Some Reflections on Touch

I haven't hugged him. It seems odd to me that I haven't, although it is probably good and healthy. I think it is part of him being a normal 15-year-old boy who hasn't been bounced around in foster care. Also part of living the past year in a group home where touching was strictly regulated. He doesn't really invite hugs. He will talk about how he is feeling. He shares. I feel like I am getting closer to him, but he also maintains just enough physical distance that it feels inappropriate to hug.

I realize now that when he left the group home no one touched him at all. There was one woman in particular who was really attached to him. She told me how happy she was that we were taking him. She said she wanted me to take 50 more. I laughed, but she looked at me like she was wondering if maybe, just maybe, I would be a placement option for more of the boys who needed somewhere to go after here. She said such wonderful things about Gary. She stayed close to us when we were leaving, and leaned against a post looking sad and happy as I drove away.

She didn't even shake his hand though.

I told him that I was a hugger and asked him where he stood on hugs. He said he hugged, not a problem. This conversation was not as weird as it might have been, by the way, we were filling out the sexual safety plan. There's a part where it says, "The sorts of touch that will not confuse me or make me think that someone wants to have sex with me are: ____" Anyway, I got to write down "hugs."

Still haven't hugged him though. Not going to worry about it.

When I dropped him off at his friend's the other day she came running up the side walk and gave him a tight hug. He hugged her right back. That was good to see.

It seems sad to me that he has lived in a no-touch environment for eleven months.

I have started giving him shoulder pats and squeezes.

Everything is moving so quickly!

This post is probably going to be disjointed, but that is because my brain is running in circles.

Okay, this is going much more quickly than any placement has ever gone before. There are multiple reasons for this of course. Kids from his region almost never get into this program, so nobody over there knows how it works. That has led to him being given a false impression about the process and to things like him being brought up for a two-day pre-placement visit before we even had a chance to read the file.

It is difficult for anyone to put the brakes on because school starts in less than three weeks. If we are going to do it, and are willing to do it now then we should, so that we can get him into school at the beginning.

With Evan I was first told about him. Then I called the youth group leader to ask if he thought Evan was a good fit for the family. He gave me a good report and so then I read the file. THEN Evan was told of our existence and we agreed to meet him.

In this case Frankie was told that there was a family in Our Small Town that had been identified as a good possibility for him and asked if he wanted to go for a visit BEFORE the file even made it to the local office.

Now I know that in foster care what typically happens is that you get a call about a kid who needs a place to stay and foster parents agree (or not) with very little information. But this is not regular foster care. This is permanent placement. Though it is possible for me to ask for Frankie to be moved, that is not what this program is about. I am being asked to make a commitment to this kid. I have signed placement agreements for three kids, and all three of those boys emancipated from this home. I view my relationship with them as permanent.

So we are usually careful.

We keep getting information and then deciding whether to take the next step.

In this case we are getting everything all at once. My head is spinning.

I think I know everything that it is possible to know before he actually lives here. I know what his past issues are. I know the ways in which he has been different in the last six months. I have seen the way that he is interacting (so far) with the boys. He seems like our kind of kid and it feels like a go, but it is fast.

Today Evan, Brian, Frankie and I all had lunch with the agency social worker, whom I will call "Diane." When we got to the agency she brought me into her office to tell me that she had just got the full file herself and we had been misled about the severity and frequency of some past behaviors, but not about the fact that those behaviors had stopped when we were told they had. I had a mental flash of Ben's face from the night before when he told us that he hoped that when we read all the details we judged Frankie based upon who he had become and not who he had been.

With that running around my head, we went to an Asian restaurant (one of those places you find in the middle of the country where they serve Mandarin Chicken and Vietnamese Noodles) where we ate and talked about family rules and acceptable ways of handling conflict, among other things. Then Diane took Frankie back to the office to discuss the program and what was expected of him.

I took Evan and Brian to the mall and sat dazed wondering how much to worry about his pre-medicated behavior, was it likely to re-occur? Everyone agrees that part of the issue was the group home environment and his behavior in the same group home has been dramatically different. I decided that I was willing to take a chance on Frankie. He seems like our sort of kid and he has come a long way. He felt right.

Then she called me to pick him up and asked if I wanted to sign the placement agreement.

It was so odd. The signing of the placement agreement along with other forms has always been a bit of a ceremony here. The whole family has sat around the table, after weeks of getting to know each other, and read the documents out loud (especially the sexual safety plan), and everyone has signed it. There has then been much hugging and grinning. The day is thereafter remembered as the anniversary of the day the kid officially joined our family.

She asked me right there, in front of Frankie, and Hubby and Andrew weren't even the same county. I had told her earlier that Hubby and I were prepared to go forward, but it felt like I agreed to an engagement only to have someone produce a judge and ask me to take my marriage vows.

Okay, not quite, but it was disorienting.

I pointed out that Hubby and Andrew had to do some signing too, so I would take the documents home. She gave me a return envelop so that I could mail them back.

I got into the car feeling a bit stunned and Evan noticed the paint brochures I had picked up earlier to give to Frankie to look at. If we all decided this was going to work, I wanted him to be able to paint his room. Evan asked if he could give them to him and I said, "Okay" without really thinking about it.

Frankie of course was over-joyed. I'm not certain he has ever been able to choose colors for his room before. He asked if he could pick any color he wanted. I told him he could have any color, just not any intensity. He could have one accent wall in a dark color, if he wanted, but the others had to be light.

With furious excitement he announced that he wanted his accent wall to be dark red and then started asking Evan for advice on the other walls. He kept handing him samples, asking, but then coming up with another before Evan had a chance to even look at the previous. "What do you think of yellow? Yellow is bright. Would it look good with this red?" "Maybe I should do white. How about pink? Do you think pink would be good?" "Oh. Look. Here is a nice green." Evan said, "NO. No green! I will help you when we get home." "Okay. No green, but I think maybe pink. Or white. Look at these, Evan. Here is a picture with dark red and light blue!"

Evan's lap was covered with brochures, we were stuck in a traffic jam, I was more than a little dazed and Evan grinned at me and said, "You're going to blog this, aren't you?"

Oh yeah.

This evening, Hubby and I asked Evan for his input. I gave him more information than I otherwise would have but I know he has lived in group homes. I wanted his assessment of the reports. Given the circumstances under which Frankie has been challenging, and given his improvement, what did he think? Evan is advocating for him, and that means a great deal to me.

So, it looks like we are doing it. Hubby said he will take the paper work down to the office tomorrow.

We are aiming for a move-in date about two weeks from now.

Frankie picked out a dark red and off white that work very well with the red block and white fabrics in the log cabin quilt. He likes the center diamond pattern.

Next: More on Frankie

Sexual Safety Plan

FosterAbba wrote a post the other day about the limits that foster homes need to keep kids safe. Baggage responded with a good post of her own. The guidelines differ from state to state. The idea though is that you need the guidelines for two reasons: so the kids don't feel sexually threatened and the adults are protected from false allegations.

What you have to remember is that kids who have been sexual abused can be treated in ways that get safe touch and unsafe touch all mixed up. Children love to be cuddled. My bioboys always loved it when I would do light tickle-scratches on their arms and backs. They had a wonderful time wrestling with their father. For traumatized children all of that can be mixed up with unsafe touch. For them there was no line or boundary between what was appropriate and what was not. That can result in them either being nervous about being touched in ways that we think of as safe, or in not recognizing touch we deem inappropriate as unsafe. In other words, their line, if there is one at all, between safe and unsafe can be "off" in either direction.

My agency, which cares for teenagers and a few pre-teens, deals with it in a very detailed and direct way.

When a new kid moves in every member of the family sits around the table. A document called "The Lastname Sexual Safety Plan" is read out loud. Some details are filled in or changed, and everyone signs it. The first time Brian signed it he was six. I've talked about it before. I decided to discuss it again, although I don't know that I am really going to say much that is new.

It includes some typical things: no one goes into some one else's bedroom unless invited and then the door stays open. No one may be outside of their bedroom or bathroom in just their underwear or without a shirt. I forget how the bathroom thing is worded. It allows for multiple people to be in the bathroom brushing their teeth and combing their hair with the door open, but only one person may be in and the door must be shut if anyone is not fully dressed. Tickling and wrestling are prohibited. It states that if anyone is touched in anyway they do not like, they should tell someone about it.

My favorite line is, "The only people who have sex in this house are mom and dad and then only with the door closed."

Most of this can be negotiated. The adult line about sex is changed for same sex couples to read however the parents want "Mom and Mommy" or "Daddy Bob and Daddy John," whatever. When Brian was six the bathroom guidelines had an addendum, "Dad may be in the bathroom when he is helping Brian to wash his hair." The kids liked to wrestle with their father so much that we had them change the wrestling/ticking clause to "play wrestling is allowed only if everyone agrees and Dad is playing too."

There are a couple of things I really like about it. One is the section that the foster kid fills out with his or her social worker. It starts off, "The kind of touch that makes me feel safe and doesn't make me feel like someone wants to have sex with me are: ____" It doesn't ask the kids to list what makes them feel unsafe. The kids list what makes them feel safe. The social worker will usually ask them things like, "Do you feel safe when someone hugs you with one arm?" "What about when someone hugs you with two arms?"

I also like that it talks about it always being okay to talk about touches that you don't like or that make you feel unsafe. This is presented as not just sexual stuff. It is anything. It's always okay to talk about it.

It is taken for granted that the rules will relax after the kids have been there for a while. Even though the plan prohibits me from being inside a bedroom with with a kid with the door shut, if a child wants to talk to me privately we will go into his bedroom or mine. I station myself away from the door and tell the child that s/he can decide if the door should be open or closed and that they can change their mind any time. And even though I am prohibited from giving back rubs, if they have a stiff back, I will recommend a hot bath and tell them that if they want me to rub Beng*y (or similar) on the place I will. If they are touch-shy I will tell them to come back wearing a t-shirt they can pull up above the sore place and a towel they can wrap around themselves below the sore place.

When a kid who had said that they did not feel safe being hugged with two arms started crying I put one arm around her and then asked, "May I hold you tight right now?"

I find the kids have very different reactions to it. Some find it silly. With them we tend to relax a little more quickly. Some feel very grateful for these sorts of safeguards. With them we will continue to keep them strictly even if the child understands that they are not necessary to keep them safe. For them it is a constant reminder that they are safe here.

And that is what the plan is about. It is not about what would look safe to someone on the outside. It is not really about keep me safe from false allegations, although that is part of it. It is really about making the kids feel safe.

It is about teaching them that they get to say what feels good and right to them. They get to set the boundaries. Touching only happens in ways and times that feel safe to everyone.

It's about giving them back control over who touches them. And when approached this way, it is not for just the first six months, or for while they are in foster care, it's for their whole lives.

Group homes and safety

For some kids, group homes feel (and perhaps are) safer than foster homes.

One of them is that they are staffed by people who work in shifts. They get to go home to their families and relax. Foster parents live with foster kids (duh). It means that we are always on duty. It means that we rarely, if ever, get time off. It means that we are the foster parents when we are sleep deprived, sick, sad, frustrated, and exhausted. We don't usually get to say to ourselves, "I just have to hold it together until 5:00." What this means is that the kids have the advantage of always being with adults who are, relatively speaking, rested and ready to be present for them.

Group home professional staff are probably better at not taking comments personally. When the kids are having a bad day and say something mean or threaten to run away the staff can probably more easily say nothing (and just let the kids cool down) or, "Well, let's talk about your choices. What would happen if you ran away?"

We foster parents are trying to be mommies and daddies (or aunties and uncles). We have been offering our hearts. We may think we have "broken through." When a kid gets mad and says, "I hate you! I'm going to call my social worker and tell her you are b****h and have her move me!" The response, "Go ahead. Leave if you want to!" is likely to come rushing to our lips. Sometimes we are too tired to hold it back. Nearly every foster parent who works with teenagers has at some point lost their temper and said something like, "Yeah? Well sometimes I hate you too."

And then there is the issue of sexual safety. Are they safer? Maybe. I don't have any statistics on the rates of sexual abuse in foster homes or group homes. I am sure in happens in both places. Regardless of the actual rates, it should not surprise us if many kids feels safer in group homes.

They are returning to the scene of the crime, so to speak. The abuse and neglect they experienced happened in a home. It was often perpetrated by parental figures who were supposed to protect them. On one hand these foster parents are supposed to be nice people, but in the child's mind they may feel less safe than the parents who abused them. After all, they are not even the youth's "real parents." What reason would the parents have for not abusing the child? The only person who would know would be the child, and these children have a long history of not being believed.

If you told the vast majority of foster fathers that they could not be trusted alone with the girls because, not being the "real" father, they had no reason not to molest the kids, they would be offended. Of course they have very good reasons NOT to molest them. Even if they are not "real" fathers, they are thinking of themselves as fathers. Even if they are not thinking of themselves as fathers, they are adult men and these are under-aged girls. Most of these men have very strong feelings about what should be done to men (and women) who molest children and teenagers. And if THAT isn't enough, foster parents know that if a child accuses them of abuse of any kind there will be an investigation.

That is probably why so much time and energy is spent on things like Safety Plans. A great deal of foster parent training focuses on what we need to do to make kids FEEL safe. That's why Mandy's husband never touches the girls, even when they ask for hugs. It is not that they are not safe if he touches them, it is that they often don't feel safe. Even if the kid he is hugging feels safe, the kid who witnesses the hug may feel threatened by it.

It is frustrating to us as parents. We want to love these kids and often that means, to us, touching them. We are, I think rightly, concerned that if we are afraid to touch the children, to hug and cuddle them, they will feel that we think they are unlovable.

My thought about this is that there is just no way to create rules for safety that will work with all the kids. I have come to really appreciate having those blank lines in the safety plan. I am glad that I have become comfortable asking kids "Are you a hugger?"

The Safety Plan

FosterAbba has a post about safe touching which prompted me to write this:

When new kids are placed in our home everyone (even Brian) signs a document called "The Safety Plan." It comes with a couple of blank spots that get filed in while everyone is there, but most is pre-written.

The first time we did this Brian had just turned 6. We sat at the table and listened to the social worker read rules like,

1. No one is allowed to go into anyone else's room unless they were asked.
2. If anyone is in someone else's room the door must be open.
3. If one of my foster parents wants to talk to me in my room then then door must be open.
4. We only change clothes in our own bedrooms or in the bathroom.
5. When we are outside our bedroom or bathroom we always have clothes over our underwear and always wear a shirt.

and everyone's favorite:
6. The only people who have sex in this house are the parents and then only with the door closed.

The rules allow for some flexibility. For instance one rule is: If the bathroom door is closed only one person can be in there at a time. The first plan we signed had written in ink, "Except for when Dad is helping 'Brian' wash his hair."

There are some really interesting rules about all touching needing to be safe and that if anyone is touched in a way that is not safe they will tell someone "like my social worker, a teacher, or some other adult I feel safe with."

Then there is a place where the foster child gets to list what kinds of touching feel safe to them. The social worker starts by saying that most kids don't feel safe with back rubs or tickling from foster parents and so that is already off the list. And then "Do you feel safe if someone hugs you with one arm? Do you feel safe if someone gives you a short hug with two arms? If you are upset or crying do you feel safe if someone puts two arms around you until you feel better?"

All of my boys have said they feel safe with all this touching (hurrah!).

When I get the same kid on respite a couple of times I usually ask about hugging. The conversations go like this:
"Are you a hugger?"
If the answer is "yes" then, "One arm or two?". I then hug them.
If the answer is "I don't really like to hug very much" (they never say "no"), I say, "How about when I want to hug you I put out my hand and you can squeeze it if you want?"

I have had a couple of girls who are hand-squeezers only. One girl, E. would not even squeeze. Sometimes she would put her hand on top of mine for a second. Other times she would say, "No, that's okay. I'm fine" and I would take my hand away.

We do get a bit more relaxed about rules as we go. For instance when I want to talk to a kid I ask if they want to go into their room for privacy. If they yes, then when we go in I station myself far from the door and say, "You can open or close the door. Your choice."

Some families though are more strict. Mandy's husband for instance never touches any of the girls, except to break up a fight. His favorite story is about how one girl came to him and said she really needed a hug. He pulled a notebook from his pocket and wrote, "HUG" on it and gave it to her. She kept it in her wallet for years. He said he often saw her take it out and look at it.