What’s It Like To Be a Foster Child?

I recently read a good book – Orphan Train: A Novel by Christina Baker Kline. It is the story of a teenage girl in the foster system, and an older woman, who had also been an orphan. It is based upon the Orphan Train Movement which was a welfare program that operated between 1853 and 1929. It transported orphaned and homeless children from crowded eastern US cities to foster homes in the Midwest. 200,000 children rode the “baby trains” with the hope that a family would adopt them. The children would be placed on a stage for viewing and inspection. Some children became indentured servants while others were adopted as family members. This ended in the 1920s with the beginning of organized foster care in America. You can find a documentary on Orphan Trains on PBS’ American Experience.

Following World War II, most orphanages in the U.S. began closing. They have been largely replaced with smaller institutions that try to provide a group home or boarding school environment. Most children who would have been in orphanages are in these residential treatment centers (RTC) or foster care.

So what is it like to be a foster child? It’s all about loss. “The number one most stressful event for a child is the death of a parent. Number two is to be separated from a parent” according to Norma Ginther. This separation re-occurs with each new foster placement. According to Amelia Franck Meyer, foster care specialist, foster children in the US have an average of three different placements, but many of the youth she works with have had 10-30 different placements. Each loss is a trauma.

As well intentioned as traditional counseling such as cognitive therapy is for these children, Franck Meyer says it is not the first treatment of choice for them. What they need is grief and loss work, and sanctuary – a safe place with people who know and love them and common routines to help get them through the day. The goal of trauma treatment is to make them feel safe. The loss of a parent or care-giver is a relational trauma, and must be healed within relationships. They require permanent, stable, loving connections with care-givers, not a round robin of new placements.

Franck Meyer says children don’t “talk” their grief, they “do” their grief. They don’t have the capacity to tell the story in a linear way. Sometimes their grief appears as “naughty” behaviors that arise out of a drive for survival and connection. Naughty behaviors are often not willful but are trauma responses. Punishment exacerbates trauma. If a child is acting out against a perceived threat, the wise adult gets “slow and low” in response. This means they assume non-threatening posture and words to convey safety. “I love you. You are safe.”

In spite of a national decline in the number of children needing foster placement, there is a shortage of foster homes. Low monetary reimbursement, emotional stress and increased regulation of the children’s living environments are big factors scaring away potential foster parents. Higher numbers of children are living in group homes instead of family environments.

One-on-one nurturing and stability that foster parents provide makes a difference in helping children cope with leaving their homes and their parents, a separation frequently caused by neglect or abandonment. The shortages of local foster homes means separating siblings or moving children to homes outside the county, uprooted from their schools and friends, and potentially making it more difficult to reunite with their biological families. And therefore making it more difficult to heal.