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@kayla-skywriter

Okay, so about the number. It would greatly depend on why she has not been adopted by now. I mean, seriously, a newborn baby gets snapped up very quickly, especially if there are no parents to cause trouble. I’d say it would take about 9 months tops to both find an adoption family and complete the adoption unless there was something else going on. We had our 4 day old baby, who was also an abortion survivor, for 2 weeks before family got her. Now, that’s family, and that means half the battle is won for them already, but even non-family adoptions don’t last terribly long unless, like I said, there are complications. And you gave us no real complications.

Some complications would be a genetic disorder, physical disorder, and family barriers. Genetic disorders might be something like autism, down syndrome, etc., physical disorders might be missing limbs, brain damage, alcohol fetal syndrome, etc., and family barriers might be a mom who doesn’t want to give up her baby, but due to previous behavior, it was taken from her at the hospital, and she goes around making a big stink about it. (The latter usually happens only if the baby is born while the mom is under investigation for previous child abuse or neglect.) A little girl with nothing wrong with her is not likely going to simply slip through the system like this.

Even if she is one of the rare cases that do happen to slip through, I want to know why. Why didn’t her social worker work to get her in a good, adoption home as quickly as possible? Was it negligence, not enough families, ineptness, etc.?

So, as an example, one of the children in our home who had been to 11 different foster homes in the span of four years had severe allergies, and could basically only eat chicken and rice, and things made from them. No dairy, nuts, eggs, gluten, pork, beef, or corn. (That included corn syrup, which is in almost everything.) He also was labeled a trouble maker with ADHD. He did have trouble in school, but mostly because he had such a strict diet and he saw all the other kids eating fun things like mac and cheese, hot dogs, etc. and he couldn’t. Some of the kids made fun of him. And so he would fight with them and get suspended. My family loved all our foster kids, and my mom made a point of trying to understand every single one. She never gave up on them just because it was hard. But most of the other homes just accepted the report that he caused trouble and didn’t take the time or effort to make good meals without the ingredients he couldn’t have, and so yeah he lashed out and rebelled.

The other boy who had been in 12 foster homes had autism, and threw down china cabinets…still full of china…because someone wouldn’t give him pizza. Yeah, we learned not to say pizza unless we were prepared to give it to him.

Now, we did have a “normal” set of kids, age 9 and 1/2 months and 2 years, brother and sister, who (hopefully) only had 2 foster homes before they were adopted. (I say hopefully because they were taken away from us because of my parents’ faith and we weren’t allowed to even know what happened to them.) Another child I know who was taken from the hospital and only stayed in 1 foster home before being adopted (after 4 years). Complications with the mom who scared everyone by suing people was the reason why it took so long.

So, 41 is really drastic for a “normal” girl who has just been in the system for a long time.

For Jane, age 13, and assuming her to be “normal”, I would venture a high, plausible number would be about 20.

I like how you have portrayed Shannon and Daniel as “good” foster parents, and also have some “mediocre” parents who just couldn’t do it because of finances, and then “abusive” parents as well. That’s all good. But please don’t make it seem like it takes 40 foster homes before you find one good one. Surely there would have been several more who would have tried to keep Jane for much longer than only a few weeks.

On average (besides the newborn who only stayed 2 weeks because we were really just a stop-gap until her aunt could finish her home study) children stayed in our home for 10 months — they ranged from 1 month to almost 3 years. The 1 month one left because he was completely refusing to comply, and cursed my mom in the most obscene language I had ever heard, and my dad said he had to go. His brother (The one with ADHD and dietary restrictions) stayed with us for 4 months and only left because someone tried to break into our house, and we highly suspect some of his family members. The autistic boy stayed 7 months and only left because my mom was exhausted, having gotten at least one concussion, and his mom was sabotaging all our efforts to help him. The two children who stayed almost 3 years left because they were taken from us, because of my parents’ faith, but the reason they cited was that my mom washed them in the shower without a washcloth — they called it sexual abuse. So, in a good home, Jane could have stayed for months, and possibly years. If there’s no apparent reason for her to leave, why would they have let her go? It’s easier to keep a child you’ve gotten to know than to give that child up and get completely new children.

(Sorry, I got to rambling and couldn’t stop.)

Details in the Foster Care System The Outsiders Might Not Know About:

1. White cars. All social workers seem to drive white sedans. All of them. Seriously, you go to social services office, and you see white cars lined up, sometimes with stickers with numbers on the windshield, and orange permanent license plates.

2. Briefcases. Social workers carry briefcases, sometimes with those hard case clipboards inside them for when they come to home visits. The note down everything. They note how the different members of the family interact with the foster child, what the foster child says, what the house looks like, whether there’s enough food in the pantries, how excited/scared/nervous/etc. the child looks, etc. It’s kind of scary from the foster parent perspective.

3. Home visits are sometimes unscheduled. Social workers will pop up at your door for a home visit. Usually, when they do this, they are a bit more understanding of a messy house, but they still make note of it.

4. Foster care has agencies. What I mean by this is that they will “give” their cases to an independent agency, who have their own foster parents, and the agency will assign a foster home to a child. The foster parents usually get paid more, and they have their own agency worker who speaks for them, but they also have twice the accountability, for there are now 2 social workers who have to come for monthly home visits.

5. Fire drills. Every month, foster homes are required to have a fire drill. This would be a cool addition to a story that I never see. You could have so much fun exposing certain fears or mindsets with the children and parents. Ex. My mom loved to make a game out of fire drills, to try to make it not so scary. Some of our kids would respond to the game and laugh as we ran outside, collecting our shoes and respective kids ( my brother and I each had a child we had to make sure got outside) but other children would cry and cover their ears and have to be carried out the door into the grass by the mailbox.

6. Calling foster parents Mommy and Daddy. This might not be relevant in your story, since Shannon and Daniel don’t seem to have any children of their own, but if there is a natural child (as in, not foster) and they are naturally calling the foster parents “Mommy” and “Daddy”, younger children (even as old as ten or eleven) will sometimes start calling the foster parents that too, without any encouragement to do so. It just becomes natural, since the other kids are doing it.

7. You don’t know much about the kids before they arrive. Seriously, we wouldn’t even know the children’s names before they showed up at our door and told us themselves. Here’s what happened to us: we’d get a call, and our social worker (we were a part of an agency. See note 4.) would tell us how many kids, what ages, what genders, and maybe why they were removed. ( My mom wanted to know why because it affected what kind of preparation mentally she needed to have.) Then they would hang up after telling us about what time they would show up. A few hours later, a white car would pull up, and out would pop the kids. Then we would learn their names, birthdays, etc. But not before. Social workers do not usually talk and give a lot of superfluous details to experienced foster parents beforehand. (So in your story, Jane might not need to feel like she doesn’t need to say her name.)

8. Guardian ad Litems. These are people completely independent from social services, the child’s family, and anyone else ( a stranger to everyone involved in the case) who only speaks for the kids. They don’t care about what the foster parents, social worker(s), and bio-parents want — they want what’s best for the kids. Most children only have one, and that Guardian sticks with them even when they move to another foster home. (As do the children’s social worker who speaks for DSS, now that I think about it.) They don’t have to have legal experience. It’s their job to listen to the children and speak for them in court since the children probably wouldn’t be going to court themselves. Some of them can be so experienced being a Guardian that they can be even better than an attorney speaking for the kids. They get to know the court and how things work, they learn how to gather their own evidence, and they can get really fierce when it looks like people are not doing what’s best for “their” kids. They will also come for regular (not always monthly) visits to the foster home to check on the kids as well.

So, those are a few more notes and details. Let me know if you want anything more.

I’ve wanted to write a story about foster care myself, but I’ve found that I get too tense and upset whenever I try. Maybe you can guess why. But I started feeling that way again just by writing these things down. That being said, I’d be happy to give any further intel, but I might not give it in large chunks like this anymore.

The stories need to be told.

~Katy