and it took four days. We ended up giving the child a bath.
If true, that is obscene. Nadya’s first publicist, Joann Killeen, said that her duties ended up including bathing and babysitting the old children.[3-27]
DR PHIL to Allred:
You’re concerned she’s going to be under-involved going forward?
GLORIA ALLRED:
My concern is, she wasn’t involved the first week. Where is she going to be the second, third, fourth and fifth? Everyone in this room is concerned about these children, but we are not there yet. You don’t have to be the best parent to keep your children. You just have to be good enough.
You just have to be in the room.
LINDA WALLACE PATE:
She has to be good enough. She’s got to get better, because she is going to be at risk of losing these children. This cannot continue, because these children will become failure to thrive. They have to be bonded with their mother. It’s important that she understands that this is the end of the road for her.
The government and Child Protective Services are not going to wait until these children slump into a failure to thrive. We need to make sure that they’re on the right track now.
Nadya’s lawyer wakes up and decides to earn his money. Look at his picture - he barely survived.
JEFF CZECH:
This is just reinforcing what I’ve seen in Nadya’s decision. The best step she could have made is to move on. This is a situation that was going nowhere. Clearly, constant judgment is not going to help the situation. Nadya does not have to be under a microscope 24 hours a day. That’s not going to help her. I guarantee you, she’s spending a lot more time now with those babies.
He just admitted she wasn’t spending much to begin with. Nadya admits she’s dealing with it by denial.
GLORIA ALLRED:
She doesn’t want the privacy. She wants only one side to come out, Dr. Phil, because every day she’s blogging to the public about what she’s doing.
JEFF CZECH shows once again he’s a minnow in a shark’s den:
Trust me, she doesn’t want you in her kitchen anymore.
GLORIA ALLRED:
You will only now hear one side of the story: the spin placed on Nadya, the spin placed by Jeff. That’s all fine and good, but we care about protecting the babies.
Dr Phil now gets on record AIW’s and Allred’s statements that they are officially finished too.
DR PHIL ask AIW:
At this point, you guys are out?
LINDA WEST-CONFORTI: Correct.
DR PHIL:
At this point, I’m saying I’m going to take a respectful step back and allow this to go forward.
DR PHIL to Allred;
Is that your plan, at this point? Do you step back and let Kaiser do their job?
GLORIA ALLRED:
We really have no choice. We couldn’t let this situation continue, so yes, we will be stepping back. We will be praying and hoping for the best for these little babies, and for their six siblings, and for Nadya, but we’re not really optimistic about their future.
DR PHIL Back to AIW (and Kaiser)
I want to say, and go on record saying, that I have sat with Linda, I have sat with Jackie. I have talked about your childcare philosophies, your intervention strategies, the systems you put in place, the things that you do, and I could not be more impressed with what y’all do. The dynamic here didn’t work.
Y’all clearly are cutting edge professionals and know what you’re doing. I say the same thing about Kaiser Permanente, having been over there, and met with those folks, and visited with them, and been in the NICU [Neonatal Intensive Care Unit], and talked to the nurses there and gotten a feeling and a vibe for everything. Those are dedicated, caring professionals.
And then the poor folks who went out of their way to donate time, material and labor to get the house set up and there’s not oing to be any more mentions of them. That isn’t fair. They got flat out ripped off and the next needy family won’t get it because of Nadya.
They don’t look too happy, do they?
Left - Shalena Smith, Ga Ga Designs provided the nursery, which Nadya didn’t make a point of thanking on air during her radaronline videos. All it would have taken was a few shots of the nursery to thank Smith.
Right - Amy Phillips, Uptown Flooring and Design provided the carpets and flooring in Nadya’s house.
Dr Phil was pist too because he was the one who arranged it. Hopefully he’ll make good with them. He covers their disclaimer.
DR PHIL:
I know you did it for the babies more than the mom. That doesn’t mean you support her decisions to have gone and gotten pregnant again. But you had the ability to look past the situation and keep your eye only on the babies. That’s so compassionate, and I really thank you guys for doing that.
He thanks Stan Whitaker, Whitaker General Contracting, who oversaw the general contracting of her home.
Young America, who donated furniture for Nadya’s older children.
Million Dollar Baby outfitted the nursery.
Higher America donated a brand-new convertible bottom drawer refrigerator for the octuplets.
