What Permanency Means to Youth in Foster Care
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 children we work with in our Intensive Foster Care program.
Youth in foster care are young people for whom the Department of Children and Families (DCF) has determined it’s not safe for them to live with their biological (or bio) parents or family, for whatever reason. A youth in foster care can be any age, from 0 to 22. They live in foster homes with parents who have completed training and background checks that qualify them to temporarily care for these youth.
All youth in foster care have experienced trauma. This trauma could be from experiencing abuse or neglect in their families of origin, witnessing domestic violence in their homes, substance exposure in utero or the mere trauma of being removed from their familiar loved ones and/or community. DCF brings a youth’s case to an agency like ours when that youth needs to receive intensive case management support and be in a foster home with specially-trained foster parents.
Permanency for youth in foster care can look like one of a few options:
Reunification, in which case they return to live with their parents after the family has completed the steps on their DCF Action Plan and are observed to be safe and able to care for their child. We consider this to be the best outcome and is always the first goal for a youth in care.
Guardianship with kin, which means their extended family (a grandma, an aunt, etc.) is able to provide a loving, safe home for them when their parent(s) may not be an option. Guardianship with kin does not require the termination of parental rights, which allows youth to maintain a flexible relationship with their parents, when appropriate.
Or adoption, which provides a legally permanent family for youth when reunification isn’t possible. Many youth are adopted by people in their extended family (kin).
The overall goal for children in DCF custody is for them to end up living in a permanent home with a permanent caregiver, who will be their caregiver even after they’ve become legal adults. That’s the ultimate goal of permanency.
But for a child, permanency also means building permanent connections with people who aren’t necessarily going to be your forever family – teachers, coaches, religious leaders at your church. These relationships mean a child is connected to their physical community; it means they have a home town. For youth in foster care, their foster placements are intended to be temporary, meaning that they know they will leave the home at some point but don’t necessarily know when. This complicates maintaining these important relationships with supportive adults, especially if their hometown is far from their foster home.
For children, permanency includes being connected to their physical community.
When we do permanency work with youth, we start by asking them who their important people are and if there are people they’ve lost contact with that they’d like to reconnect to. Sometimes youth in foster care feel like everyone has given up on them. We know this is rarely accurate, so we work hard to prepare youth to think about who might be a supportive person for them to connect to and then we support them in the journey to build or repair these relationships. We ensure that youth have a voice and are empowered in this process, which is something that sometimes fades when government agencies function as your legal guardian. Youth in foster care can wake up every morning with a sense of, today might be the day I have to move, and they can live with that uncertainty for long periods of time. We ensure our youth know their plan and the steps to achieve their plan right along with the adults who are working on it.
There are three main components to our practice in helping the youth we serve achieve permanency. The first component is, we support them in stabilizing themselves and their behavior. We take the time to understand their personal history so we can help them get the treatment and therapies they need to be safe at home and in school. It’s hard to plan for the future or navigate complicated relationships when you’re worried about your day-to-day safety. We work hard to ensure kids feel safe, secure and supported in their foster homes so we can start to work on the more complicated tasks, like permanency.
The second is, we speak directly with our youth about what they want to happen and what’s important to them. We make sure their voices and desires are heard in court proceedings and conversations with DCF. We work with DCF to try to achieve the goals that our youth are enthusiastic about, and we connect our youth with the people they identify as important to them.
It must be very scary for a parent to trust the care of their child to a stranger. But when foster parents and agencies like CFCS reach out and collaborate with families of origin, we can take away that fear and build an alliance for the best interest of the child and family.
And third, we help our foster parents understand the importance of permanency and of their foster children’s relationships with their bio family. We can’t understate how vital the collaboration between foster and families of origin and pre-adoptive placements are to the success of children in foster care. If our foster parents can build a safe relationship with the bio or pre-adoptive family, that will help the child in foster care build a healthier relationship with their own forever family and understand that foster families are not trying to keep them from their own family, but to encourage reunification or adoption to establish permanency.
However, initiating this relationship can feel intimidating, especially if a foster parent doesn’t have training or support to guide them. At CFCS, we help our foster parents build healthy collaborations with families of origin whenever possible. Our foster parents consistently report that placements go more smoothly, the kids are more stable and planning for permanency is more successful when they’re able to collaborate with the family of origin.
Perhaps the biggest challenges in our intensive foster care work are systemic. Sometimes, the only remaining barrier to reunification is a parent finding stable housing. Often, systemic financial instability and inequality play a bigger role in a child’s removal from their home than the performance of their parent. So the warmth and respect our foster families provide when collaborating with bio families makes a huge difference in building their confidence and plays an important role in the bio families being able to advance in their action plans.
It must be very scary for a parent to trust the care of their child to a stranger. But when both foster parents and agencies like ours reach out and collaborate with families of origin, we aim to take away that fear and build an alliance for the best interest of the child and family. Foster families report that they do a better job of caring for youth when they consider the challenges that the youth’s parents may have faced. Often, bio-parents have experienced being a child in the welfare system, and have their own past trauma that impacts their ability to effectively parent. When foster parents have compassion towards those challenges, they can better support the bio-parents and ensure positive, safe outcomes for the youth they care for.
As we’ve said, being in foster care can feel very uncertain and confusing for children, no matter how nurturing their foster parents are. And regardless of a youth in foster care’s history with their bio family, we see more often than not that they still care about them and want to know that their bio family is still in their life. So when we can maintain that connection, they don’t have to wonder if they’re ever going to see their bio family again. When a child isn’t burdened with that worry, when their foster and bio families are working together as a team, that’s where real permanency begins.
To read more about the importance of collaboration between foster and bio parents, check out these articles:
A Foster Parent’s Perspective: Creating Permanency in Foster Care