I have a friend, let’s call her Renee, who has a sister, Stella. Stella has had drug problems for most of her adult life. She also has three children, at least one of whom has some mental and physical issues (not major ones, but still present) as a result of the drug use; the oldest is now 7.
Stella is uninterested in taking care of the children, so Renee and Stella’s parents, Mimi and Mr. Mimi (he’s not going to show up in the story because his job takes him out of the country on a regular basis, so I don’t feel the need to make up a name for him 
) take care of them. However, Stella likes the fact that she has the kids, because she can get government money for them, which she spends for herself; she also likes that it gives her control over her family, and she has threatened to take the children away from Mimi on various occasions when she felt like the family wasn’t paying enough attention to her. (I don’t have direct evidence of this, but I kind of suspect that Stella might be blackmailing Mimi into sending her money as well.)
The family really doesn’t want this to happen. The last time they tried to make Stella be responsible for her own kids was four years ago; there were two of them, the oldest kid was 3, and it lasted about twelve hours. The kid called Renee, crying that he was hungry, and trying to feed a bottle to his baby brother who was screaming his head off because he hadn’t had any food either. So now they just try to pacify Stella as much as they can.
But since Stella is still the mother, and is still playing these control games, she visits the kids irregularly, makes promises to them she has no intention of keeping, and basically the kids are totally on edge and miserable (to the point of wetting their pants, having screaming nightmares, etc.) every time she makes an appearance.
I guess I have a couple of questions. I’m not intending that this be a post about asking for legal advice per se – I’m not trying to solve Renee’s family’s problems for them, and at this point I suspect they are unsolvable until the kids get older anyway – but I am more wondering what the best thing to do in this situation would have been, given the goal to make Mimi and her husband the adoptive parents (or have custody of the kids, which they don’t technically have – technically Stella is the custodial parent) and terminate all (or at least some of?) of Stella’s parental/custodial rights. (Oh, and the father’s parental rights, too; apparently he’s never technically given them up – but I’m more interested in Stella’s parental rights right now; I know nothing about the father.)
I said to Renee, about the starving-kid incident above, “Why didn’t you guys just call CPS on Stella?” That would have been my instinct: to call CPS, document Stella as an unfit mother, and get the kids taken away from her for good. Mimi didn’t do that because she didn’t want the kids to go into foster care, to strangers away from family, and she was also concerned that if this happened, she (Mimi) wouldn’t have any rights to them either. Is this accurate? (We’re talking about Idaho, if that makes any difference. I live in California, and my understanding is that in CA they always try to find bio-family if they possibly can at all.) My viewpoint would be that even if the kids had to go into foster care for a week or a month, it would have been better to get it over with then and then have a stable life for these kids instead of the see-saw they are currently on. But I don’t know, I have no experience with such situations – what is the Doper wisdom?
It also seems to me that documented drug use (she’s OD’d at least twice at this point and been admitted to the hospital) should be evidence of unfit behavior, but maybe not?
One more thing: Mimi apparently made Stella sign a form saying that if she was mentally unfit/incapacitated that Mimi would be able to adopt the children. This happened (that is, Stella was ruled as incapacitated) during a recent OD, but they couldn’t find the form in time to file the adoption papers. At least, this is what Renee says. This makes no sense to me, that this would be possible in the instant that Stella was incapacitated but not two days later when she was discharged from hospital? And I was always under the impression that adoption was a really long drawn-out process. Is Instant Incapacitated Adoption really a thing?