How do kids wind up in foster care?

This is a tough post to write because I need to be conscientious about privacy issues and can’t really tell the story about each of our foster kids. I’ll talk in some generalities though, because a friend raised the question, and I think this is a really important topic.

I think a lot of people assume that bio parents who have their kids removed are monsters. I’ll tell you right now that based on my experience they are absolutely not. The parents of our kids have all loved them more than I can express. They’ve all wanted the best for their kids. They just sometimes weren’t able to provide it.

Some kids wind up in foster care because of poverty and homelessness. One of our kids’ parents wound up homeless with the children because the apartment DSS emergency funds paid for was infested with bedbugs. It takes time and funds to straighten out messes like that, and the very poor don’t have resources to draw on. It just so happened that that parent also didn’t have parents to rely on. One parent was dead, one had severe mental health issues, so the parent had nowhere to go with kids in tow, and called CPS to surrender them to foster care temporarily to give the parent time to straighten out the mess. I can’t imagine how hard that must have been.

Some parents wind up with their kids in foster care because they simply don’t know how to raise children. If they weren’t raised well themselves, they have no role models to draw upon, and are bound to make mistakes. Sometimes mistakes lead to children getting hurt. Sometimes mistakes lead to children not getting enough nutrition, or having rotted teeth.

Those of us who were raised in relatively functional families tend to take for granted that we know about things like nutrition, and weaning, and dental health, and hygiene. But some folks were never taught those things at home, and never learned those things in poor school systems, and simply don’t know how to provide proper care for their kids. This is one of those areas that gets me upset because preventative care, namely educational programs for vulnerable parents, could make a world of difference and prevent kids from winding up in foster care. We need to do better with identifying and providing resources to vulnerable parents.

Some kids wind up in foster care because they are caught up in a cycle of domestic violence between parents. Sometimes the abused parent can’t figure out how to leave with their children. Sometimes they’re so stuck in the cycle of violence they don’t know how to get even themselves out, let alone their kids.

Alcohol and drugs are a reason that many parents wind up losing their children to foster care. Addiction is a horrible beast, and clawing one’s way out of it is sometimes such a monumental task that people can’t do it, even for children they love.

Sometimes there are cultural barriers that play a role. This is especially the case with Tiny’s family, where families may have been refugees for generations, have grown up largely without formal schooling, don’t speak the language, and don’t understand our cultural expectations for medical care.

Foster care tends to be generational. More than one of our kids’ parents have spent time in foster care themselves. That means trauma is intergenerational. People live what they know, and if they grew up with domestic violence and poverty that may be all they think they are capable of living themselves. Mental health issues and PTSD are common among parents who have children in foster care. Just wanting a better life for your child doesn’t mean you know how to give it to them.

For medical kids, sometimes an accident or injury can lead to a child winding up in foster care because the medical care the child requires is more sophisticated than the parents can cope with.

A lot of teen parents wind up struggling to figure out how to cope with parenting while they are still children. One of our kids had a teen mom who grew up in a life saturated with trauma herself.

The school to prison pipeline leads to children not having parents who are able to care for them as well.

Kids with mental health problems and behavioral problems sometimes wind up in foster care because their parents can’t cope. There are insufficient resources for kids with mental health issues and behavioral issues, and sometimes parents reach limits they didn’t even know they had.

Are there some “bad” people out there whose kids are in foster care? I’m sure there are. Are there some folks who have made some terrible choices that led to their kids being in foster care? You bet. But on the whole we have found loving parents who want their kids to thrive and want to do right by them.

What happens while kids are in foster care is absolutely crucial. Parents are required to take steps to rectify the situation that led to the child being in foster care. This means that parents are required to get mental health services, drug and alcohol treatment, parenting classes, domestic violence classes, parent aids, and the like. Whatever the underlying issue is with the parent, they must learn to do better in order to get their children back.

For some of our kids, that has meant parents learning what resources they have upon which they can rely in times of crisis. For all of our kids, it has meant many months of extremely hard work by the parents. I am sincerely impressed by some of the parents who worked their tails off to get their kids back. And for the most part, kids have gone back to far better situations than they left. All those things that are required of bio parents really do work.

Are the situations that kids return to ideal? Nope, but neither is their staying with us. Being separated from a bio family equals trauma, whether it’s for short term or long term. Some very good studies have shown that kids tend to do better with their bio families than they do with ideal adoptive families, and those studies form the foundation of the foster care system. If kids can go home to a safe and appropriate situation, then they should. And if someone can’t accept that that is the truth, they’re going to have a very hard time being a foster parent.