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Love will never reject others. It is the first to encourage and the last to condemn. "Death is not the greatest loss in life.The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.” Norman Cousins
“It takes the eye of
faith to see the beautiful butterfly in the caterpillar.” |
Adoption Ambassador's Bridge What do Foster Parents Have to Offer Adoptive Parents? Our primary aim in fostering a pre-adoptive child is to expose and deal with the disturbing ghosts in that child’s past. Hopefully we can introduce an adoptive family to a child healed in body and spirit of his or her past wounds. The child’s new self will be a product of successful family living — not with a caseworker, a therapist, or a juvenile judge, but with us, his foster family. We proudly take credit for it. The foster child may never have experienced nurturing, let alone come to know himself as a person of worth. In the foster home, he or she, perhaps for the first time, experiences personal values. As a loved member of a family, he or she can find safety and acceptance in being dependent, not only on him/her self but on each other as well for support and affection. He/she learns that the success one achieves in family living is based on mutual respect for one another. The foster child needs to learn that one’s achievement as a successful human being depends partly on one’s “civilization”, that process by which one enters “the state of human society regarded as having reached a high level of intellectual, social and cultural development” (dictionary definition). The civilizing procedure includes elements of personal hygiene, polite conversation, sharing of family chores, introduction to new skills, regard for possessions of others, responsibility for self improvement and especially, respect for education and school. Boiled down, fostering a pre-adoptive child is similar to an incubation process from which a new person may be born a child with confidence in self and trust in others, and with the capacity to give and receive love. The child’s future success as an adult rests not only on emotional development but also on the best possible education. Very few children enter foster care at grade level, let alone emotionally able to do the assigned work. One of our jobs is to make school work as enjoyable as possible and to enable our children to get the education and diplomas they need. Success in school or at least some improvement is a major goal for foster parents, but it may not come until the permanence of adoption stills forever the apprehensions which are part of the built-in impermanence of foster care. Foster parents also need to give the child “permission” to love more than one person or family. They try to impart the knowledge that giving birth does not exclusively ordain parenthood, that parenting is nurturing. Just as the child may be loved by more than one parent (biological, foster, adoptive), so also may the child himself love more than one set of parents. One does not have to cease loving one person before loving someone else. New love is added to a past loves, such as significant parent figures the child remembers and continues to cherish even after adoption by his or her “forever” family. Foster parents also give the child “permission” to grieve. We show the child through our own grieving. that life can be very sad. But we human beings work through despair and go on; our lives have been made richer by all loving relationships, even those that have ended. Including the foster relationships. Adoptive as well as all other permanent placement parents need to be convinced that foster parents are not a threat to new parent-child relationships. We are the reality of their child’s past. To deny their child's love for us, as well as our love for him, is to deny a part of that child's reality. It we are lucky, that new kind of relationship between their child and our love can be established. A gentle one, a caring one, perhaps comprised of photographs and letters. A validating relationship. Part of our commitment as foster parents is that we will give up the child in our care — knowing we, as well as the child, will grieve the loss. We must show our foster child that our love for him is too great for us to want to cause him pain by any reluctance on our part to relinquish him. We need to convince ourselves first, however, that we can indeed end the fostering bond. We must stick to our firm resolve to say good-bye. If there is to be further contact, it must come from their new forever family, if and when they are secure enough with each other to risk reattachment to us in a new kind of relationship. We always hope for that relationship, based on the prior love between their child and us. But we must never let that hope blind us to reality; our days as their child's parents are over. Now it’s their turn. Reprinted from the NFPA Web site and The National Advocate is an offical publication of the National Foster Parent Association, Inc. Correspondence and subscription inquiries should be addressed to: NFPA, P.O. Box 81, Alpha, OH 45301-0081, (800) 557-5238. This is your ONLY national Voice for Foster Care – Attend the National Conference in Minneapolis and join this valuable organization. The Minnesota Adoption Support and Preservation (MN ASAP) is a collaboration of the Minnesota Adoption Resource Network (MARN) and teh North American Council of Adoptable Children (NACAC). It’s purpose is designed around three interconnecting circles, none more important to the other and each revolving around successful adoptions and families that are healthy. Adoption Information Clearinghouse - Sheryl Freeman 612-861-7115 - MARN
Parent Support and Respite Network - Ginny Blade 612-644-3036 - NACAC
Training for Parents and Professionals - Cece Gran 612-861-7115 - MARN
National Campaign Urges Americans to Adopt More than 500,000 U.S. children are in foster care; approximately 129,000 are waiting for someone to adopt them. The United States Department of Health and Human Services' Administration for Children and Families (ACF) has partnered with the Collaboration to AdoptUSKids to develop a public education campaign, Answering the Call: A National Campaign to Encourage Adoption of Children from Foster Care, to increase public awareness and encourage adoption of children from the public foster care system. Beginning in June, multi-media public service announcements (PSAs), developed in collaboration with The Advertising Council, began encouraging prospective parents to realize that they "don't have to be a hero to be a hero," and "don't have to be perfect to be a perfect parent." The campaign addresses prospective adoptive parents’ fears and encourages individuals to realize that they have the ability to be adoptive parents. ACF also will use the campaign to issue a national call to action for prospective parents to adopt children from foster care by offering important, accurate information about the foster care system and the adoption process. The PSAs, which are being placed on television, in print outlets, and on the radio by The Advertising Council, will encourage adults to learn more about adoption of children from foster care by calling AdoptUSKids (888-200-4005) or by visiting the website at www.AdoptUSKids.org. Officially launched by the President and First Lady in 2002, the website provides information about how to become an adoptive parent and features children across the United States who are waiting for permanent, loving homes.
Inducement – The Language of the Abandoned Fortunately, words are not the only means of human communication. Psychologists have taught us another way. They call it inducement. Inducement, whatever else it is, is the language of the abandoned. And therefore, we at Family Focus are convinced that it is the most conceptual tool that we as workers can give to our adoptive families. It is more important than knowing a kid’s history. it is more important than going to therapy. Inducement – at least as we have appropriated it from the psychologists - means simply this: With no words even required, I set up a situation to make you feel what I feel. It’s a very human thing and certainly not limited to the abandoned kids. But it is perfected by the abandoned. I set up a situation to make you feel what I feel. And what it is that I feel, as a result of by abandonment? Alone! Angry! Sad! Mad! Crazy! Intensely before all those words – intensely alone, intensely angry, intensely sad, intensely mad, and intensely crazy. Well, psychologist have taught us that there is an alternative means of communication for people that requires no words. They call it “inducement”. We call it probably the most important concept that there is to give our families. All it means is that I can communicate my feelings to you without using words, by setting up a situation that induces some measure of those feelings within you. And what are those feelings that I am trying to communicate: pain, fear, hopelessness, aloneness, helplessness, and number one and above all – craziness. Anyone working in the field with people who have adopted, must have heard parents complaining that they are feeling these things as a result of what their children are doing. Inducement is a human means of communication: we all do it to a greater or less extent. The difference with our kids is that the feelings they induce are the feelings that are produced when one is abandoned. And there are two qualities that all those feelings have – they are intense and they are bad. So the kids communicate their feelings that come about from their abandonment experience to their adoptive parents. Communicating their feelings is good. Communicating their feelings is evidence that the adoption has been a success; the child has accepted that their adoptive parents are their real parents. And how does that success often look? Very bad. How does it feel? Very bad. CPS workers must take note here. What is the purpose of inducement? Is it just to communicate how the kids feel to their parents? No. Like all unconsciously motivated behavior, it has more than one purpose. And the biggest purpose is a cry for help to the parents. The kids induce these terribly painful feelings inside the adults (although it is perhaps only actually some small fraction of what the kids feel) and then they sit back and watch what the parents do with what are now THEIR feelings. If you (an adult) can’t handle your feelings without acting out, then what chance to I (a kid) have to handle mine? And what is the worse thing that the parent can do at that point? Blame the kid. Holding the kid accountable for his or her behavior make the kid feel safe. Blaming the kid for how the parent feels has a kernel of truth to it – the kid is doing what he does purposefully; he did it deliberately – albeit most times, but not always, unconsciously. But nobody – look to what psychology teaches us again – nobody is responsible for how I feel except me. If – as sometimes happens – the parents, or the workers, or the therapists, or the schools, or CPS, use the acting out on the part of the kids (the inducement motivated behavior on the part of the kids) to decide that the adoption is a failure, they are doing exactly the wrong thing at exactly the wrong time. And they are feeding the confusion and feeling the craziness within the child. Looking for websites with GREAT ADOPTION resources right at your fingertips? Visit the following, you won’t be disappointed.
The Invisible Realities of Adoption Maris Blechner, Executive Director Helene Gershowitz, Associate Director Family Focus Adoption Services - Little Neck, NY 718-224-1919 These laws allow the parties to enter into an enforceable agreement that sets forth terms (type, frequency and duration) for post-adoption contact. Minnesota’s Open Adoption Laws can be found at MN Stat. 259.58 |
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Foster and Adoptive Care Association
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