SUMMARY: The juvenile court properly found a youth to be within the jurisdiction of the juvenile court and rejected the mother’s argument that any action or inaction on her part, regarding her other children, prior to this child’s birth could not be used by the State to prove that she had neglected this child.
The Court of Appeals upheld the trial court’s determination that the child lacked proper parental care and that her mother neglected a refused to provide her necessary care. This finding was based upon the mother’s incarceration, her prior refusal to enter into drug rehabilitation, her prior drug activity involving her two older children, and her decision to expose her infant, in contravention of prison policy, to a fellow inmate who admitted to killing her child.
While the mother contests that her past behavior with respect to her older children cannot be used by the State to prove that she has neglected this child, the Nebraska Supreme Court held that “evidence supported an adjudication of a child as lacking proper parental care by reason of the fault of habits of his mother, in that the child’s siblings has been previously adjudicated and the mother had failed to correct the conditions that led to those adjudications.” Similarly, the Court of Appeals stated “one’s history as a parent is a permanent record and may serve as a basis for adjudication [because] one’s history as a parent speaks to one’s future as a parent.”
In this case, the mother’s older children had been adjudicated under § 43-247(3). DHHS “had put a plan into place for [her] and had set up visitation for [her] with her older children” but she had “not made any significant steps towards reunification with these children.” Therefore, the court did not err in considering the situation of the older children in deciding this case.