When children enter the foster care system, they are assorted into specialized institutions, group homes, privatized agencies, or any other institution pertaining to children’s welfare. Foster care agencies are for those whose birth parent do not have the capability to care for them. Foster care agencies are inclined to protect and nurture these children. However, the possibilities of safe reunifications with birth parents or adoptive homes have lessened over the years, and due to delays in Family Court, inadequate casework and a lack of urgency throughout the city child welfare system, many languish for years in the foster care system. Foster care agencies, under the supervision of the Administration for Children's Services (A.C.S), fail to meet the needs of these children and disregard the concept of reunification. It is the responsibility of the Administration for Children's Services to instigate the process of getting permanent homes for these children within a reasonable time frame. However, the A.C.S. has not taken any action about the foster care agencies keeping children to linger longer in the system. Children's Rights and the Arizona Center for Law in the Public Interest have petitioned that foster children have been failed by a bureaucracy that forced them to move frequently and disrupted their educations.
THE A.C.S.
Fostering children from foster care agencies and other child welfare institutions is not easy, especially when parents lack a real connection to these children. As much as foster kids need help, so do foster parents. It is hard to foster a kid who has been traumatized their whole life and been removed from their family. Foster parents need training and support in order to respond to the foster children’s needs. It is highly recommended that foster parents educate themselves on positive discipline techniques that address the behavior and the root cause. It is especially difficult to handle teenagers since they have spent half of their lives solemnly taking care of themselves and they have suppressed so many emotions for far too long. Older children who have been repeatedly traumatized often suffer from post traumatic stress disorder PTSD and automatically freeze when they feel anxious, and therefore are considered oppositional or defiant by those who interact with them. Considering that they tend to cultivate the habit of pushing people away and refuse to let their guard down, foster parents should listen to them and ensure them their voices are heard. When fostering these children, it should be seen that their functional needs are being met, and they are being provided with nurturance, support, and cognitive interventions to create a safe and comfortable environment for them. This means that foster parents has a lot to deal while providing care to these traumatized children and often end up questioning their decisions. Without adequate background information about the child and its past, they are delving themselves into a dangerous zone and has an equivalent deleterious effect on the children they care for. Take the example of Jenny Rough who has stated that ‘In class, we learned about all sorts of difficult situations we might face: how to handle a repeat runaway; what to do if an 11-year-old girl acts out by having sex with boys from school; what to do if a child, removed from a home because of a hoarding situation, brings in bed bugs. I don't yet have all the answers, but I do have some: If you can't talk the child out of leaving, let the runaway go, then call 911; address the safety and self-esteem issues of early sex with the child's social worker and therapist; bug control is a phone call away.
FOSTER PARENTS CHALLENGES
Often times, the concept of reunification with birth parents or the primary caregiver is ignored, especially in the foster care system. It is crucial to encourage the bonding time between foster kids and their birth parents because some of them, although removed from their families, do not necessarily wish to be. The Committee on Early Childhood, Adoption and Dependent Care (2000) examines the importance of reunification in a foster child’s development.
Foster children should be accorded visitations with their parents. The intent is to maintain or improve the relationship, and to observe the progress made by the parents(s). This develops the child’s sense of judgement and trust based on how far the parent would go to meet the child’s needs. These visitations may either be harmful to the child or helpful with his or her individualism and identification. For these parent-child visits to be beneficial, they should be frequent and long enough to enhance the parent-child relationship and to effectively document the parent's ongoing interest and involvement with the child.
REUNIFICATION
Group homes are often perceived in a dark outlook, with a strictly business-like environment and so many rules and regulations, the only real conversations a foster child could have with is a doctor with a prescription pad. Foster children are looked at as second-class citizens and treated slave-like in most cases. They lose their basic privileges such as phone calls and television time for normal behavior. The environment of these group homes suggest penalization for being a foster kid. These placements make children sleep on couches, as well as, cook the meals. The homes are supposed to offer intensive care for the nation's most troubled youth. But the homes have come under fireplaces for violence and sexual predation. With full knowledge of all officials, children from these group homes had disappeared for days to live in parks and were involved in fights, sexual assaults, and drug abuse. The Department of Social Services disregards reports on abuse and did not take action on this group home until the report of an 11-year-old girl from the facility who was allegedly raped by two older boys from the home. Children are pulled from their families only to be placed in a more tumultuous environment that is known as the Child Welfare System. The recent reforms were aimed at improving the investigation process, but little had been done to address conditions for children already in the foster care system.
GROUP HOMES
When local/state child welfare systems reach out to private agencies, they make a contract. The private agencies get paid and the public system gets rid of some of the foster kids. However, this is a big problem because the children are being placed in homes that lack an actual background check, which makes it unsafe for the kids’ welfare. California introduced the concept of privatization in the belief that it would serve children better and be less expensive. However, the state's private foster care system has become more expensive and more dangerous. Those living in homes run by private agencies were about a third more likely to be the victims of serious physical, emotional or sexual abuse than children in state-supervised foster family homes. Cases such as belt whipping, burning with cigarettes and abuse are reported due to these privatized foster agencies. According to county officials, in Los Angeles County, at least four children died as a result of abuse or neglect over the past five years in homes overseen by private agencies. About $400 million is funded towards privatized agencies which is seen as an enormous opportunity to sell off these children to whomever is interested, which by doing so, suggests that they would have to spend as little money as possible. Due to the unavailability of homes, they are open to accepting convicted criminals as foster parents.
In extreme cases, waivers were given to people with
criminal background in lieu for volunteering such as foster caring which undermines the safety of children throwing them into jeopardy. In fact studies show that the foster care system is so poorly monitored that they continue their efforts in spite of a history of abuse and violence.
PRIVATE AGENCIES
The back-and-forth routine of moving from houses to houses takes a toll on foster children, eventually developing a sense of detachment and lack of empathy for others. Just as it is hard for a foster parent to meet the needs of these children, it is adversely difficult for them to express their needs because of their fear of being abused or creating an unsafe environment for themselves. Gender identity and sexual orientation are two of the most personal and grueling experiences a child could face, especially a foster one, and ergo, these are considered grave and sensitive matters with reference to the child’s development. In the event that these children are placed in abusive homes, these petrified children often settle to hiding their true identity and engage in a false pretense to please the contemporary society. The LGBTQ children are often considered as secrets and are frowned upon. Majority of the foster parents and social workers disregard the identities of these children in the light of the fact that it does not fit in with the societal norms, and choose to be indifferent to these children, therefore elucidating the impression that their needs are not worth risking going against tradition. For instance, when Fernandez, a foster teen, came out to his foster mother… she made him spend holidays alone in his room because she didn't want his "gay germs" affecting her family members, and when he came out to his social worker, she changed the subject. He became depressed, dropped out of high school and left the system. In addition to this, foster teenagers who are Latino or Black have it hard and face added discrimination for their sexual orientation and their ethnicity. About 15 years ago, advocates created a countywide Task Force to End Homophobia in Foster Care, and because of that the department changed forms that then listed a child's sexual orientation in the same category as bed wetting and other behavioral issues.
LGBTQ TEENS
Due to the fact that same-sex marriage was legalized by the Supreme Court, group homes are hoping this new era of acceptance will prompt more LGBTQ couples to consider fostering or adopting children. Foster agencies like Let It Be Us, along with the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services intend to encourage and support potential foster parents from the LGBTQ community through the means of workshops and training. In the foster care system, being a “potential” parent means perseverance when faced with hardship, positive disciplining, exhibiting a sheer sign for adaptability, and beyond of all, having patience. Majority of the children are not comfortable and safe to open up or even explore their options to figuring out their identity, and this is because they have lived all their lives in fear. Foster kids experience frustrations but unfortunately for them, even when they express their pain and anger, their voices are not heard. When foster children do not articulate appropriately, their needs are not met. This makes them feel helpless. Foster kids cannot talk to anyone because of so many rules and regulations. Their whole life, they are being controlled by people. Foster children are often the hardest to place because of prospective parents' biases when it comes to gender identity and sexual orientation. In most cases, they are beaten up and ignored for having a voice, which makes them afraid of everyone and anyone around themselves. The foster care system believes that potential gay parents will alleviate the perpetual, confusing search for one’s identity and in this sense, they are more likely to have a different outlook on certain traits than other foster care parents. Foster agency representatives, Dawnn Pirani-Brumfield and her wife, Rachel, described their foster daughter’s experience with them and implicated that she was elated to know that they were a part of the LGBTQ community because it made her feel safe about expressing her gender identity and sexual orientation. Due to these factors, the foster care system intends to encourage same-sex couples to adopt more children and it is presumed that they are about six times more likely to raise foster youth and four times more likely to raise adopted youth than heterosexual couples.
LGBTQ PARENTS
Children, especially teenagers, develop disruptive behavior which is because of the lack of affection, detachment with reference to trauma and loss, being placed or brought up in an abusive environment and the lack of education. Consequently, their depression and suppressed anger and pain are treated in Medicaid with an overprescription of psychiatric drugs such as antidepressants, anti-seizure medicines, and antipsychotics. Due to the fact that the foster care system can only afford few programs for these children to work through their traumas, they settle to psychiatry. In spite of being overfed with these drugs and generating an endless possibility of mental problems, these foster teenagers do not have a say and are therefore, not permitted to refuse treatment. According to a 2009 data from Medicaid and private insurers, Stephen Crystal, a professor of health-services research at Rutgers University, estimates that 12% to 13% of kids in foster care take these medicines. That compares with about 2% for children on Medicaid but not in foster care and about 1% for those with private insurance. Be that as it may that when these psychiatric drugs were first introduced into the foster care system, they were meant to be much safer than predecessor drugs, the new prescriptions have become more and more dangerous and show hazards to health and potential side effects such as diabetes and movement disorders.
PRESCRIPTION OF DRUGS
Effects on children
Often times, children are pulled out of their homes, sometimes because of negligence of their parents, and sometimes simply because their parents are imperfect. This redundant measure makes it even harder for agencies to track down children who are living in an actual dangerous environment. The concept of emotional attachment is crucial in a child’s life as it forms the foundation for a social conscience and emotional support; hence, it is extremely traumatizing for children when they are taken away from their first home and parents. The process of separating children from their primary caregivers and moving them into the foster care system will have a detrimental effect on them if the execution is done in a volatile manner or if the aftermath of this separation causes harm to these children. Children faced with separation at a very young age often tend to have major trust issues and lack of emotional support, which prompts them to take out their anger on society. Abused and neglected children learn to react to alarm or stresses in their environment reflexively with immediate cessation of motor activity. The child, rather than running away, may learn to become psychologically disengaged, leading to detachment, apathy, and excessive daydreaming.
Effects on children
The bitter truth is that being persecuted in the foster care system has a worse effect on children in later life than being mistreated in their own homes. The constant back-and-forth system of reuniting families, separating them again impacts their coping mechanisms negatively, and ultimately make them susceptible to detachment, and stress. They are often too likely to suffer from attachment disorders, depression, feelings of self-abasement, a lack of education and anger. Not only do kids suffer trauma from the circumstances that led to foster care in the first place, but they also experience the grief of being separated from their primary attachment. The impact on their mental state rapidly brings about several other developmental challenges of their brains.These abnormalities in brain development may result in a persisting or abnormally over-reactive fight-or-flight response that can include attention problems, and oppositional and defiant behaviors. It can thus be concluded that the children need to be evaluated whether they are really in danger in their primary care environment and then be placed at a foster care system, if it deemed so. In the absence of a proper evaluation, foster care should not be overloaded with children unreasonably.
Effects on teenagers
Between 2012 and 2017, the number of children entering the foster care system in the United States has increased from 397,000 to 443,000 and among those, more than 171,000 are teenagers who are either kept in the system or being forced or in other words,“aged” out. The transition from foster care to the real world takes a toll on teenagers with their lack of experience in education, employment, housing and parenthood, hence having to struggle with succeeding independently. Due to the absence of a parental figure or guidance, these teens do not have the support or services they need. According to author, Joe Heim, 30 percent of youth who transitioned from foster care to independent living reported having been homeless and half of young people who had been in foster care start living on their own, without the support of a family.
Effects on teenagers
The Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System advocate for an extension of care so that teenagers can continue receiving education, financial assistance and access to guidance programs even after they turn 18. Extending foster care to 21 helps provide young people with additional resources and manage the typical problems they face as they approach independent living.