HELPING KIDS FIND HEALING IN FOSTER CARE
HELPING KIDS FIND HEALING IN FOSTER CARE
By Rod Campbell | MAMFT, LPC-S, REGISTERED PLAY THERAPIST SUPERVISOR
A major concern faced by many prospective foster parents often centers around the possibility that offering a short-term home could further harm an already emotionally-fragile child. The questions often sound like this: “What if she gets attached to us, but then has to leave our family? Won’t she be right back where she started?”
We appreciate the concern for the child and the long-term thinking this indicates, but further exploration would indicate that a healthy foster home can have a significant and lasting positive impact on a child’s ability to heal from past trauma and form healthy attachments for the future.
BROKEN ARMS & STRONG CASTS
Imagine for a moment your six-year-old child has a sudden fall on the playground and is experiencing severe pain in his left arm. You immediately take him to the emergency room where tests indicate a broken arm. The doctors are likely to place the arm in a cast and give instructions for limited use of the arm over the course of a few weeks until the arm has healed sufficiently that the cast can be removed.
Over the course of this treatment, the cast plays a very important role. The tough, outer portion of the cast provides the strength that the bone currently lacks while also providing safety against external blows that would do more damage to the arm. The inside of the cast is made of soft material that provides a level of comfort not offered by the hard exterior shell that makes the treatment significantly more tolerable, though often itchy and not entirely without difficulty.
Once the cast is removed, your child can continue using the arm incrementally more until it is completely healed and the muscles have returned to full strength. At this point, the broken arm is mostly forgotten and is once again treated as though it is a completely healthy arm.
WOUNDED CHILDREN & SAFE HOMES
When an emotionally wounded child is placed in a foster home, the foster parents become agents of healing much like the doctors in the above illustration. Instead of a cast, they place this wounded child in a home where appropriate structure provides predictability, safety, and security—not just for the child’s physical well being, but also so their emotions can heal. In addition, the family provides nurturing interventions that mimic the interior of the cast, providing gentleness and softness that make the increased structure significantly more tolerable.
Like the cast, no matter how wonderful the foster home, the child is likely to experience this situation as not entirely without difficulties of its own. Although treatment of a broken arm with a cast may be accomplished in a few weeks or months, emotional healing in a foster environment might take significantly longer to accomplish. But it is, nevertheless, important and meaningful work in the life of this wounded child.
When a child has had an opportunity to experience a loving, gracious, and generous home which also functions in a very predictable, intentional, and repeatable way, this combination of consistent structure and nurture provides a deeply healing environment that can reset what this child has come to expect as normal.
Foster parents, in this way, can become agents of relational healing. They offer an opportunity for the wounds of the past to be healed so that children who once anticipated harsh words, rejection, or even painful physical consequences can begin to predict being met with redemptive love and gentle firmness.
FORMING HEALTHY ATTACHMENTS
Many of the children who arrive in foster homes have experienced such negative consequences so consistently that, out of fear and anxiety, initially they may proactively lash out as a way of defending themselves against what they perceive as danger from adults and other children. Healthy attachments that exist in a healthy foster family are not simply a different way of parenting, but offer lifelines to healing.
Over the course of time these healthy attachments can help wounded children learn healthy relationship patterns so they learn how to have their needs met through negotiation, compromise, and expressing vulnerable emotions, along with learning to connect in healthy ways, regulate their own emotions, and to be capable of authentic concern and care for others.
By providing a healing environment, the foster family does not only provide for the child’s physical and emotional needs. They help the child establish healthy relational patterns that can benefit the child over the course of their lifetime.
HELPFUL RESOURCES
If you are a foster parent or are thinking of becoming a foster parent, we highly recommend you connect with a therapist who can help you learn more about how to parent a child from a hard place. It is imperative that in this journey, you learn how to be a healing agent in their lives through wise counsel and resources.
Here at Pathways we can help you do that through parent counseling and coaching. We also highly recommend the resources from Empowered to Connect or utilizing the book The Connected Child.
You can also view here some of our past blogs written by our therapists on ways to understand and better connect with children from hard places.