Biological/Adopted Kids of Foster Parents

One of the realities of doing care and having biological children is that people in your life, including friends, will tend to believe that any problem your children have is related to care. Sometimes, like for me recently that is hard to shake off.

There is no doubt that fostering has an impact on children already in the home, how could it not? It isn't generally what people worry about though. Part of it is just ordinary sibling dynamics. Kids define themselves against each other. My sister joined gymnastics, so I took ballet. We both started piano and she was better than I was, so I quit. I was the "good girl" and she was one always in trouble. She was cute and I was ... awkward. And fostering kids define themselves against the fostered kids. The fostered kids get into trouble and the fostering kids know that they are not supposed to be that sort of kid.

It is really rather ironic. People tend to be afraid of doing care because they worry that their legal children will pick up bad habits, when in reality you are more likely to end up with legal children who are anxious about doing anything wrong. Fostering kids, with the exception of fostering kids who get really good at getting away with torturing fostered kids while always looking like angels to the parents, tend to be very "good."

I know from my research that it is typical for fostering children to feel pressure to be "good." They feel that they are supposed to be role models. They feel that it is just expected of them, that their parents don't have time for them to get into trouble. The younger they are the more they are likely to have the worry that they will be sent away if they are bad. That shouldn't be surprising, as nearly every fostering child under 10 who has been interviewed thinks that is why fostered children, even babies, are in care.

Older kids, the exact age depending in large part on how much the parents talk to them, come to understand that is not the case. Their belief that some children are given away by their parents because the kids are bad is slowly replaced with a world-view in which some parents have their kids taken away because those parents hit them, or left them alone, or just forgot to feed them while they where high for days.

You can't hide it from them. Even if you try to educate them about poverty, mental illness, and social injustices, even if you try to give them the most sympathetic understanding possible for why sometimes parents can't care for their kids, the fostered kids will talk. Maybe not all of them, but eventually there will be a child who tells your kid about killing and eating cats while homeless with his dad, or having his sisters hit him in the head with shovels at his step-father's direction.

It turns out that behavior problems are not major issues among fostering children, but some degree of anxiety is common. They tend to be homebodies. They have more sick days from school. They stress more about bad things that happen in the world. Of course the effects of fostereing are not all bad, in fact, the research indicates that it is mostly good. If the alternative is growing up feeling totally safe in their bubbles and believing that everyone who is poor is just lazy, I'll choose the life with a bit more anxiety.

It is at heart a choice that every parent has to make. When do you let them watch the news? When do you tell them about war? How much do you protect them from ugliness in the world, and how do you make them feel safe while being sympathetic at the same time? The people at the homeless shelter are not bad. They are just like us, but don't worry dear, it won't happen to you.

You just can't have it both ways. You can't raise children who understand what happens in the world and don't experience some anxiety about it. This is, by the way, that some of you with pre-school children find social workers don't want to license you or if you are licensed don't want to place children. All of us, as foster parents, started out naive. We started out only thinking about bringing a traumatized child into our homes and helping that child to heal. We did not realize that we would be introducing our un-traumatized children to all that trauma.

So I know all this. I know it better than my friends do. It is why I have not hesitated to get my children counselors as soon as I suspected that they might need someone outside the family to talk to.

I also know that there are amazing benefits of doing care. I have no doubt at all that Carl, David and Evan have enriched Andrew and Brian's lives. I know that Brian loves all of his brothers. I know that Andrew is committed to social justice, has sympathy for people in crisis, in ways most young people do not.

You know, I started this post to talk about Brian.

Brian has anxiety attacks. Brian is a fostering child. He has been a fostering child since he was six.* Brian has anxiety attacks, although his worst anxiety symptoms have not occured when there are other kids in the house. In fact, anything that could be called an anxiety attack has occured between placements. Prior to Evan moving out Brian had stomach aches and too many absences from school, but nothing worse. In fact, he did not have anything like an anxiety attack until after we started giving him ADD meds. (None of them helped him, all of them increased his anxiety. He doesn't take them anymore.)

The issues started when he was in third grade, after Carl had lived with us for a while. They seemed very much school-related. He had a bad teacher. Actually the poor kid had a series of not-great teachers. Even the ones who were probably good teachers for other kids were remarkably poor at dealing with ADD. If I could do go back in time and do anything differently, it would have been to move him to his father's elementary school where Roland could have hand-picked his teachers and easily communicated with them daily about what work Brian was getting done, and not getting done. I wouldn't change anything about doing care.

Oh, so what does all this mean? It means that I cannot pretend that doing care is part of the equation, but that I really don't believe that it is the cause of the problem or even the major contributor or trigger. Doing care has been part of making him who he is. He has a genetic pre-disposition to depression and anxiety, and some unfortunate educational experiences. In the long run, all I can do to help him is to be understanding while not "feeding" the problem. What I did yesterday is I think what is best for him. I spoke to him sympathetically, told him that I knew that what he was experiencing was tough, and all there was to do was to ride it out. The administration at the charter school responded perfectly. They too did not make him feel that he was acting out for attention. They did not roll their eyes and tell him to stop clenching his throat. They put him in a quiet room and gave him some drawing materials. After an hour they sent him back to class. He needs to get back into counseling (we've been working on that) to develop more skills, but I know this is the sort of thing that ultimately he has to "make better." I can't fix it.

And so if I am right and care is part of the equation, but not a major part, what does that mean for doing care? I want to say that it means very little. Of course we need to be careful about who we bring into the home, but I don't think it will make much of a difference. I think that doing care is probably part of Brian's anxiety, but I don't really think that Carl, David and Evan themselves are responsible for it.

And what does that mean for the future? Well, Brian still wants to go to the big high school, and we are nervous about it. Of course I also recognize it as a reason to get me out of car pool, but I am trying to keep that out of the decision (which is easy when he seems to be leaning towards the big high school. Then I get to pretend that I am a perfect super mom who would happily make any sacrifices for her kid, it is just that he doesn't want me to.) Anyway, part of me thinks that it would be smart not to take any new kids until after he is settled next year. That way we can get him settled and if he does have problems with the new school at least we would know it was the school.

Which brings me to what I was planning on writing about and will have to wait for the next post...

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*Brian turned six while we were taking classes to become foster parents. He was five when we decided to do it, and six once Carl moved in.