During foster parent training, we listened to a mother share her personal story about her son, who was formerly in foster care. She had to work through some things before she was able to get him back, and she expressed her gratitude for the foster parents who watched him while she was getting better. Even before going to classes, I knew that my goal as a foster parent was to reunite foster children with their parents. I'm not here to snatch them from their families. Most kids want to be with their biological parents anyway, even when they've suffered extreme pain and loss from them. Kids want their parents. I want to help kids whose parents need to pull it together (or, in other cases, whose parents are no longer alive... but that's a different case). And I sincerely hope that parents learn to master their addictions, put their children above their boyfriends, control their emotions, provide for their children, and make the changes that they need to implement in order to become fit parents. That's what I hope the parents are doing while we've got their kids. Meanwhile, we don't use drugs, alcohol, or tobacco; we don't hit or yell; we don't fight; we don't demean; we don't neglect. We provide healthy meals, structure, reading time, play time, school support, and a safe environment. We create a place for children to grow while they are going through a stressful time in their lives.
Cody and I make it a goal to never speak poorly of parents. We validate children's feelings of missing their parents, listen to stories about their parents, ask them to share good things about their parents, and encourage visits with their parents. We show respect for parents in front of the children at all times--even when we are absolutely furious about things that the parents say or do, which we discuss behind closed doors well after bedtime. We do our best to not discuss the parents or their situations with others, even when it's tempting to vent.
Because of this goal, I have gone back and forth on my desire to share some of the intricacies of working with biological parents on this blog. A month and a half in, I'm still not sure how much I should share. The decision to write today's post comes as I've been noticing the page views climb weekly, with over 100 clicks on this blog yesterday alone, in countries such as the US, the UK, Chile, Poland, Russia, Puerto Rico, Spain, and Honduras. I figure that people are interested in learning about foster care, and that I would like to share those things I wish I had known about before experiencing it first-hand. With that, I would like to paint an accurate yet anonymous picture of what it has been like working with our first set of biological parents.
First of all: it's been nothing like the experience shared by the biological mom at our foster care classes. We've been insulted, degraded, and outright hated. Our foster children come back from home visits with stories that make us want to scream, but we keep it hidden from of the children. I would like to limit my examples to four, which I believe will paint an accurate picture while not going overboard on detail. The negative sucks, and we weren't quite prepared for it. I don't want to dwell on it, but I would like to let good-intentioned people interested in foster care know what I wish I had been prepared for.
1)Creating fear: We didn't understand why our kids reacted a certain way when they first arrived at our house, but after consulting with various resource people, we finally learned that the children had been told to stay on guard around us because their foster parents would try to sexually assault them if they weren't careful. Yeah, let that sink in. Having a child be terrified of you because they think you're going to abuse them in that way, because their loved one told them you would.
2)Passive-aggression: We keep a spare change of clothes in the baby's diaper bag, in case of accidents. She repeatedly would come back from visits wearing the spare pair, while the original clothes still looked clean. I asked the children why the baby's clothes kept getting changed during home visits. One of the children said it was because they said that the baby smelled like rotten food and they couldn't stand the smell. Mm-hmm. Because we feed our children rotten food? Because we hadn't put fresh clothes on the baby to look her best for the visit? They have come home from the past six visits with numerous bags and boxes full of clothes, toys, and candy because the parents say they are worried their children are not being taken care of. Our garage is full of garbage bags of old clothes (after their individual dressers are already overflowing with clothing), out-of-season winter clothes including 6-10 heavy winter coats per child, dozens of stuffed animals, grocery bags full of candy and junk food, etc.
3)Cancellations: Soon after arriving, the children were given two scheduled visits per week with their family. Three times in a row, we received a phone call ten minutes before the scheduled visit that it would not be happening due to a last-minute cancellation on the part of the parents. On one particular afternoon, we dealt with alternating meltdowns every 10-20 minutes until bedtime: screaming, crying, yelling at the top of their lungs, absolute mayhem. After three or four cancellations, the visits were changed to one day per week, at the request of the parents.
4)False hope: The children often come home with stories about how their parents say they're about to come home at any minute--which is completely unrealistic and untrue. The latest story is that the parents are trying to get the children to be able to stay with their grandmother's brother, so that they can stay with someone they feel comfortable with, instead of strangers (the child's exact words).
In essence, it sucks. Not what I had expected. Wish I had prepared myself to be a little tougher! Ha.
No comments:
Post a Comment