Foster Parenting: Chapter 2
To Tell the Truth
Before we
started the Foster Parent Training sessions, we attended an orientation meeting
to give us an overall picture of what we could expect as “specialized
caregivers”. They brought in a seasoned foster parent to give us a “veterans
view” of life in her special home. She walked up to the front with a slight
limp. She, had bags under her eyes, and wore a scarf that covered her gray
hair. When she spoke her voice was slightly hoarse, but loud enough for
everyone to hear. She said, “My name is
Edna and I am 32 years old.” She said, “First of all, all you women take off
your name tags. Once you finish this class and have foster children in your
home you will all have the same name, $-I-T-C-H. Well, she spelled something like that.
Our first little darling.
“Dysfunctional?” “What do you mean by that?”
“I thought you were a loving
family that opened up their hearts and home to suffering children.”
Yes, that is
true. We didn’t consider ourselves to be
an abnormal family. But from that moment on, every other family looks at you
through ‘crazy glasses’. Your previous
soccer team/ballet class/come on over for a barbecue friends begin to distance
themselves. You find yourself drawn to families
like yours, where you can have conversations about the recent antics of your
kids.
A child that has
been neglected and abused can develop behaviors that are hard to describe to
normal families. Out of neglect comes self preservation. When they have lived without
enough food in the house they will hoard food and gorge themselves at
meals. Once while we were at a buffet
restaurant, we let her eat until she was full.
Halfway through a bowl of ice cream she looked up at us and said, “If I
throw up does that mean I can’t have more?”
Then the lying
started. All kids will tell a lie. Most of them, when confronted with the truth
will cave in and admit that were lying. But not “special needs” children. For instance, you walk into the kitchen and
there is bite out of the birthday cake. The wrong response from the recently
trained foster parent is to say,
“Did you eat some of that
cake?”
“No.”
“Yes you did. Admit it. You
ate a piece of that cake.”
“No. I didn’t. Why should I
admit to something I didn’t do.”
You march her
down the hall to the bathroom. Tell her to look in the mirror and explain to
you again that she didn’t eat the cake.
She looks into the mirror and with horror in her eyes she wipes at the
chocolate that is covering her mouth and cheeks and she says, “I don’t have any
idea how that got there.”
Ten minutes
later, the child is sitting at the kitchen table writing 100 sentences that
say, “I will ask permission to eat the cake.” Though, you never actually
received a confession to the crime.
It’s not just
the cake icing on the mouth, it was also the milk mustache. And pile of candy wrappers under the
pillow. Or, the mystery shower that
involved no wet tub, dry hair, and a dry towel.
There is no end
to the lying. So don’t go there. It is easier to assume your child is lying.
Use your all powerful knowledge and let them know you already know the truth.
Just survey the situation and make your assumption and dish out the
consequences. You will go mad trying to get to the bottom of every mystery.
Your very own crime scene
investigation kit. Complete with UV
light, DNA swabs, and fingerprinting.
Plus, the all important
yellow “DO NOT CROSS” tape.
This way you can
spend all your free time taking dental impressions of teeth marks in a block of
cheese or a saliva sample from a half can of soda.
She also had
this other problem of getting messy pants. We didn’t understand the psycho
lingo that could be causing this issue.
It seemed like leakage to me. You
wait too long to go and then something is going to come out no matter how hard
you try to stop it. This appeared to be strictly a behavioral issue. We talked
to our therapist and we tried a reward system and a consequence system. Then we
took her to the doctor and tried fiber and medication. In the end, (no pun
intended), this was all about control. It is called Encopresis. Or to put it
simply: Once you have been neglected, abused and perpetrated on, you have lost
all control of these external forces.
What you still have control of is the internal. Whether this starts
consciously or unconsciously, eventually, this becomes a cycle that you can no
longer control.
Encopresis
or fecal
incontinence. This
“soiling” is the involuntary passage of stools in conjunction with constipation. It is abnormal
for children over 4 years of age, and occurs in boys 3 to 1 over girls.
What can you do with this behavior? Buy lots of
underwear and pull-ups and schedule frequent baths.
When you add this to lying, stubbornness,
manipulation, lack of eye contact, and destructive behavior it is hard to embrace
and care for the child like your natural born kids. You have to dig deep and be a parent by
profession.
We had a therapist from the Carolinas assigned to
our family. She had a sweet southern spirit and believed in the adage “There
are no bad children”. One day she took
our little angel out for ice cream so she could spend some one on one time with
her. On her return I noticed the therapist looked a little disheveled and
red faced. When I asked her how it went she just replied in her southern voice,
“I’ve never come so close to strikin’ a child in all my life.”
There you have it. Our first special needs foster
child. We were caught off guard. Our training went out the window when reality
walked in the door. After a year we felt
that we really had a handle on this parenting thing and figured we were now
well experienced and could not be surprised by anything.
Cue explosive laughter from audience.
_Doug Lambert
has been a Foster/Adoptive parent since 1980. He is not a Licensed Social
Worker, a Psychologist, Psychiatrist, or any other kind of doctor. He lives
with his wife Kari who is the driving force behind making a difference in
children’s lives. Observations made in
this blog are based on experiences. Names and pictures do not represent foster
children past or present.
