Post Visit Fallout

I haven’t written a whole lot about visits and what happens during them or after them and it’s an important part of being a foster parent.

Kids in foster care still have visits with their families. Those visits can look a lot of different ways.

For some families they’re supervised at the Department of Children and Family Services. Most parents start out with visits there right after the kids are removed. A lot of families then move on to have visits at a facility run by an organization like Salvation Army, which here runs a facility called The Family Place. Visits at both DCFS and the Family Place are supervised visits, with a trained facilitator who monitors what is happening. At the Family Place they also assess how the parent is doing with the child or children, and then they can make a recommendation for what type ongoing assistance the parent(s) might need to get their kids back.

So for example, with Kiddo, visits started at DCFS, moved to the Family Place for four visits with each parent, a report was written about what skills the parents needed to work on in handling their child, and then the parents were referred to another facility where they could work with a supervisor who was trained to assist them in building any skills they needed to work on.

Ultimately, if things go well and parents are working their plans and kids are looking like they will go home, visits can move on to unsupervised. In theory, visit time with parents will increase at that point. Sometimes a service provider is added to help work on the bond between the parent and the child if it needs extra help.

But.

Things get tricky with visits in so many different ways. The above outline works great for kids who really are headed home. We’ve seen it work more than once, and it’s a beautiful process. But things in foster care are seldom neat and clean and scripted.

In our county, the stated “goal” is always “return to parent.” It stays that way until a termination of parental rights proceeding is actually filed. What that means is, you run into situations where everyone knows the child is not actually going home. The parent is not working their plan, or is not capable of achieving their goals because of mental limitations, or the parent is not getting off of drugs or alcohol, so the case worker, the foster parents, the judge all know that the child is very unlikely to ever return to the parent. But the stated goal remains the same until that termination proceeding is actually started. And visits continue until the termination proceeding is completed.

As an aside, not all counties work this way. I work in two counties as an attorney for the child, and one of the counties – the one we foster in – works this way. The other county is much more inclined to change the stated goal to match the actual progress of the case. It seems to be a cultural thing and is very frustrating to me in the county we foster in. But that’s neither here nor there.

What really matters is what happens to the kids around visits.

And visits are horrifically messy for kids.

All foster parents know and experience the Post Visit Fallout. After a visit with parents, kids can come home angry, fussy, irritable, hysterical, off their oats, destroying things, laughing hysterically, and crying a whole heck of a lot. We’ve experienced all those things with different kids. This post-visit state of affairs lasts for anywhere from a few hours, to almost a week.

For Tiny, visits with her family have been very sporadic during her time in foster care. A lot of that has to do with Covid, because the visit centers shut down. When she first came into foster care she went nearly 7 months without a visit. Then one of her therapists arranged a couple of visits at a park because she was frustrated that no visits had happened. After that, finally things opened back up at DCFS, so visits were happening every other Friday for an hour with just her Mama. Tiny returned from those visits positively chipper, and remarkably unfazed.

So two court dates ago, the caseworker recommended a change in the visit schedule, and requested unsupervised visits be allowed at Mama’s apartment so that Tiny could see all of her siblings, because the siblings could not be accommodated at DCFS because of Covid still. There was a little bit of back-and-forth in court about whether the visits were a good idea, but ultimately they were agreed to. I supported them. I knew Tiny missed her siblings. She’d carry around a photo of them that I laminated for her and point out each one, and talk about them.

So, we started with visits at Mama’s apartment with all of the siblings. And the wheels came off.

Something about the change in the visits really rocked Tiny’s world. She went from returning from visits all chipper and happy, to coming back crying hysterically for days on end about how much she missed her Mama and her siblings. She would be extremely clingy, needing to be held 24 hours a day for two full days after she returned from the visit. Then she would move on to just being weepy periodically. She’d be moving along through her day just fine and then suddenly stop, remember her family, and basically be brought to her knees by the recollection and weight of missing them.

This whole process would take about five days. On the sixth day, she’d be herself again. Then on the seventh day, there would be another visit.

We wound up having to go back to the court to request that visits be moved to every other week so that Tiny could have some recovery time between visits. If Tiny had been actually looking like she could be going home I wouldn’t have requested the change because the bonding time with her family was so important.

But right now, her Mama is not managing to do all of the things she needs to do to get Tiny back. Honestly, it doesn’t look like she’s capable of doing all of the things she needs to. It’s horrifically sad in so many ways. Tiny is a very, very, very well loved child. Her Mama loves her, her siblings absolutely adore and dote on her. But the home environment just isn’t what it needs to be for this medically fragile kid to go home. Anything can happen in foster care, and there’s still time for things to change, but that’s the way things look right now. And it’s hard to imagine how enough change could happen at this point.

If Tiny truly doesn’t go home, it means that Tiny is going to grow up missing her family and they are going to grow up missing her. It means Tiny isn’t going to grow up in her culture and is going to be stuck growing up with a white family who is trying hard but never quite able to achieve truly teaching her her culture. It means a tremendous amount of tragedy and heartbreak all around. It’s some thing I am wrestling with daily.

For now, we swing in foster care limbo. We suspect which way this case is going, but there’s still time and anything can happen in foster care, and I mean anything. For now the visits will go on every other week, with it taking a week for Tiny to recover after each one. Even though she just turned three yesterday, we are restarting her play therapy to see if there’s anything a therapist can do to help her process after visits. And we will of course keep loving on her and doting on her and wishing with all our hearts that visits weren’t so damn hard on this poor tiny little human.