I’ve been a foster provider with my husband in America for four years. I would say that one of my existential crises involves the concept that children do not belong in the justice system. I do not envy the judges that sit day after day and decide to remove children from their homes. Once this happens several people are involved in a case number. That child is the case number in the court system. Their lives are documented from the moment they go into the system. Can you imagine having people write notes about you each week and subjectively give their viewpoints on your behavior and progress in maturity? It’s kind of a cruel joke. Then they age out of the system, left with very few opportunities or connections. Turn it on its head and it’s actually quite cruel.
I’m one of those well-meaning people in the whole situation and I know that I am speaking from my own perspective. I am licensed to keep children safe and cared for in my home from the time their case is opened until it closes. That is what I am. Nothing more. I mean, the requirements are a bit steep for me sometimes, but I just trudge through it. I don’t know how other foster providers add up when it comes to all the demands. I am just me. I do a damn good job, but my impact is only the amount of time they are in my home. After that, I have no power over what happens to them or where they go. That can be quite heartbreaking and I have had to work through what that feels like. I know how little control I have outside of my home. I know that’s just way too many strange adults for these children to expect to move around with and learn any sense of identity, self-esteem, connection, character-building opportunities. Their young lives and opportunities get lost in the shuffle. It is a very lonely road for such young humans.
Several professionals and people are involved in a foster child’s care, but no one is cooperating or coordinating and the child just ends up being carted around from one adult to the next based on a judge’s orders. The judge is not the only one involved in this decision. There’s the parents and their lawyer, the child and the child’s lawyer, the casa advocate, the foster provider, the social workers, the counselors, extended family, and so on and so forth. The system is set up to work very well, but the bureaucracy and inadequacy of it all always comes up short. Honestly, it’s almost worse than being taken away from their parents. At least with their parents they have one set of grown-ups. When they become foster children they are forced into multiple relationships with grown-ups that they’ve never met before, and this is chronic throughout their life. I don’t know how they’re ever supposed to feel secure enough to invest in themselves in any meaningful way. What gets started can quickly be deleted with each new move. It’s a strange sort of chronic trauma that ends up creating emotionally dysregulated adults that have very little understanding of how to competently be grown-ups. Overall, the Department of Family and Protective Services (DFPS) systems don’t help anything get better. For the most part it just makes things worse for kids. I don’t think it’s the right way to protect children.
My existential crisis is how we treat families in America. Many millions of people in our own country, one of the wealthiest countries in the world, live in abject poverty, and the environment of poverty breeds crime and despair. I think our country could be doing a whole lot better for children if we focused on supporting the family structure, instead of cruelly putting them through the CPS grinder and then expecting them to be acclimated and adjusted as adults when they age out of the system. This is a great injustice in our “me” culture, identity marketing, social media platforms, go-fund me’s, and animal rescue videos, and while that is all going on there are hundreds of thousands of children being given so little time or value by our society. I promise you the answers would not be easy but if we were really willing to look at what investments and consequences would look like to create positive outcomes for children, we might could get somewhere. We could make progress to repair the long since severed compassion that ebbs and flows through our society.