It is so much easier to sit and pass judgment on others instead of working towards implementing change. In my next few posts I will be talking about reasons why foster children leave foster homes.

There is a stigma about foster parents when foster children are placed to an institution. Sometimes this view continues over with adoptive parents also. It is easier to blame the foster parents than to realize that the foster child is so damaged by what she has endured before she came into care.

It is not easy to think of these foster children in such a gloomy and fractured state so, this leads to people to look for other factors that caused them to end up there. What is a more easy target than bad parenting by a foster parent?

These foster children come into care thinking that it is normal to be beaten, sexually abused, parenting their parents instead of being children, not to matter to other people, etc. This can cause some foster children to really struggle with how they have lived before coming into foster care.

Some children’s’ spirits can recover to some point or find a way to deal with that was happened to them. Then you have the other children where their spirit’s have been totally crushed...unable to recover. Some of these children can struggle on in a foster family but you only see very limited progress.

On top of all of that add in mental health issues that tend to run in families, a number of biological parents struggle with mental illness which can add to the reasons the children are in care. Some foster children are just existing on the edge when a stressor comes along pushing them beyond what they can cope with.

Foster parents do not enjoy having to place a foster child in an institutional setting but it is not because of something that we did or did not do. The realty is that some foster children have endured so much that they need more intense long term help to find a way to cope.

We do not hold special abilities to ease their pain and undo what has been done to them long before they came to us. We are just the ones left to pick up the pieces of a fractured child’s life. We live the heartbreak with these children, when they rage for hours, they cry uncontrollably, then they act out because of the deep angry emotions that they are unable to let out in a healthy manner and when we hear what they endured before coming into care.

Next, I will share a personal account of having to place a foster child into an institution.

More reading:

Multiple Foster Placements When Coming Into Care

The Need For Additional Foster Placements

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