Alone And Aging Out

I don’t often address issues related to foster care because I really don’t have any direct experience with that system – thankfully.

Even so, homelessness is an issue close to my heart since my own youngest sister was homeless for 4 years and somehow survived that and even managed to extricate herself from that about 10 years ago. Her situation remains precarious and my heart hopes she doesn’t end up in those dire straits again but there is no certainty.

I have learned that when children in foster care reach a certain age, they are put out without much in the way of resources. Some even run away from foster care before they reach that age. These are children who lack any kind of supportive family to love and care for them. Their parents may be in prison or addicted to drugs and self-absorbed. Or their parents may have even died.

There is a non-profit known as Pivot in Oklahoma that is trying to do something substantial to help youth who would be homeless otherwise. They are building a community of tiny homes to primarily serve the needs of 16 to 19 year old youth. These are located right outside of the organization’s headquarter. In addition to providing a bed, small kitchen and bathroom (a roof over their heads), the organization provides services.

They help the teen get a job. They teach them life skills. And they provide therapeutic attention to help these youth heal from a less visible internal hurt. So regardless of the reason their parents are absent, a youth is understandably upset that the person who was supposed to take care of them, is not there for them.

All children still do love their parents at that level of attachment from birth. There is a grieving process that needs to be addressed – what should have been, could have been – wasn’t. This healing is necessary if a person is truly to move forward with their lives in a productive manner.

Helping Families Stay Together

We’d be better off spending the money upfront, whether that’s in the form of early childhood education, preventative healthcare, or helping families get the support they need to stay together. It would cost less overall and be more beneficial to those who truly need it. There will always be cases where throwing more money at a scenario doesn’t help, but overall, it makes more sense financially and emotionally.

If we really cared about children, we would want to do everything in our power to keep them out of the foster care system.

I am so grateful no one ever reported us as having children out of control. There was a time in our lives when I worried about that. I even cautioned my children to try to be on their best behavior out in public or they could end up like that episode of The Simpsons when the children are taken away.

I was happy to read that there are efforts underway to totally rewrite how child welfare works.

As a society, we should be helping children BEFORE a caseworker shows up at their house. We should be supporting that family BEFORE anyone feels inclined to call a child abuse and neglect hotline on them.

As a society, we can be spending taxpayer funds more effectively by spending them on prevention. Many believe it would be cheaper to intervene earlier. It would be less traumatic for the children and their parents. Therapists, parenting coaches (children do not arrive with an operating manual) and mental health professionals could help families avoid bad outcomes.

A good goal to begin with is to find families at risk but not over the edge yet. Families that lack secure food and housing because of poverty. Those young parents who grew up without good attachment to their own parents (in my case, my parents were adoptees and I can see now that they were strangely detached as parents, though overall good parents who did love and care about us).

I remember my mom telling me how she didn’t know how to cook or clean house when she first married my dad because her mother lacked the patience or tolerance for flaws to teach her. My mom made certain her daughters had such skills.

Here is the shocking statistic for only ONE of these 50 United States –

In 2019, in the state of Colorado there was a $558 MILLION dollar budget and 8,820 children were taken out of their family homes and placed in foster care.

I find that staggering and very very sad.

Dignity

Imagine the circumstances in your young world are such that adequate care and love from your parents doesn’t support you as every one of us would wish for our own self.

A question came up in relationship to foster care where the foster parent was introducing a foster child as that aspect of their identity. ie my new foster child Dylan or foster child Caroline. When people do that it shows just how little they are able to actually empathize with the experience of the child in their care. That is a terrifying situation to place a child in.

This feels immediately demeaning to me personally. It highlights a tragic circumstance as the first impression of this child to a neighbor or even a complete stranger.

Why not say something like this is Jake and he is going to be staying with us for a bit ? Why do people have to disclose a kid is in foster care ? Actually, simply saying the child’s name is better. No one needs to know you foster. The people who don’t know as part of the process, certainly don’t need to know.

This same unthinkable behavior can be extended to include an adopted child – why do people say this is my adopted son or daughter ?

After all, no one announces “this is Suzy my biological child”. Just simply introduce the child by their name. No need to add details related to the child’s most difficult circumstances. Life is hard enough without piling on.

The Scourge Of Poverty

Many children end up in foster care or adopted for no more reason than poverty. A recent suggestion was if stipends that go to foster care could be redirected to parents working hard to keep their children.

Definitely, a single mom can feel stuck in a never-ending cycle of poverty, constantly worried that one financial emergency will send everything tumbling down.

In 2014 there were 46 million poor people in the U.S., and millions more hovering right above the poverty line. A single mom may live in a cozy two-bedroom apartment and have food, furniture and toys for her child and still be very much at risk. That apartment may not be located in a very safe place to live. Yet subsidized housing may be all she can afford.

I was such a single mom at one time in my life. Most of my paycheck went to rent, food, child care costs so I could work, gas and pediatrician bills. What drove me to leave my daughter with her paternal grandmother was – so I could try and earn a higher standard of living. I didn’t have a lot of hope for the future, if I stayed in the situation I was in.

If you’re poor, it may be in every aspect: emotionally, support-wise and family-wise. And even when there is family support ? As in grandparents raising several grandchildren as their own of which I do know more than a few. Heck I turned to a grandparent myself in my own dire time of need.

And the strain on children of living with adults who are overwhelmed by life or who don’t have the skills they need to raise their children because they themselves came from troubled homes only compounds the core problem of poverty.

Poor families today are more isolated from neighbors, work, family – all of the social networks that help people through life. There has to be a better way than the business as usual way we have now.

The Forgotten Children

One of the better known adoption failure stories is that of the Harts. Since I grew up with the surname Hart, I suppose this really caught my attention. One may remember that a same sex couple drove their SUV off a cliff with the children inside.

Less known is the sadly typical story of their older brother. The biological older sibling spent eight years in the Texas foster care system. He had acted out violently when the state removed him and his siblings from their home in 2005. He became a victim of the foster care-to-prison pipeline: separated from his brothers and sister, heavily medicated, shuffled between foster homes and shelters, institutionalized in a psychiatric hospital and placed for years in a restrictive treatment center. By age 19, he was in a Texas prison serving three years for robbery.

Sadly, “Once they get diagnosed with something like this, it’ll stay on their record and show up on their permanency reports, and it’s assumed to be true.”

He never gave up on reuniting with his siblings. He didn’t learn of his siblings deaths until he was released from prison in October 2018, more than six months after their fate had been widely reported in the news.

“That was the last little hope I had in my life, you know? I had that hope that I was gonna see my little brothers again; one day we gonna kick it,” he said. “I used to cry sometimes thinking what we could be doing, growing up.”

Days after he was separated from his siblings for the last time, the 10-year-old tried to commit suicide by strangling himself with a belt at a therapeutic foster home.

Siblings placed together have fewer “non-progress” placement disruptions for reasons such as incompatibility with the caregiver. Research has linked changes in caregivers to child delinquency, even for children not in foster care. Those who experience two or more changes in their primary caregiver before age 10 are significantly more likely to engage in serious violence during adolescence — including homicide, robbery and aggravated assault — than those who do not experience multiple caregiver changes.

There’s no real sustained public awareness about these child welfare systems — how broken they are, and what they do to kids. Sharing this story is my attempt to raise awareness a little more.

National Adoption Awareness Month

The general public can be forgiven if they think that National Adoption Awareness Month is a promotion of adopting infants. That is not the purpose and it could have been titled better.

Thousands of children and youth are currently in foster care and waiting for a permanent home within the embrace of a loving family. In 1976, then Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis announced an Adoption Week to promote awareness of the need of children in foster care to be matched with an adoptive family.

In 1995, President Bill Clinton expanded the awareness week to the entire month of November. Three years later, President Clinton directed the US Dept of Health & Human Services to expand the use of the internet as a tool to assist in finding homes for foster care children seeking a stable home.

There actually is a National Foster Care Month – May. Foster Care is intended to support families. It is not intended as a substitute for a child’s parents.

Only 5 percent of all children adopted in 2017 were 15 – 18 years old. The risk of homelessness and human trafficking is increased for teenagers in foster care. Average time in foster care is 31 months.

Damaged

There are worse things than being adopted. Foster care seems to be that from most of the stories I’ve heard. Currently, Netflix has a series titled Unbelievable, based on the true story of a serial rapist.

The central character is Marie. Her newfound independence in an apartment of her own after years in foster homes seemed like a dream come true until he entered her apartment. Even her foster parents doubted her assertion.

She does not know if she attended kindergarten. She remembers being hungry and eating dog food. She reports entering foster care at age 6 or 7. She met her biological father only once. She reports not knowing much about her biological mother, who she said would often leave her in the care of boyfriends. She was sexually and physically abused.

“I moved a lot when I was younger,” Marie says in an interview. “I was in group homes, too. About two of those and probably 10 or 11 foster homes. I was on like seven different drugs. And Zoloft is an adult drug — I was on that at 8.”

Marie got her apartment through a program called Project Ladder designed to help young adults who had grown up in foster care transition to living on their own. Case managers would show participants the dos and don’ts of shopping for groceries, handling a credit card, buying insurance. “The rules about life,” Marie says. Best of all, Project Ladder provided subsidized housing, with each member getting a one-bedroom apartment.

Police pressured her to recant her rape report and then charged her with filing a false report which could have landed her a year long sentence. Eventually, the truth that she had been raped was revealed. Marie’s case led to changes in practices and culture. Detectives receive additional training about rape victims. Rape victims get immediate assistance from advocates at a local healthcare center. Investigators must have “definitive proof” of lying before doubting a rape report, and a charge of false reporting must now be reviewed with higher-ups.

The full story is available at ProPublica.