What Permanency Means to Residents at Teens Learning Choices

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: achieving permanency is our top priority for every person we work with. But what does achieving permanency actually look like? There could be as many answers to that question as there are people who need help from agencies like CFCS. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a worthy question to explore. In that spirit, we’re starting a series on the blog called “What Permanency Means…”, where we’ll explore what permanency means for the many different people we serve. In this installment, we’re looking at what permanency means for the residents at Teens Learning Choices, our group home in Malden. 

The residents at Teens Learning Choices (TLC) are youth ages 16 to 21 who identify as female. Residents are referred to us through state agencies after living in a variety of settings, which could include another group home, a foster home, living with their birth family or an adoptive family. 

TLC residents have experienced significant trauma, including abuse or neglect in their families of origin, witnessing domestic violence in their homes and substance exposure in utero. TLC residents may have also experienced physical and emotional abuse by a partner and sexual exploitation. These traumas make our residents slow to trust, and they often express to us how difficult it feels to be in their shoes. But they also surprise us every day with their intelligence, resilience, sharp wit and endless creativity. 

The permanency goals for TLC residents in some ways are similar to achieving permanency for youth in foster care, at least on paper: we aim for all residents to be safely reunified with their biological families or for them to be adopted by a loving family. Adoption may not be the first thing that comes to mind when thinking of a 17-year-old in a group home, but a youth is never too old to be adopted.   

Our residents are slow to trust, and they often express to us how difficult it feels to be in their shoes. But they also surprise us every day with their intelligence, resilience, sharp wit and endless creativity. 

Often, when a young woman comes to TLC, she has not been removed from her birth parents’ home recently – she has spent years bouncing around the foster care system, sometimes without any regular contact from her biological family. This lack of stability causes our residents to struggle to trust supportive adults in their lives, and it’s up to us to fill in these gaps for our residents, to get them connected to supportive adults and family members again. 

When our residents turn 18, they want to be free, like any other teenager. They want to be on their own. All teenagers and young adults, including our residents, need a safety net as they began to be out on their own. For youth in our care who do not have permanent lifelong connections, they don't yet have the safety net to fall back on. 

But for them, being on their own is very risky because they don’t have the safety net that permanency provides: an adult they can count on, a home they can always return to, a community that supports them. And, because they’re still teenagers, residents often don’t understand the consequences of stepping out into the world without that safety net. So we try to guide and motivate them as they create their own permanency, their own safety net. 

We do a lot of work in both group homes to support and prepare our residents for life after being in our care. We make sure they’re employed or in school, we talk to them about personal finance and sexual health, we make sure they go to therapy and try to help them take care of themselves. But they need people outside our home, in the real world, who support them just as much as we do, if not more. 

Our residents often remind us that everyone has their own story, their own path. So what might be permanency for one person could be very different for someone else.

Specific permanency efforts look different for every resident, but we follow a general template: we work with each resident to identify the important people in their life, and the people they want to depend on. When they share with us who those people might be, we ask, how do you feel when you’re with them? Do you feel loved and respected? We also work with residents on what skills they might need to form these important relationships. Our residents sometimes connect with fantastic adults with whom they’ve had tumultuous interactions in the past, and we want to work with our residents on how to handle that and how to mutually move forward with that person. We want to make sure that we’re supporting relationships that are healthy for our residents. 

Our residents often remind us that everyone has their own story, their own path. So what might be permanency for one person could be very different for someone else. Once residents identify what their own permanency looks like, we then work with them to make these relationships stronger. We encourage our residents to connect with those people by making regular efforts to talk, share what’s going on with them and meet in person. And we’re constantly checking in with our residents about how they’re feeling and how these relationships are supporting them as they move towards their personal and professional goals.  

We show our residents how to build healthy relationships, how to set healthy boundaries, how to communicate about their feelings and how to remove themselves from situations where they may feel overwhelmed or unsafe. We give them the tools to create their own healthy relationships on their own, once they’ve left our care. 

Permanency work in our group homes can sometimes feel very murky. In addition to managing their cases, providing them with Life Skills training and working on permanency with them, we’re also trying to provide them a home: a place where they can relax, focus on homework and applying to college, eat dinner and unwind. Balancing all this can be challenging, but we see every day that our residents thrive with this support.  

Ultimately, we want permanency for these young people, but not just so that they have someplace to go. We want permanency because it will help them be successful in whatever they choose to pursue.