Foster Parents Dealing With Children Living in Limbo

Foster Parents Helping Children Living in Limbo

I fostered a little boy (five years old) for a little over a year he was mentally retarded and autistic. In your mind, picture the worst child and his behaviors, then magnify that times five that is probably close to what he was like.

He had so many issues and behaviors that we would have gone crazy just trying to address half of them. So, we pick out a few unbearable behaviors and chose to work on them. This did not mean that we did not care about the other behaviors or would address them to some point but they were not our main focus.

We chose to address the behaviors below:


He was aggressively attacking others to the point of hurting them (biting to the point of drawing blood or taking hunks of flesh, hitting others with any object handy to the point of drawing blood or leaving a golf ball size knot on the head, etc).

Grabbing and touching others inappropriately, mostly females (any woman’s breast, rubbing his hands up strangers legs in public, sticking his hands up skirts and dresses and grabbing females, etc.)

Playing and eating his feces (smearing it on the walls, furniture, bedding, himself and the worst, eating it).

Running away from us in public (in a store, at school, at the beach, in a parking lot or across the street it did not matter).

When he left our home everyone including the caseworkers could see that he had made some improvements.

We felt that these were behaviors that we needed to deal with first and were the most important. Yes, that meant peeing throughout the house and at times other children’s beds, eating issues like gorging himself, food hoarding, not chewing his food, etc., speech delays, destroying toys and other things, hurting himself, etc. While these are all important behaviors that need to be addressed you cannot do it overnight. Addressing these behaviors as best as we could while focusing on our main behaviors goals is what worked for us. Someone may say speech is a must but really can someone teach a child speech while these behaviors are happening. It is not a benefit for the child to be restrained to receive speech if he does not get anything out of it.

When this child was moved to another foster home I wrote a few pages explaining what worked best with him and tried to provide information. I was asked by agency to give the foster mom my cell phone number in case she had problems. I started receiving phone calls a few hours after his placement. First she had questions about his behaviors and then in a few days she was judging my parenting.

The last conversation I was questioned about what I spent over a year doing with his child since he was peeing throughout her house, and was aggressive, eating issues, etc. I explained I had spent the year toilet training him, working with the above major behaviors, getting him to the point of sitting through a thirty minutes speech therapy sitting most of the time with minor behaviors, working on his eating issues, getting him placed in an appropriate special needs class in the school system, etc.. The truth is that this lady had no idea what this boy was like when he came into my home and found it very easy to place the blame on me. That was the last phone I accepted and he was moved a couple of weeks later.

To people not involved with this foster child’s ongoing care would probably make the judgment that I did not do all I could for this foster child and overall that I was a pretty crappy foster parent. This is not the case if you know the child’s journey from the beginning. Granted I am not an expert parent but far from the worst somewhere in between.

Photo Credit