In many states, children whose parents are unable to care for them, are allowed to make the decision on whether to continue to be wards of the state, or allow the foster care social workers to find an adoptive family match for them. Some get discouraged by previous attempts to find a placement, in what we would think of as the traditional "Li'l Orphan Annie" style... where all the orphans clamour for the opportunity for a new home.
In more situations, the children choose to remain without a permanent family for much more complex emotional reasons. Perhaps they cannot contemplate breaking the connection between themselves and their birth parents. And then there is the typical teen belief that adults are a mere inconvenience. Teens in a normal nuclear family that is not falling apart, want to find ways to separate. They want to ignore us. We are an embarrassment, old fashioned, stupid. After all, we think texting is unnecessary and that the posting of too much personal information on Facebook is a bad idea. We are holding them back. In a few short years they'll be allowed to drive, then vote, then drink. They will be on their own and supporting themselves soon. So we are excess baggage that they have to figure out how to work around until they can push their way forward into adulthood.
Like baby chicks working furiously to crack the egg and burst out on the scene, they wish we'd just get up, release them from the incubator, and let them get on with life.
In an intact family, however, the parents work hard to hold the kids back. The kids are not allowed to say "no" to family time, they are forced to sit through family meals and watch their favorite TV shows with Mom & Dad. They are given chores and not allowed to use Mom & Dad's money to buy too many treats for themselves. It does not matter how much Mom & Dad have given to them, the moment when the gravy train stops, they try to angle to get more. It's their job. To see how much they can get from us without working too hard for it. If they were offered the opportunity to live with minimal supervision, with no adult holding them back, or the promise of quicker entry into adulthood, many would choose it.
It is a shame that our government allows children in it's care to make these choices. Most competent parents do not allow their kids to have this opportunity. Our government is being negligent in allowing this.
What do the foster kids miss, when they shove aside that opportunity for permanency?
Most obviously, they lose the soft place to land when they become adults. They lose the home that they will boomerang back to when jobs are hard to find or marriages fail. They lose the connection and tradition to come home for during the holidays. The lines from the songs, "I'll be HOME for Christmas", and "Over the river and through the woods, to Grandmother's house we go"... and similar sweet, holiday memories... they become meaningless for a young adult who has no home base.
But then there are the subtle things. Things that are much more important to the young person's eventual success or failure as an adult. The Friday evenings watching "Say Yes to the Dress" and "Bridezilla" with Mom making comments about the wastefulness and budget issues brought up in those TV shows. The weekends spent renovating the rec room with Dad, where he shows the importance of maintaining safety in using tools. The dinners where Mom & Dad discuss maintaining a balance between work and home, choosing vacation destinations for that year's time off, and budgeting appropriately. The moments when either parent is chauffeuring the kids to their various events, coaching them about how to approach the event, how to be a good loser and a humble winner. There is something that a kid gets, almost by osmosis, from watching and listening to their parents talking about how to conduct their lives. Some people might not present the most perfect example of decisionmaking, but the fact that they are presenting SOME example is important. The effects of a complete absence of that opportunity is clear.
Foster kids who age out of the foster system are more likely to lose opportunities for post-secondary education, to become homeless, or to go to jail, than children who found a "forever home". Children from intact two parent families, are the most likely to go to college, have a career, stay out of jail. And the infamous "single family home", where the parents are estranged from each other, whether or not the co-parent has tried to remain in the picture, puts out children who fall, statistically, somewhere in the middle.
Whoever in our system has decided that foster children should be allowed to decline to be adopted, needs to be held accountable for the results. It's nice, in theory, to say that teens should not be forced to do something they don't want to do, but in NORMAL families, that happens all the time. Teens from intact families are not allowed to skip the visit to grandma, they are required to go to church with the family, they must negotiate their relationships with friends and romances, with their parents' supervision. They may rebel against it, but the teachable moments that arise every day, where teens learn the most basic skills that will guide their success in life, are necessary. Our system should not allow the children who are in the system, to succeed in avoiding these moments where other teens would not be permitted to avoid them. Our system has been negligent.
To that end, if we are going to allow kids to choose whether or not to have parents, then we need to figure out how to give them the information necessary to make an informed decision on that issue. We need to find a way to explain to them what they will miss. Not some statistic-filled boring lecture, but a real, visceral understanding... We need our foster kids to be a little more like the orphans of yester-year... clamouring to find parents, not rejecting them.
Any ideas would be welcome!
Why does everyone want to be a diva? In my world, the prideful, entitled attitude called "diva-tude" is not considered a virtue. But finding ways to pull one's own weight, to accomplish something worthy of taking pride in... these things are true virtues. And it's worth passing along fun projects, new ideas in how to accomplish this anti-diva-tude in your own life.
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