Blending Your Foster Kids and Your Bio Kids: Part 3 When Jealousy Rears Its Ugly Head…

By John and Diane

When I first started doing foster care I knew it would be a growing and learning experience for my whole family. If you read Parts 1 and 2 of this series, you can see that the growing has been painful at times, but there have been countless blessings as well. My daughters have met all different kinds of people during our family’s journey through foster care, and some of the children touched our lives and hearts in positive ways.  Sometimes the relationships evolved in unexpected ways.

When I asked my oldest daughter, now 21, to reflect on some of the children that crossed her path, she thought about one girl who really illustrates this point”

“We had a girl that was a grade under me in school move in, her name was Sandy [name changed] she was fun to have around at first.   I really took her in, as my sister I helped her decorate her room, and gave her some of my stuff.  She would sleep in my room sometimes.  It was like having a constant slumber party.

  She quickly became jealous of me and everything that I had; she wanted to be just like me.  She started destroying my stuff. Just little things,  like once I caught her putting gum in a tie blanket my mom had made me.  We started getting in arguments and things would get pretty hostile.  Then one day I went to school and came home and she had been moved out.  I was told that apparently she threatened my life so my parents had her removed from the home.”

We thought it would be a good idea to have a foster child around the same age as our own for the following reasons:

1.     Our child would have a friend to keep her occupied

2.     They would grow up and be best friends and be supportive of each other

3.     They would be going to the same school so they could share transportation and activities

4.     They would be like real siblings and could share clothing etc.

5.     The foster child would need us to love her/him and provide the things she/he wasn’t getting in the first place

6.     We would provide family structure that she lacked in a previous home

What we found was that the age of the child was less important than the child’s history and experiences. In this case it was young girl who had a troubled life, she was the type of child that acted out in school, had very little social skills and we later learned she both lied and stole. 

The caseworkers told us that she just needed to be loved and to have a strong family structure to keep her safe. 

My wife took her in and took her shopping for new clothing to help her feel and that she was a part of the family.  We did not attempt to dig into her past as we thought that they had professionals dealing with those issues and we would just let her start fresh with us.

 As time went on we felt as though she was manipulating us and making demands of us, often saying that we were treating her differently then our biological children. 

No matter what we would provide for her we could not fulfill her need to belong “to” us.  She was also still involved in the court system and having visitation with her bio mother, which did not help the situation. 

It is a balancing act that foster parents have to do between the foster children and biological children. You must make sure that your own children feel loved and the foster kids do not feel like they are being treated differently.  We tried to compensate our bio kids for the lack of time given to them with more gifts and monetary things, and spent more time with the foster kids, thinking they needed and wanted more nurturing and attention.

So all the good intentions that we had fell through, it wound up that this child wanted to be in our family so badly that she wrote a letter stating she wanted to get rid of our bio daughter so she could take her place. This resulted in her immediate removal from the house. 

I would suggest simply getting foster children who are younger than your bio. kids. This way some discrepancy in the way they are treated can be attributed to age differences.

So, here are some tips on dealing with jealousy issues between your bio kids and foster or adopted kids:

·      Be sure they know there is enough love to go around.

·      Try to spend time with each child separately. Have a “date” time with each kid or a special activity you do with each child once a week or once a month.

·      Play family sports or games and have the all the kids be on the same team where they can work together to bond. Give them a chance to work together and not to compete against each other.

·      Treat children within the home equally, shower all of them with love and make them all follow the rules.

Into the Fold: Blending Your Bio Kids with Your Foster Kids - Part 2: Rooms to Grow…

by John and Diane

I asked my daughter to write down her thoughts on growing up in a home with foster children and I thought that her advice and insights would be very valuable to new (and experienced) foster parents out there. I feel that foster parent training may not really prepare families for the realities of bringing children with complex emotional, behavioral and cognitive issues into their home. Caseworkers and counselors, though they may be well meaning, do not always “have your back” and you must take the reins and lead your household in the safest and most nurturing way possible for both your biological and foster children.

My wife and I made some mistakes early on, which have shaped everyone in my family to some extent, as all experiences do, and it is my hope,that by sharing our past, we can help others to avoid the pitfalls that we lived through.

At one point we had 4 foster children in our home, plus our own daughters. We grew close and some of the foster children we had began to feel like true siblings to our own two children. It was easy to get comfortable in the home and feel safe. That was a mistake.

From my daughter, who was 13 or 14 at the time:

“For some reason my parents thought that it would be smart to put all three teens together downstairs, let me forewarn all the future foster parents right now when you put teenage girls and boys together things happen. Although I will not go into details if you have daughters I STRONGLY advise against allowing boys within a 3 or even 4year range of your daughters in the house or even just older boys period. They were fun at times for me to hangout with but because we didn’t have the blood relation naturally people become attracted to each other as inappropriate as it might be. Young girls are very impressionable andit’s just not a risk worth taking. “

I thought that because the bedrooms were at complete opposite sides of the finished basement, and I had monitoring cameras and had clearly discussed boundaries with the children that this was acceptable. I can see that it was foolish.

Conversely, I have also learned that no matter the gender of a foster child, or even if they are blood-related, each foster child should have their own bedroom. Meaning each girl, each boy, brothers, sister each child should have their own room.

Sometimes foster children come into the program with sexual abuse issues (as discussed previously) that have not been discussed or discovered, hence, it is easy to inadvertently put children at risk for being abused by other children, including siblings, when they are sharing rooms.Rooms should be single occupied onlyand the house rules (as detailed in Importance of House Rules/Chore Lists for kids with Trust Disorders and RAD) state that children are not allowed in each other’s rooms, must be enforced.

I cannot stress to you how important this is. No matter how pressured you might feel to take more children, unless or until you know for certain that there are no sexual or abuse type issues with the child, it is not worth the risk to anyone under your roof to share bedrooms.

So, again, perhaps you think I was too naive, or that my story is atypical, but I am sure that there are many foster parents out there that are learning by trial and error; which is an unfortunate state of affairs when we are dealing with troubled children already.

Hence: Lessons learned thus far in this series:

Part1.

· Insist on getting new foster children’s criminal and personal case records

· Do not rely on your own children telling you the truth in regards to foster children’s behavior

Part 2

· Keep teenaged and younger children on separate and well-monitored floors or better yet, do not take foster kids who are older than your own children.

· Each foster child should have their own bedroom,no matter if they are of the same sex, or are related.

More to come....

Please share your experiences and thoughts...

Into the Fold: The Effect on Your Bio Kids When Foster Kids Come Home: Part 1.

 by John and Diane

Becoming a foster parent when you already have children of your own is a big decision, and one that is sometimes made with well-intentioned naïveté. At least, it was in my case.

Ten years ago, I led my family, (2 daughters and my wife) into a life helping children in my community. I already had a lot of experience dealing with troubled kids at my job where I frequently supervised kids doing community service hours. I found out that bringing them into my home and making them part of my family was both rewarding, and a much greater risk than I had anticipated.

My daughters were 10 and 12 when we began fostering kids. Although I had talked to caseworkers about the type of kids I was willing to work with (behavioral issues, but not sexual abuse or other overtly risky behaviors that would be dangerous to my family,) before we began to bring children into our home, I later realized one simply cannot take for granted that the “system” will always protect you and yours.

I started this blog and am working on a book to help new foster parents prepare for things that aren’t necessarily covered in the training classes. With this in mind I asked my now 21-year-old daughter her thoughts on growing up with foster kids.

Here are a few of her insights:

“ Each foster child who entered the home affected me in a different way. The first kid we had was an older teenage boy. He was 16; I was 12. It was unique having an older sibling for once, and I got to hang around with his friends, but I was exposed to things that I shouldn't’ have been at a young age. I kept a lot of secrets from my parents when he was living there, a lot that my parents still to this day do not know.”

My daughter and I have talked about these things, and I have learned a great deal from her experiences. The lesson I want to pass on here is this:

Do not expect your child to be honest with you and tell you what is going on. I had a long talk with my kids before bringing foster children into our home. They were told to tell me if anything happened between them and any of our other foster kids. I said plainly, “If they come into your room, touch you in any way, or say anything inappropriate, come to me.” They didn’t.

In spite of having video monitoring cameras in the public areas in my home and what I thought was open communication, I wasn't able to protect my own kids from negative influences I brought into my home.

Although ultimately, my own naiveté was partially to blame, poor communication with caseworkers and counselors was also a contributing factor here.

The “professionals” gave me a false sense of security. Either they didn’t know how to deal with sexual issues themselves, or they weren’t sure where the line of confidentiality should have been drawn, but when a dangerous child or a child-predator is in your home, you should know it.

My advice to foster parents is this: ask for all the child’s court records and all the information about the child before they come into your home. You are entitled to it. Do not take anyone else’s word that the child coming into your home is “safe.”

If that doesn’t work for you, treat every child who enters your home as if they were a predator, liar and thief. I don’t mean that to be unkind, or that you should treat them in an unloving or un-nurturing way, but in the way that you provide safety and security for everyone in the home, including the other foster children and biological children in your house.

See the Blending Families Tab at the top of our blog to read the whole series.

image: flickr: License

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