Guest Post: Radical Thoughts for National Foster Care Month

Guest Post by Sunday Koffron Taylor


photo © 2009 Dave Fischer | more info (via: Wylio)


Sunday Koffron Taylor is a foster alumni who you might recognize from her awesome blog "To Tell the Truth -- Please Stand Up."  As May is National Foster Care Awareness Month, she has graciously agreed to guest blog a topic of her choice to share with us her thoughts and perspectives.

"Radical Thoughts for National Foster Care Month"

May is national Foster Care Month and I should be blogging my bum off. Let’s face it would do my bum some good. I have just not been able to get my divergent thoughts together enough to come up with what I thought would be a coherent post, it just wasn’t coming to me. When Amanda asked me to do a guest post I decided to give it another try.

The problem is – the US foster care system is broken. Really broken and is damaging the very children they are supposed to be helping.

Here in Michigan we had a state Senator Bruce Caswell who proposed that our foster children would receive certificates for their $79 semi-annual clothing allowance that could only be spent at second hand stores. He later revised the plan and explained that the proposal was not to further marginalize our foster kids; it was to protect their clothing allowance from being misappropriated. Now what struck me about the whole controversy that has seemed to escape everyone else is – If our states foster parents (and / or agencies) can’t be trusted with $79 dollars twice a year, who on earth is approving them as foster parents in the first place and why? Why on earth do we trust them with the lives and souls of this state’s children?

Because we need foster parents to care for our state’s foster children, I assume. There are not enough good foster homes to go around and they system and our foster parents are stretched to thin.

But what if the way we view the foster care IS the problem with foster care?

The two tenets of foster care that shape the whole system are: A) that it is temporary and B) that kids need to be in a private home /“family” setting. What if those two premises cause more harm than good? What’s that you say? Blasphemy, right?

They say that the average stay in foster care is around 2 years, there are 20,000 kids who will age out of foster care every. While temporary and adoption are worthwhile goals, it is not a reality for many.

“Chances for adoption. Among those infoster care as of September 30, 1999, 127,000children were “waiting to be adopted,”27 meaningthat adoption was the placement goal for thesechildren or that parental rights had beenterminated.28 However, only 36,000 childrenwere actually adopted from foster care in 1999.Thus, only about 28 percent of children whowere eligible were, in fact, adopted over thecourse of the year. And the odds of these“waiting” children being adopted declined asthey got older. Children ages 1 to 5 accountedfor 35 percent of children eligible for adoptionbut 46 percent of actual adoptions .29 Incontrast, children ages 11 to 15 accounted for22 percent of the adoption-eligible children butonly 14 percent of actual adoptions, and thoseages 16 to 18 accounted for 4 percent of theadoption-eligible children but only 2 percent ofactual adoptions.” ChildTrends.org

Are we as a society allowing pipe dreams for the futures of our foster kids stand in the way of real, practical help? How different would the system be if we shifted the paradigm and from the moment children are made wards of the state we viewed the number one goal as permanency above everything. Anything else, such as reunification or adoption would be seen as a happy accident. What if from day one we looked foster kids in the eye and said, “This could take a while”? And what if from day one our goal was to put children in situations that could serve them long term? What would that shift in attitude hurt?

How bad would it be if we accepted the fact that a large number of kids in the system, who were not initially placed in kinship care or reunited won’t in fact be adopted, and that maybe for many older kids it isn’t the best option anyway?

What good could come of such a radical shift in the way the foster care system does business?

Children are initially traumatized by being removed from their families of origin, no matter how good the reason. Removal from the only the only life the child knows is damaging, that is a fact. Any time a child is removed there had better be a darn good reason. In cases where there is poverty driven neglect or cases of mild parental mental illness CHILDREN would better served by providing their parents with health care, medication, counseling and assistance, than by being removed in the first place.

After being removed, the most destructive and lasting damage to foster children comes from lack of continuity, seven or eight placements (in my case) many more in others, six middle schools, eight high schools.  The psychological effects of living in 8 different places, with 8 different sets of rules, countless caregivers with myriad different personalities are the stuff that attachment problems are made of.

What if large numbers of children would be better served in small, well run, managed, staffed and regulated group facilities or “boarding schools” where at least they could wake up in the same bed year after year. Are we are denying them that so we can hold on to hope of a fairytale happy adoption fantasy ending?