Why We Quit Foster Care

The state is not your friend.

I’ve put off writing this because it’s been a subject I’ve been angry and grieved over for a long time. All I ever wanted as a child was to be a foster mom. In the years leading up to our getting licensed, I was frequently in tears knowing there were kids who felt unwanted and feeling like a bench warmer. I think I was born to foster. But it’s time to tell you all that, after four full-time placements and probably dozens of respite placements, we have allowed our foster care license to expire. Here are the reasons.

1. The “harmacy”

Remember kids, we don’t want you to solve all your problems with drugs. By the way, would you like some drugs?

Most foster kids have some kind of mental health diagnosis. Every foster kid in our agency was required to have one before being placed in a therapeutic home. So it makes sense that almost all of them had prescriptions.

What doesn’t make sense is prescribing extremely addictive medications to children who have a history of drug and alcohol abuse — as per the pages and pages of side effects that come with those prescriptions. I pointed this out with extreme concern and was immediately labeled a crazy foster parent. How dare I butt into the realm of medication management. The social worker agreed with me, but even that didn’t matter. My fifteen-year-old kid, who had spent her entire life watching the adults around her self-medicate, was the only person with any sort of voice on the subject. You can guess how that went: she wanted the magic pills to make everything better.

On the days she took her medication, it was a nightmare. There was a palpable atmosphere of tension in our home, as if we were living in a meth house. On the days she refused to take her meds (to my secret relief) we were all perfectly happy. No matter how I documented this and begged for a change, I was ignored.

Someone is making a lot of money off foster kids and anxiety pills, depression pills, sleeping pills, birth control pills, acne pills, and whatever other pills might help balance out the side effects of the original pills.

Has it occurred to anyone that feelings of depression and anxiety are pretty healthy responses to being in foster care? Do you think we might give them time to just unwind outside of a stressful school setting? Of course not. Your foster child is nothing but a collection of chemical reactions. We’ll just find the right chemical balance, and then all her problems will be solved!

2. Social workers see people as problems

Social work is a ton of drama, driving, and paperwork. Most social workers are fairly young women, and many have their own history of neglect and abuse that they’re attempting to face down. I don’t want to make a social worker’s life harder by disdaining her. That being said, after a few years as a foster parent, I did develop a prejudice against social workers. Many of them are simply social engineers. Rather than meet the needs of individuals and do whatever good they can a little at a time, they see collective groups as the problem. And their solution is eugenics.

Rather than encourage impulsivity reduction as they did in every other category, they pushed hard to put all my girls on birth control. Including a Roman Catholic girl who felt it was a violation of her religion (because it was). They said in the presence of one of my placements, “People who were in foster care tend to have kids who go into foster care, too.” In other words, You’re going to be just like your parents. You don’t deserve to have a family. The goal of foster care is reunification. The goal of social work is ending the family line.

They would never say they see people as problems. They really don’t think that’s what they’re doing. They love kids and they want to make a positive difference. But their job, at least according to the people who train them, is really just to quell the raging tidal wave of child abuse by reducing the number of future children.

3. I have a big mouth (as you may have noticed)

If I think something is wrong or stupid, I have a tendency to try to wrestle with that idea without thinking about how it’s going to go over or whether others will feel comfortable pushing back and working it out with me. When one of our social workers began a motherly spiel warning my placement that “there are a lot of people out there who are anti-woman,” I had pretty much had it with her at that point. I defended myself. I said I’m not anti-woman, I just don’t think tiny humans deserve to die. I pointed out that I do plenty for women. Guess how that went over.

Now, I am not a you-know-who supporter. If I could vote a giant meteor into Washington, I would. But the social workers all got to chattering behind my back about what an evil white nationalist I must be (not wanting babies to die and all) and absolutely would not discuss it with me when I tried to clear the air. I know they talked behind my back, because all of them started acting weird with me.

One said something back-handed and insulting every time I spoke to her — things like, “Maybe younger children are a better fit for you.” Nevermind that we had a great evaluation, from them, in writing. Nevermind that we made sure a placement had a home and a car before she turned eighteen. Nevermind that we took in a teen with a small child within a year of having a baby of our own. Social workers want to engineer future citizens, you see — citizens who aren’t like me. And as I’ve heard them explicitly state during mandated trainings, they depend on Christians too much in order to have any foster homes at all, so they prevent Christians from passing down their values by making sure they get the little kids. Well, that would have been great, but I already had a few little kids, and regardless I wasn’t real optimistic that I’d be able to keep working with someone who thought I was Literally Hitler. She’d already demonstrated (as discussed in #5 below) that she didn’t trust me with anything at all.

4. It’s a good vocation, but we weren’t actually being allowed to do it.

I specifically sought out a private foster care agency so that I wouldn’t have to deal with bureaucratic nonsense. At this agency, we the foster parents were supposed to be considered the primary social workers. We are the ones who live with the child. See the child every day. Notice what’s going wrong and what the child’s needs are.

The trouble began when the state’s Department of Human Services laid down some new guidelines: no children under six, and no placements lasting longer than nine months. This meant any children under six who were already in therapeutic homes would either be relocated to a state foster home, or their foster parents would have to demote to a state license (meaning less support). This caused not a small amount of panic for the foster parents who had sibling sets. For those like Jared and I, who were fostering a teen, it meant that there was little point in getting attached. We noticed the subtle change in our relationship immediately: it had an expiration date. The teen withdrew. I raved and ranted in fury while mowing the lawn, and missed a huge slice.

I thought of sociology class: it takes six months to adapt to a new culture, which most foster kids have to do when they enter a new home. I thought of my day care training: just changing preschools can cause a child to regress three months. So potentially, these new DHS stipulations meant you wouldn’t really be able to impact your foster child for six out of the nine months they lived with you, and then they might regress and lose the three impactful months once they were moved for no good reason whatsoever. What was even the point?

The next thing that went wrong was our agency being bought up by a bigger agency. Discreetly but immediately, all of our awesome foster workers started leaving like rats leave a sinking ship. They were replaced by… frankly, stupid people who saw foster parents as inept villains rather than teammates. We were treated as suspects in crimes that had not yet been committed, and our opinion on what our foster child needed was completely disregarded in favor of opinions from people who saw her once or twice a month. These social workers are the ones who basically ruined my opinion of social work.

Everyone assumes you’re a foster parent for the money. At the same time, the really good reasons for fostering — making a difference in a kid’s life — are stripped away from you. You’re a babysitter. Not that you’re being compensated like one. Also we aren’t sure we can leave you alone with the kids. By the way, we’ve made a bunch of appointments for you without consulting you about when, where, or whether your toddler needs a nap during that time. Good luck keeping it all straight!

5. To work with an evil system, or adopt out of it…?

When it became very clear that our last placement — who had nearly died from more than one overdose — was sneaking around and doing drugs again, this was a violation of our agreement (you can have a phone as long as there’s no drama). I informed her that I was taking her cell phone. She informed me that I was not.

The on-call worker at the agency told me to wait, to take the phone with the help of my team, i.e. our social worker. So I waited until our meeting. The state worker did not show up. The agency worker undermined me in front of the child and validated the child’s declaration, “If I want to kill myself, that’s my choice!” By validated, I mean she smiled, closed her eyes, and nodded as if she’d heard something beautiful.

I attempted to bring this up with her in future conversations. I was shut down. There would be no apology and no course correction.

From the moment we began the licensing process, we were upfront about my husband’s history with alcohol. He is in recovery. We were even told that this could be an asset — it was — as it helps us understand where our placements and their biological families are coming from. Now, while our foster child’s drug use was apparently not an issue, my husband’s history was suddenly a huge issue. We were called into the office and grilled about our use of per diem funds and how a relapse would be handled if Jared’s drinking ever became a problem again. I was also told that I should have the same “let go and let God” attitude toward a minor in my care using hard drugs.

Not long after that, our final placement used her cell phone (that she wasn’t supposed to have, remember) to run away. I told my then five-year-old son that we might not see her again, the girl he called “big sister.” He began crying, and would go on to wet himself for the next 18 months. I spent the entire weekend (a family holiday) sobbing that she was probably dead while my husband handled phone calls with the social workers — who failed to inform her biological family that she was even missing. Her disappearance was treated as a possible sex trafficking case for some time. My son declared he was going to go looking for her with his wooden sword.

The foster care system has never had a great reputation. I tell you, every year it is earning a worse one. If you can adopt anyone out of it — regardless of whether they want to think of you as their parent — just get them out.