Class Meeting 1 - Sept 13th
We watched a video called, "voices of youth" which interviewed older foster children who shared their experiences in the system.
I was really amazed at how badly these children were treated not only by their birth families but by the foster care parents as well. One girl was in over 50 foster homes! Some were treated as if they were brought into the homes to clean up after the foster family's kids and do all the chores. Then there were a few that were abused all over again which really brought me to tears watching.
After the video, we went over feelings/behaviors and how to identify various types of abuse. We learned that if we could detect the feelings and help resolve them, then we have a greater chance of correcting the bad behavior that comes from those feelings which are from past neglect/abuse histories.
There was a scenario about a Latino male who was withdrawn. He wouldn't look at the foster parents when they spoke to him (which they took as being disrespectful) and he wouldn't do anything that was asked of him. He was removed from that family (they couldn't deal with it) and placed with another family who had more experience. In his culture, it's disrespectful to look into an elders eyes so that's why he would never look at them. He was also mentally abused so badly by his parents that he was "scared" to do anything because he was worried he'd do it wrong and get into trouble.
Then we learned not to be judgemental of the birth parents because sometimes they weren't always abusive/neglectful until something happened that set off a chain of events. One scenario was a family of four. The mother stayed at home and the father worked to support the family and wasn't around much. He worked a lot of over time in a factory. One day he goes to work and is handed a pink sheet due to the company outsourcing work to another country. They lived in a small town where most depended on working in factories. He was unable to find another job and about to lose their house. Because most men (not all) have issues communicating feelings properly (unmanly) he started drinking which led to fights with his wife and more stress in the household which also lead to tempers. The kids ended up getting beaten for crying and one ended up in the hospital after she fell and broke her nose.
In the cases like above, social services removes the children from the hostile environment and then attempts to work with the parents on a program so that they can get back to where they were prior to the set backs so that they can get their children back.
This was a very long but educational day. I was told that the next two weeks are going to be even more difficult because we're going to learn more about the abuse histories that some of the children had to endure.
A few of the folks that attended the class didn't come back after lunch. IMO that's probably a good thing. I still feel good about the program and my decision to become a foster parent. Although, I was surprised and learned a lot of things yesterday, from my own past experiences, I already knew it wasn't going to be something that was going to be easy.
