Tuesday, January 8, 2019

Reunification

A lot of people don't know that the goal of foster care is reunification - the family being reunited. This is something stressed over and over again during the training and by workers involved throughout the process. The whole point of foster care is to remove a child temporarily so a parent can focus on doing whatever needs to be done to parent successfully. Then the child is returned.

Sounds simple, right?

Since becoming a foster parent, I've found that many people have incorrect assumptions about the foster process. Some people think that if a child is taken away, he can never go back. Some believe if you take a child in, you are automatically planning to adopt him. Some even believe the kids in foster care are given up or abandoned by their parents, rather than forcibly removed. (It *is* true that a tiny percentage of kids in foster care were abandoned, but the overwhelming majority are removed against the parent's wishes.)

At first, I wondered how people could have so many misconceptions. How do people not understand how this works? Why don't they get it? Doesn't reunification make sense? Then we went through a long, painful process with our first foster placement and I realized something important: Nothing about this makes sense.

In a perfect world, kids would always be able to reunite with their parents. Scratch that, in a perfect world, kids wouldn't need to be removed from their parents in the first place. But this isn't a perfect world, and reunification is not always the answer.

Now don't get me wrong. I believe in reunification. I believe parents should be given the chance to parent and families should be reunited whenever possible. I do. But the truth is, successful reunification is rare. The reasons why would take another whole post (and I might do that one day), but sometimes one of the biggest barriers to successful reunification is the fact the child has been taken to begin with: Once the child is gone, the parents lose the motivation that was keeping them afloat. Once the child is gone, they start to sink. Once the child is gone...chances go up that he's never coming back.

If this all sounds rather bleak to you, that's good. Foster care should never sound happy - there's nothing joyful about families disintegrating. About trauma. About loss. And on one hand, bleak is about the only word I can think of to describe this whole foster care business.

But.

On the other hand.

Is hope.

Every time a child is removed, every time a parent says they will do whatever it takes to get their kid back and then disappears, every time the system bounces a kid around trying to find something - anything - that will help him, there is hope. Hope that this time it will work out. Hope that the systems in place will do what they were meant to do. Hope for reunification. Hope.

No matter how many times promises are broken, families are left in limbo, kids are jerked back and forth in a terrible tug-of-war...I still have Hope. And I don't think I could keep being a foster parent, keep caring, keep getting up every day, without it.

"We wait in hope for the Lord; he is our help and our shield." Psalm 33:20

4 comments:

  1. I've never heard of reunification, but I love the idea you present behind it. But yeah, I've always thought the foster system very sad. I think one of the best books I've ever read about it is the Great Gilly Hopkins by Katherine Paterson. Have you read that and do you find it relatable?
    And I love how you ended this post, on hope.

    keturahskorner.blogspot.com

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    1. I've seen the Gilly Hopkins movie, I didn't realize it was first a book! The movie was definitely relatable, I loved it. Thank you for sharing your thoughts!

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  2. Sadly, but honestly, you bring out the very worse thing that is occurring in foster care.

    The limbo, the back and forth, the what if, the maybe but no and the false hope. I’ve watched it for so many years as a carer and six years in our long term kids.

    They constantly get false hope, hopes up and then dashed, until they have no expectations left. But deep inside them I can see they think by eventually self placing back to their parents, they *might* be the magical thing that will “save” their parents only to then find out when it’s too late that their parents will pull them down to their level and all they have worked hard at - breaking bad habits, recovering from their early child hood trauma and getting themselves in a constant positive mindframe, will all be thrown out like the garbage and trampled over because their parents don’t really care about them, they care about numero uno.

    The only consistent unwaving solid hope our kids have is putting their personal trust, hope and lives in the Lord.

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    1. Thank you for your comment. Watching kids go through that is very difficult - I talk some about that in my post Top 8 Reasons Not To Become a Foster Parent (http://katiepowner.blogspot.com/2018/04/top-8-reasons-not-to-become-foster.html). I'm glad you point out that the only real hope we have is in the Lord. All other hope is false hope.

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