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Yes, I want to order Fostering FAMILIES Today --- Issue 1
Unconditional Commitment:
The Only Love That Matters To Teens By Pat O'Brien, Director "You gotta Believe!" Having directed both foster care and adoption programs that place teenagers into permanent families and then having founded an agency that places them into permanent families, I often get asked the question, "What kind of people will offer their home permanently to a teenager?" My answer is always the same."Any and all kinds of people who, after a good preparation experience, are willing to unconditionally commit themselves to a child, no matter what behavior that child might ultimately exhibit." Teenagers need, first and foremost, at least one adult who will permanently claim the teen as his or her own. Any thing less is an artificial relationship. Teenagers need unconditional commitment before anything else constructive can follow. This country has tens of thousands of young adults, between the ages of 18 and 21, being discharged to no one but themselves. Half the homeless population is made up of these foster care discharges.This is in spite of the fact that teenagers, as a general rule, are easier to care for. And often, the rewards and gratification for caring for them come back a lot sooner than when a parent accepts younger children for permanent placement. However, our child welfare culture seems to have an anti-permanency bias against caring for teenagers.Very few organizations even have the slightest expectation, of the prospective parents who offer their homes to teens, that the commitment made must be necessarily unconditional for the placement to succeed. Parenting strategies and a whole variety of other skills, taught to families in pre-placement preparation and training, are rendered essentially useless if unconditional commitment to a child is not imbedded in the preparation philosophy. My working definition for "unconditional commitment" is, simply, that there is nothing a teenager can do to stop being someone's child. It means that we treat any child's behavior with the exact same commitment we would treat a biological child's behavior who might commit the very same act.If a bio-child commits a crime in the community, he might go to jail. But he does not lose his parents because he makes a mistake. If a bio-child becomes mentally ill, she might have to be hospitalized on a long-term basis.But she does not lose her parents because she has an illness that needs to be treated.If a bio-child becomes heavily involved in drugs, he might have to be placed in a residential treatment therapeutic community.But he does not lose his parents because he has the disease of addiction. Most importantly, if a bio-child has a nasty attitude, the parent develops ways to deal with it.The child does not stop being that parent's child because of the attitude. This, of course, is not the case for teens living in traditionally prepared foster homes.But they need a place they can make mistakes and not have the equivalent of a child welfare capital punishment sentence imposed on them. So many teens in foster care lose their parents simply because they do what teens do.All parents who help children they did not give birth to must be prepared in the same permanency philosophy that most biological parents have in the care of their children. I have had the privilege to orient about 2,000 prospective foster and adoptive parents over the past three years. I always ask them why they want to parent children not born to them. Generally, in a first session orientation, all the answers take the same form.Either they love children or they want to help them.My second question to them is, "Who is coming forward to be a foster or adoptive parent in order to hurt hurt children?" The participants are usually baffled by the oddity of the question. Then I ask six more similar questions to the rest of the group changing just one word, as follows: "Who wants to abandon abandoned children?" "Who wants to reject rejected children?" I repeat the question substituting the words "traumatize," "victimize," "abuse," and "neglect." No one raises their hand for any of the seven questions. Then I point out to them that, every time a foster or adoptive parent attempts to return a child for a behavior committed we are "re-everythinging" them.We are re-abusing, re-abandoning, re-hurting, re-traumatizing, re-victimizing, re-rejecting, and re-neglecting the child. Every person who comes forward to help a child must come to this work with an unconditionally committed permanency mindset. If they are going to be foster parents, they must commit to the child's permanency future.The number one permanency plan is for the child to return home. And until that goal is achieved that child needs one placement and one placement only.Anxious children invariably do things that upset foster and adoptive parents. Can you begin to imagine what feels like to have someone give you up as a child, every time you did something they did not approve of, particularly if it was during the most difficult period in your childhood? This happens to teenagers in care every single day as a matter of accepted and common practice -- that we professionals perpetuate and endorse implicitly or otherwise. Often, teenagers are in foster care because they have no one planning for their permanency future.They may havegoals of adoption but most often they have goals of independent living. Both goals may mean, if the child does not get into a permanent family before discharge from foster care, he will run a high risk of being alone in the world and becoming homeless after discharge. Way too many of these youths live in congregate care facilities, particularly group homes.They may be taught skills but if no one unconditionally commits to them before their discharge, their hopes for a brighter future are drastically reduced. Very often the system takes a half-full approach to teens in foster care and attempts to find conditionally thinking, traditionally prepared foster parents for them.Intake workers across the land make the same mistake when they call traditionally prepared foster parents for a teen.They make "the deal.""Try it and see if it works out."The implication being that if it does not work out the child will be removed. Can you imagine if you had to live under those conditions when you were a teenager?Can you imagine if you had the equivalent of child welfare capital punishment inflicted on you every time you caught an attitude, came home late, got caught smoking a cigarette, or broke even the most basic of rules? I knew a teen kicked out of his home for washing his sneakers in the washing machine.I knew another teen who got kicked out of two houses: one because he flushed the toilet at night and the other house because he did not. In one house, the father woke up at 4 a.m. in the morning and no one dared disturb his sleep.The other house found it disgusting that this same teen did not flush the toilet at night.Both houses kicked him out for this utterly minor offense. This happens time and time again because we do not imbed the unconditional commitment philosophy in our preparation of these families. We have dehumanized teenagers in our care. We have treated them like disposable garbage. And we have to stop it.Kids should not have to grow up in institutions, but equally, they cannot grow up in conditional homes.You Gotta Believe, the agency that I founded, makes it a practice of teaching each and every one of our families how important unconditional commitment is. We will only approve prospective families who agree to practice this form of love.Every time we place a child that child is placed forever. We support families through their hard times after kids are placed. And we are there to constantly remind them, that if this child's adolescence is handled in the right way, the child will have a family for life -- and the family will have the young person in their family forever. We teach each family to treat every child they accept as if he or she is the child who will bring them their last glass of water. Having practiced for over 15 years in this field, I know of at least three placements where the child that we placed was the child who did so, even over the dying adoptive parents' biological children. We have to stop accepting that teenagers in particular are not worthy of permanency.We have to continue to recruit only unconditionally committed, permanent families for every teen in our care who could be discharged to no one. If we don't we will continue to perpetuate what we did to another group of human beings in our Country's history. In an article written in the November 2000 issue of Harper's Magazine "Making the Case for Racial Reparations," there was an eerie quote about the condition of slaves who found themselves set free: Think about this. In 1865, the federal government of this country freed 4 million blacks. Without a dime, with no property, nearly all illiterate, they were let loose upon the land to wander. - Willie E. Gary It was so eerie when I read this because 135 years later we do the exact same thing to tens of thousands of predominately African American and Latino children in our care every year.We discharge them without a dime in their pockets; without any property; and rarely with a high school diploma, so they might as well be illiterate. And without an unconditionally committed permanent family in their corner they are simply being "? let loose upon the land to wander." We absolutely can do better for our kids. All we have to do is believe there are enough people willing to offer them unconditional commitment and then go about the good work of bringing those families into the process.It is far easier to find these families than you think. But you can only do this if you first believe it is possible. The choice is yours.Choose to believe. You gotta believe!Our children's futures depend on it. Anyone interested in contacting the writer of this article, Pat O'Brien, executive director of You Gotta Believe! The Older Child Adoption & Permanency Movement, can e-mail him at ygbpat@msn.com call him at 1-800-601-1779 or write to him at 1220 Neptune Avenue, Suite #166, Coney Island, N.Y. 11224.Pat would be very interested in sharing ideas with you about how you might find homes for every teenager in your care.
Yes, I want to order Fostering FAMILIES Today
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