Some foster children can be successful in therapeutic care rather than the basic foster care. Foster children who continually struggle with behavior problems, mental illnesses, mental retardation, and many countless failures and disruptions in basic foster children can end up in a therapeutic foster placement or treatment care.
A high school boy named Patrick was placed in a therapeutic foster home due to his behaviors instead of being placed in a juvenile facility. After finding the right placement for this boy he has improved. Patrick is turning into a teenager that is learning how to get along with others, how be successful in school, and even develop friendships without tantrums, hostility, or being defiant.
Therapeutic foster children need firm guidance, a lot of re-teaching over and over, firm and clear boundaries, etc. to even possibly make it in family setting environment. These children need to have a heavily structured and constructive environment to begin to learn how to control their behaviors. A teen that goes into an aggressive outburst aimed at others must know that the consequences will always be the same. A teen that has been restrained because of this behavior may act out again maybe this time when you are in the middle of dinner, caseworker visit, or when you are talking on the telephone, etc. to see if the consequences will be the same.
One of the main things is that you have to find a way for the foster child to be successful without setting your expectations too high for this child. Honestly most of these children would stay in trouble all the time because of their behaviors, but you have to allow them to succeed.
Parenting therapeutic children can be very demanding and time consuming. Some of these children can be reached, learn how to live in a family setting, to put others before themselves and then they can be successful in school and life.
More reading:
I had children who were therapeutic. My expectation was the agency would be there for us. Little did I know they never were there when there was a crisis, or their response was one of noninvolvement. There was never any follow up after an incident and we were totally on our own. Even the local crisis unit in our community didn’t believe us and sent the children back without meication or followup. We hd lost our therapy due to lack of agency cooperation. Of course we all lost because after multiple incidents and safety issues for all in thehosue, the boys had to go back into care. What heartache for all of us. Unfortunately the children are used to bouncing around and build a very tough shell that never goes away.