Experiences with foster system and support for removed relatives
Hi Tilderinos!
First, apologies for the ramble. I'm based in the US. I got a letter from our state's child services department telling me that one of my relatives who is a minor has been removed from the custody of their parents. The letter asked me to complete a form to indicate the level of involvement I'm interested in having with said child's placement and/or support.
We don't know what the child's situation is. I'm the furthest-degree relative they search for - hopefully someone closer will step forward, but unfortunately, based on what I know of our part of the family, other relatives may not be in the best situation to take on a child. I'm hoping that this would be a temporary situation and that the ultimate goal is for the child to be reunited with their parent(s), but we have no information at all right now other than "child was removed and we're looking for support from relatives."
I'm going to call the contact info on the letter tomorrow, as we received it after business hours today. We've discussed our comfort levels with caring for a child and what type of situation we could say yes to and what we would have to say no to. We are very fortunate to be in a stable situation (in control of our own housing, dual incomes, qualified for leave programs, etc.). Our point of view currently is that this child is a child in need of support, and we are willing to provide what we can as long as it's not overtly detrimental to us or to them. I already filled out the form the best I could in a manner that corresponds with our comfort level, which is approximately that placement with us would be a possibility but not right this instant, and otherwise we're happy to correspond or communicate in whatever way benefits the child. (We suspect that the child is currently 1-3 hours from us, so frequent physical assistance on our part would be less doable unless the child were placed with us.)
Is this something you've been through before? What experiences have you had with child placement? (I'm actually not even really sure what questions to ask beyond this, but if you have been down this road and are comfortable sharing, please do!) We've discussed adopting or fostering before, but only in hypotheticals, as it's something we weren't planning to look into for 5-10 years (we're in our early 30's and are not having bio kids). Something externally-initiated like this was never on our radar. Any guidance, tips for questions to ask, or experiences you would like to share would be welcome!
I am currently in a similar situation, where a toddler was more or less thrust upon our house because someone somewhere had similar bodily fluids to my wife and the state decided that was good enough reason to involve us.
It isn't proper foster care. I don't really know what it is. The kid sure is living with us right now though so I figure it is close enough for this post.
We have a child not much older than the new child, but we were absolutely not prepared for this.
A kid taken by the state is going to have some issues that you will need to deal with. They are going to be extremely reasonable for the kid, but not something that you can logic them out of. There will be abandonment feelings, mistrust in the system, confusion to a new place, confusion as to who you actually are to them, confusion to new routines, lack of sleep due to the new circumstances, and a whole slew of resentment across the board that they are in this situation in the first place through what is almost assuredly no fault of their own.
You didn't say how old the child was. If they are old enough to communicate properly, this might be less of an issue. If they are too young to know that things are amiss, these might be less of an issue. It is really hard to say given the (reasonable) lack of specifics in your post.
You have the easy stuff covered. You have money and time. Money can buy a lot of help. Good groceries, (pre)school, activities, all well and good. Time will let you make sure to get them where they need to be.
Money and time do not grant you the hard parts. Dealing with sleepless nights, dealing with their confusion, dealing with you possibly having absolutely no connection to them, trying to not get frustrated by whatever bad behaviors they do as part of lashing out.
It is rough. It will be a huge sacrifice on your part. There is no way around this fact.
Thank you for the response, and I'm sorry you and your family and your placed child are going through a similar situation. I hope it smoothes out a bit more with time. It wouldn't be proper foster care for us either, as far as I know, but would be somewhat regulated like foster care (they do a home check for safety hazards?). We would have the option of getting licensed which would open up some financial aid, I guess.
This child is older, well into school age but not a young adult. They should be able to communicate, but I'm not sure how effective that communication will be. (I think with a lot of kids, myself included at that age, sometimes communication becomes more indirect or misunderstood as they get older and into being a teenager, unless they're great at being blunt or getting their feelings across.) However, the child has been through STUFF before (big parental battle when they were small) and I have no idea how that would have affected them long term. I haven't seen them in half their life. They might know who I am or recognize me but not remember me, but that would be an extremely small possibility. They'll probably think, "wait, who's this rando?" If I actually did get involved. So this whole thing is pretty much a big "I guess we'll see" for the moment.
I did, however, realize this morning that we are now less than two weeks from Christmas, which our extended family on the whole has historically celebrated. So depending on what's going on, I may feel obligated to get involved sooner than I normally would. If the child's family has been following our traditions, the child should NOT be in a group home or something on Christmas.
I have zero experience with fostering or raising children, but reading your comment gave me a sudden thought for a small little thing that can help:
Depending on their age, get them a stuffed animal. That is one of the softest, safest gifts, something they can hug while they cry and treat as a friend when they're alone, and can provide a bright spot and source of comfort and security in a tumultuous time. I have read so many accounts of people who have cherished stuffed toys from difficult childhoods that served as a bright spot and anchor. If you can find out their favorite animal or if they had a family pet, it can be even better.
Even for older kids, it might be a good idea because it's something that is unequivocally theirs when they may not have many belongings. And it's something that isn't a necessity like clothing or food, something gotten purely for their comfort. That small gesture of care can be helpful in showing that... Well, you care.
This popped into my head because I remember my dad gave me a stuffed dog the first time I visited his apartment when he and my mom briefly separated when I was six. That time didn't leave lasting scars on me (actually, I think my ADHD and autism kept me from understanding just how serious it was at the time), so for me, it became one of my small army of stuffed animals. But that dog still stands out to this day because of the level of care he put into choosing it, finding one that resembled our dog at the time.
In retrospect, he likely chose that one specifically so I wouldn't miss our dog while visiting his apartment. He was thoughtful like that. I can imagine him taking his time at the store considering which toy would have the most meaning, and thought that one could ease the transition by giving me something familiar. That just makes me appreciate and cherish it all the more.
I can't offer any advice, but I do have experience from the other side of the equation. I was wrongfully placed in foster care when I was a small child. I ended up in two different foster families (a few months with each), then I was placed with extended family for two years before I finally got to live with my real parents again.
Without knowing any details about the case, I think it's reasonably likely that the child in question will ultimately end up with their family again. In addition to myself, I know two other people who were placed in foster care, and they eventually got to return to their families as well. Granted, in my case, there was no evidence of abuse or neglect of any type (other than a false accusation); it just took a long time for the case to work through the court system. I should not have been taken at all before any kind of investigation took place, but for some reason I was.
In the other two cases, I suspect there was some initial investigation (following accusations of neglect), but I'm not sure about the details. I do know that a judge ultimately ordered the children to be reunited with their families, though. I also know that the children went into regular foster care (not placed with extended family) and had a really terrible time of it.
My own experience with foster care was, by far and away, the most traumatizing experience of my life even though it was only a few months. It still deeply affects me nearly four decades later, and I don't think I'll ever fully recover from it. I have been through a number of tough experiences (most notably, my brother's death and an abusive relationship that I ultimately went into hiding and left the country to escape), but foster care was far more traumatic.
On the other hand, living with extended family was wonderful, and I've stayed very close to that side of my family ever since. Based on my experiences, I would strongly urge you to do this if it's feasible. It could make such a huge, huge difference to this child's life.
Just be aware that they are likely to be traumatized by the experience — at least for a young child, being seized from your family is a far more horrible experience than I could possibly describe to someone who's never gone through it — and they may have behavioral issues even in the best case scenario (I had severe temper tantrums, got held back a grade due to excessive crying in school, and had to go to weekly therapy for years).
This is ultimately what I wanted to emphasize as well. I have a close friend that spent years as a public defender, representing parents who had their children taken from them by CPS. In the US, at least, CPS has an unbelievably racial and anti-poor bias, and is keen on removal as a first step in many cases.
What I think she would emphasize is that removal is very often the single most traumatic event in the lives of both the children and parents. Parents are often required to follow very specific and restraining protocols after removal, which they often struggle with because they are contending with the emotional upheaval if having their children taken from them. Children, like @RoyalHenOil says, rarely have any tools for dealing with this trauma, and it can come through in unpredictable ways.
I guess my two takeaways from this (though I defer to @RoyalHenOil who unfortunately has firsthand experience) would be:
Ultimately, I suspect that taking this child into your home as soon as possible is probably the thing that will have the least negative impact on them, but that's basically a guess. It just feels right to me. Non-familial group homes and foster care seem to lead to astonishingly poor outcomes across the board, and staying with family instead seems to mitigate a lot of the worst of those harms.
This is spot on, at least from my own anecdotal experiences.
Another thing to be aware of: anyone who has custody of the child may be under strict protocols as well. In my case, nobody was allowed to tell me any details about why I'd been taken into custody because it could affect my testimony (I was made to testify against my parents).
I can't speak for foster children in general, but for me personally, the dearth of information was one of the biggest and most lasting sources of trauma.
When I saw my parents during visitations, I would beg them to take me home with them, but they were required to refuse and not tell me why. I was just a little kid who'd never heard of child abuse or foster care before, so I assumed they simply didn't want me anymore and had given me away.
My foster parents were similarly barred from telling me anything, no matter how much I cried or screamed. The lack of communication about what was happening to me was my biggest temper tantrum trigger, and it was particularly severe in the week following visitations with my parents.
My two foster families had very different methods for dealing with my temper tantrums (timeouts with one, corporal punishment with the other), but these methods only made my tantrums worse because they heightened my frustration and did nothing to address the root problem — that I had no idea what was happening or why. But they were legally barred from saying anything that could help me, and I imagine they were supremely frustrated themselves and at the end of their rope. They weren't bad parents — both families had biological children of their own, who they had very strong and healthy relationships with — but the system was more or less set up against them.
Oh my heart hurts for young royalHenOil and children caught in this.
People are routinely reported to child services out of spite. The agents that come don't care, or they have trained to not believe anything and leave it to the judge/system....
Would it have been legal to tell the child, look, my papers tell me I can't tell you anything? Wat about freedom of information for the child, can the child's erh, public defender (???) obtain this information? It seems needlessly cruel when a "we all love you very much and we are just trying to figure out complicated adult stuff that isn't your fault" should be a minimum.
Thank you. It's possible that someone did tell me something along those lines, but I didn't understand it. I was really, really young.
In my case, the accusation wasn't made out of spite. It was a misunderstanding of something I'd said, made by a very young and inexperienced daycare worker. Unfortunately, she contacted the police instead of DFACS directly, and the police took me without any investigation whatsoever (they didn't ask me anything, didn't call my parents, etc.). They just picked me up in all of 5 minutes and dropped me off at DFACS — probably assuming that DFACS would have me back in my home that night if there wasn't any merit to the case.
If the daycare worker had contacted DFACS instead, I think they would have at least interviewed me and my parents before they did anything else. But once I was already in their care, I suspect there was a lot of red tape involved in getting me back home, and the overloaded/underfunded juvenile court system didn't work in our favor. (It also didn't help that one of my case workers was actively working against reunification, including lying to my parents about things I'd said to turn them against each other and withholding evidence from my parents' lawyer as long as she possibly could during the discovery phase of the hearings. Once the lawyer finally got the evidence and presented it to the judge, he ordered me out of foster care and into family care that day. But it took months.)
As much as I sometimes want to pin all the blame on someone, there weren't actually any bad actors (except, arguably, that one caseworker — but I'm sure even she had good intentions and thought she was protecting me from an abusive home). It was just a flawed system that wasn't designed to handle false positives elegantly.
But there are a few good things that came of it:
I have an extremely close relationship to my parents and my extended family. I never took them for granted, not even during the worst parts of my teen years, and they likewise never took me for granted. I got a ton of emotional support that I think very few kids get. I really couldn't ask for a better family.
It also made my parents' relationship a lot stronger (in the "if we can get through this, we can get through anything" sense), which I think helped them a lot later on, when my little brother got sick and died. My parents have admitted to me that before I was taken, they had been drifting apart and becoming more career-focused, but this event shook through out of complacency and made them refocus on what matters most.
I think it's also made me more emotionally robust in certain ways. I do still live with regret and trauma (in particular, accidentally consuming media about children losing their parents can really ruin my week), but I also have this general sense that the worst that will ever happen to me has almost certainly already happened (knock on wood, lol). It feels like I can survive anything now, and (a few trauma quirks aside) I think I might be one of the happiest and most emotionally resilient people I know. It was a short period of extremely intense stress, but it was bookended by years of unbounded love and support, and I think that might be the best case scenario in some ways: it's like foster care calibrated my brain to see "normal" as "fucking fantastic", while the overarching pattern of my childhood helped me develop good coping mechanisms and a really strong sense of self-esteem.
What a tough event to have to go through, but I can see that love and thankful perspective and resilience is still paying dividends for you and family.
Agents may start out caring but understaffing for high case loads, the experience of being lied to or deceived by actual abusers, the horror/secondary trauma of the worst cases that they see can lead to burn out and worse.
In addition, people intuitively understand situations similar to their family of origin and people they see as similar to themselves. Explicit racism and class prejudice is part of the mix depending on the agent but there can also be a much more subtle lack of empathy and blaming the victim, jumping to judgmental conclusions, due to lack of familiarity with the circumstances of the families that they see. I'm not explaining this as well as I would like.
Trauma and horror does weird things to people. Sometimes human beings latch onto a plausible lie because they can't deal with the implications of a universe where something so horrible could possibly be true, or have no causes no one to blame.
Happened to a friend when their baby died: could something so horrible as sudden infant death happen to anybody without reason? That's a scary universe, no they don't want to live in that universe, surely not, surely the parent(s) murdered their child and are just very convincing actors, better wring them through the system and go home feeling safe.
That's why sometimes too much evidence of horror works against the victims, when the jury out of mental self protection shut down and try to latch on to the defence lawyer's stories.
There is also a cognitive bias/logical fallacy where people assume a greater frequency of things they have seen/experienced/heard about than actually exists.
On the therapy side this is something that CPS/DCFS/the state agency should also be facilitating and generally should be covered by them cost-wise as well.
Family placement is where some of that stuff can get wonky and my work was only in DCFS adjacent fields but it is absolutely worth asking for assistance finding a good provider at a minimum.
My sole interaction with the foster system was taking several classes a decade ago when my spouse and I were considering adoption. We didn't think we could have our own child together, but ended up getting extremely lucky, so we never fostered or adopted.
I can say from those classes that reunion with the biological parents is always the goal of the foster system. Even with full legal adoption, which you would need to actively work very hard to accomplish, active involvement of the biological parents is legally required to be open to them. If a biological parent is not involved, they are either so legally in trouble that they can not even have visitation while incarcerated, can't be found, or they have actively refused their rights as a parent.
I would recommend you look into your local foster program to see if there are any classes you could go to. I found them extremely helpful. It's a chance to talk to parents who have been fostering for years.
Thank you! I signed up for the info sessions that the child services department hosts. Unfortunately, they're only once a month, but I'll be trying to find more information in the meantime. Whether something comes out of this situation or not, it will be good for me to have info about where to start in the future, since fostering or adopting were things we have discussed as a possibility, anyway.
I have no experience with fostering or living in the USA
With that out of the way: I really don't think you can prepare more than say 60% to become a parent or guardian.
The things you think are important mostly aren't and the things that really are important are incredibly hard to prepare for.
Based only on this post you seem to be well enough prepared and decent enough to take care of a child.
What I'm trying to say is: you might have a child falling into your lap, if you are in anyway interested in parenting, take your chance!
If my mental image of how this process works is close to correct you won't be stuck with an impossible child and the child will not be handed over to you if you're not deemed at least a decent alternative.
I know this doesn't answer the questions you wrote, but it might answer the one I'm guessing you really want to answer: should we foster this child? And in my opinion you should!
Thank you! Yeah, the part we have concerns about are the parts we may not be able to prepare for... (Does child have issues they won't disclose to us?) There are also definitely some normal parts of parenting that we would likely not be prepared to deal with until they happen, as this is the first time we've considered parenting and we would be thrust into the middle of it lol. (What if they have issues at school? What if they have a particular communication style that we don't get? And like infinitely more hypotheticals.)
My feeling has always been that if I get to a place where I can support a child who needs support, I'd probably be happy to help. It's a little earlier than I foresaw feeling that way, as we JUST got settled, but that also might be fine. I guess we'll find out. Maybe this situation will lend itself to having us considering fostering more readily than we had before.
I am now a little invested in how this turns out. So if you are up for it I very much would like to see updates.
I think you have received a lot of thoughtful information here and I hope you will manage this situation well.
:) to be fair, most kids don't come with any warranty or disclosures either. We can only try our best to spend time, make objective observations, delay/avoid ascribing motivations, and pass those notes to any experts who might give us better strategies forward. And be prepared for those experts to be wrong: if your child comes with papers and diagnoses, still keep an open mind, spend time making observations, and be ready to get second opinion / pivot.
Hey crialpaca, holy moly, your holiday / life potentially just got turned upside down. I have no insider knowledge at all of the American / fostering / child services side of things, only kitten fostering + human biological child raising experience, so the usefulness of comments below are highly questionable.
I want to start by acknowledging that your partner and yourself already have qualifications far beyond the vast majority of parents across all cultures and history, among the top 1%: you've expressed empathy, you're stepping up beyond legal duties, you're educated, not in crazy debt, have a home, is partnered, you are already getting prepared and you're working hard to becoming even more prepared. Honestly, the fact that you're putting any thought into caring for someone, that you're not just doing this for Ego or to give someone a sibling or a clone of yourself or milk social assistance or get benefits or to sell to rich gross old people or travelling merchants or something crazy like that. Again, 1% stuff. So first off take a deep breath, the child has struck the lottery already and they will be okay in your home.
Again this puts the two of you in the top top top percentile. Sometimes people can't foster because they would want all or nothing: if they're going to provide parent-like love, they need the child to see them as sole exclusive top priority parent.
So what you guys are doing, is fostering in maybe not the human USA legal sense, but at least the kitten fostering sense : through absolutely no fault of their own, a kitten is in need of a warm, quiet, not scary and abusive place to stay temporarily, while they wait for a more suitable and permanent home to appear. The basic qualifications are "slightly better than alternative", which in kittens case, is a cage at the rescue. So, as long as you're able to provide slightly better than where the child is right now, that's already golden.
You already have a lot of love. You're going to need a lot of patience, for yourself, your partner, the child, the System™, the bio parents, and any court involved. There's going to be sadness and tears and frustration, but as long as you can communicate Love to the child, that's really all any of us can do on this small blue dot of a planet. Let's worry about communication hurdles when you cross that bridge: we're fortunate to live in a point in history where we actually have experts and some answers to any potential trauma, developmental issues, and care/accomodations/healing.
It's totally okay to tell the child "I don't know" to any of their questions, as long as they know the answer of "does @crialpaca love me" is a resounding yes.
"Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins."
Thank you all for the thoughtful and kind replies! Just a small update (pinging @fnulare), I reached out to the person who sent the letter and expressed my concerns about the child being without family on Christmas/holidays, in addition to letting them know I had filled out their form. They told me they would email the caseworker and request that the caseworker reach out to me asap, but that the caseworker has 10 business days to process those forms (note: that puts us into January). This conversation happened yesterday and I haven't heard back.
On the rumor mill end of things... we now have information from extended family that the removal may have actually stemmed from a behavioral issue of the child's and the removal may have been for their safety and the safety of others. So. Not using this as a working assumption AT ALL but, we will be proceeding with caution, if we hear back. When Mr. Alpaca and I talked about this, children with legitimate behavior issues were one of the things we did not consider ourselves ready for right out of the gate. However, we will not assume the child actually has them until we're told such by officials, and we'll still do what we can if our involvement is desired. And I'm still attending the foster parent info session in January regardless :) we had another flurry of weird news yesterday (interesting how the universe works!) that means taking fosters may be much more comfortable for us much sooner than expected, but we're not counting those chickens until they hatch, either.