Foster Children.

[Guest]

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[amicus]

I managed from age 14 until the Navy took over at 17 and never looked back.

Such a deal, eh?

Amicus

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

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[Guest]

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[oggbashan]

Our town has a disproportionately large number of foster children.

There are two main reasons:

1. Historically, large houses were cheap and people who had large families, or who wanted to foster a number of children, could buy a property with sufficient bedrooms to have one per child.

2. The town had a number of residential homes for physically and mentally handicapped children, with the skills in the community to care for those children, and the resources for those children such as sports and social clubs adapted for their use and a school for those excluded from normal schools.

Generally the foster children are not noticed as part of our community. They are treated just as other children are, despite some of them having difficulties in adapting to a normal family life.

We have "professional" foster parents who are trained to care for foster children. Some are registered and qualified to take children with "challenging behaviour". Some have specialist skills for dealing with physical or mental handicap. Some are specialists in healing emotional damage.

In 30 years in this town the only problem I can remember is two young brothers who were placed with "normal" foster parents. The brothers had significant police records for burglary, assault, drug-dealing, car-taking etc. The foster parents were NOT told of the brothers' history.

In their 10 days in our town they were responsible for over 50 criminal acts before they were arrested and taken back to a juvenile detention centre from which they had been released into foster care.

They were aged 14 and 13.

The local authority responsible for placing those brothers was fined for incompetence.

The majority of the fostered children in our community benefit from their stay in our town. There are some failures but those can usually be attributed to inappropriate placements.

Our foster parents are paid for what they do but I think that they earn every penny. Fostering damaged children is hard work.

Although the system is supposed to end at age 18, there is a scheme to support those between 18 and 21 (or 25 for vulnerable adults) and most of the foster parents continue to support "their" adult foster children as they would their own children. When one set of local foster parents officially retired most of the thirty children they had fostered were able to attend the retirement party - and wanted to.

Og

 

[R. Richard]

My aunt and uncle were foster parents for twenty years or so. Some kids stayed for a brief time, some for years, some went to college, some took off, some are married with kids. Some still come back to visit. I can't imagine my aunt and uncle kicking one of their kids out just because they were over 18.

I think of myself at age 18 - no way could I have managed without any help.

Foster parents get paid by the state to keep children. Most foster parents wave goodbye to the children [Arrividerci alligatore] when the children turn 18-years-old and the money stops coming in. There are foster parents who do continue to care for the children after the children turn 18-years-old and the money stops coming in, however, that's unusual.

If you had had to manage at 18-years-old, without help, you very probably would have managed. However, you would be a completely different person than you are today.

In MNTHO what is done with foster children is a crime. The state supports the child until 18-years-old and then dumps the child into a world for which the child has no training and no realistic way to make a decent living. A foster child [and, for that matter, usually a single parent child] has different needs than a two parent child. The foster child will have to start earning a living at 18-years-old and needs to be prepared to do just that. The foster child needs to be trained, more than to be educated. The foster child needs to develop normal, salable skills in school, particularly in high school.

In the area where I lived as a minor child, the normal path for a boy was to try to develop into an NFL, NBA, major league baseball player or a perforner [mostly singer or musician.] The normal path for a girl was to try to get married to money, become a performer or [the one realistic ray of hope,] become a secretary. Most of the boys wound up selling dope, selling 'ho's, holding up liquor stores or serving time in prison. Most of the girls wound up married one of the boys and raising children on welfare. The highest earning girls found out that they could sell what they were sitting on and made good money for a pimp. A good, practical course of training in salable skills would have at least provided some hope.

I took a somewhat different course and managed to train myself to survive the streets and make a decent living. My back trail was littered with corpses [killed by other people, of course.] I was offered only memorization of crap, while I was in school. I was sufficiently resentful that I was told that if I ever came back to the school where I finally graduated from, I would be shot down like a rabid dog. Welcome to the world of the feral child!

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

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[LadynStFreknBed]

I am sure there are some foster parents in some areas that do it for the money. I was a foster parent for a short time several years ago. My foster kids were brother and sister aged 4 & 2. I felt so bad for those kids and I just wished I could have some words with their mother (The mother chose to be with her pedophile bf instead of keeping her children. She had already lost one child to the system and was pregnant with her 4th child at the time.)

As far as the money went, the money did not even come close to covering expenses. I think at that time in that state it might have been about $250/month total. The kids come to you with basically nothing but a couple changes of clothes.

I felt so bad for those kids, but they moved on to their first foster parents who wanted to adopt them, so I was glad they would have a loving, permanent home. I only had them as an emergency placement until the first foster parents could build a two bedroom edition to their home for them.

btw, I was told that mothers choosing to be with convicted pedophiles was the most common reason that state removed children from the home.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

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[elfin_odalisque]

SARAH

Take some of them home and get a real education. Rats spawn rats, and snakes beget snakes. THAT look is how they hook fools.

What a ratbag you are.

 

[oggbashan]

I don't like the way JBJ has expressed some of his posts in this thread but I am aware that some of his statements about fostered children are accurate for some of them.

Some foster children have been taught by their life experiences to be manipulative, aggressive, untrusting, untrustworthy and have learnt that they can only depend on themselves.

Changing their behaviour and their attitude to other people is a very difficult task. Many social support systems unfortunately reinforce the child's distrust because the systems are inflexible and ultimately uncaring.

However hard foster parents work to build and gain trust, the system can frustrate their efforts by allowing manipulative parents to regain access and re-abuse their children.

Children can be used by a parent as weapons against a partner or as routes to financial gain. When the parent's limited object has been obtained the child can be rejected again. The process can repeat until the child becomes a damaged adult. Statistically, an abused child is more likely than an average child to be an abuser as a parent and the cycle continues.

Professional foster parents are well aware of the obstacles in their way. The best of them succeed despite the system.

Og

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

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[R. Richard]

Some foster children have been taught by their life experiences to be manipulative, aggressive, untrusting, untrustworthy and have learnt that they can only depend on themselves.

Changing their behaviour and their attitude to other people is a very difficult task. Many social support systems unfortunately reinforce the child's distrust because the systems are inflexible and ultimately uncaring.

However hard foster parents work to build and gain trust, the system can frustrate their efforts by allowing manipulative parents to regain access and re-abuse their children.

Og

I feel that you have glossed over a major problem. Yes, the system can frustrate foster parent's efforts by allowing manipulative parents to regain access and re-abuse the children. However, much of the abuse, at least in the USA, comes from the system itself.

A foster child has, by definition, had the floor of his/her world taken from under the child. The child is taught, in many ways, that his/her parents are his/her support, maybe his/her only support. Then the child is rejected from what society has taught the child is his/her principal support.

The system then teaches the child crap that has little or no practical use. After the child has been taught the crap, the system then vomits the 18-year-old child into a world where the child has no skills to support him/her self. Unfortunately, the child has almost certainly talked with other, similar children. The child, on some level, realizes that he/she has been failed by the system. And the 'experts' wonder why.

The solution to the problem is simple, but politically impossible. Test the foster child and then teach it skills that the foster child can realistically use to earn a living in the real world. However, then many others will want the same thing. The system isn't set up that way.