Cultural
Connections for Foster Children
Last year I was
asked to develop a training for the Arizona Court Improvement Program to
address the role of culture in child dependency cases. As I prepared the
presentation, I wasn't sure where to begin to address the question, "what is role of culture in
child dependency cases? From my FCRB experience, I know that Section III
(D) in the DCS Progress Report addresses “efforts to
maintain cultural connections, including opportunities for the child to build
cultural awareness, identity, and involvement.”
From a long list
of definitions of “culture,” I selected, “society’s common foundation of
beliefs and behaviors and its concepts of how people should conduct
themselves” (Hunter School of Social Work web page.) I then began putting together
the presentation with the idea of addressing national and ethnic cultural
differences and how we assure that the child’s cultural “beliefs, behaviors,
and concepts” remain in the child’s life as he moves through the foster care
system. Pretty straight forward.
But it quickly became
apparent that not every child is tied to an ethnic or national culture. My grandmother was born in
Prague, Bohemia, and came to the US as a child bringing her Bohemian (note the
capital “B”) ways with her. Her
daughter, my
mother, cooked Bohemian food, knitted “continental” style, spoke to her mother
in Bohemian. She had clearly adopted some of her mother’s culture. My brothers and I have some
curiosity about Bohemia (now Czech Republic) but no real connection to the
Bohemian culture.
So we make
efforts to assure that those children who are
tied to an ethnic or national culture keep those connections. But, I soon realized that cultural influence extends far beyond
just ethnic/national culture. Additional
cultural influences include the foster child’s family, neighborhood,
church/organizations, and school. Each of these “cultures” (aka
“microsystems”) have common beliefs and behaviors and a child placed in foster
care loses connections to all of them in one swift move. As a foster
child, I clearly remember the experience of being placed into different foster
homes. It was almost paralyzing. And it didn’t matter whether
it was kinship or non-kinship placement, or if the foster parents and their
home were perfect in every way; the rules were different from my home “culture” and I didn’t know what
they were. In one “kinship” placement, my brother and I went to a
new school for three weeks. We were lost
in that particular school culture. Nothing was the same; not the
school work, the teaching methods, the rules, and no one answered our main question,
“how come no one is wearing their uniforms?” (We were Catholic school kids and
that was true “culture shock.”). We were also far away from
our church where we were both involved with Scout troops and, of course, we did
not know our new neighbors (church and neighborhood - two more cultures lost.) But, for us, it was more of a
temporary stressor because we knew we would be reunited with our mother and older
brothers eventually.*
For children who
are abused/neglected, the “culture shock” is much worse. Children who have been
physically abused, or who have not had adequate food, managed to adapt to their
abusive environments for survival. Perhaps they learned how to
sneak and hide food or steal change to buy food; or they became adept at
sensing when it was safe to approach a parent and when it wasn’t. Most of these children have
spent their entire lives in abusive/neglectful homes. It’s all they know; and their
neural pathways for their specific survival behaviors are strong. When they are removed and
placed in foster care, they enter unfamiliar territory with unknown rules and
new people who might or might not hurt them. They are unsure of how to get
food; nervous about attending a new school, and have no neighborhood friends to
play with after school.
In their new placement, these children
may display behaviors that we would consider “survival” tactics in
their abusive homes but “odd” in their foster homes e.g., hoarding food,
stealing money, or raising their arms in self-defense when approached by an
adult. That was their home culture. At school they may be so far behind that they become lost
or just give up trying (every move through foster care results in 4-6 months
loss of academic progress in school.). Regardless of the quality of their
care, their removal from home and school cultures may be unsettling because the
abuse and neglect way of life is all they know.
It becomes
apparent that, in addition to assuring connections to ethnic/national cultures,
we also need to consider connections to the child’s “microsystems.” So we ask, always with the safety of the child in mind,
“Is it possible for the child to remain in the same school (in accordance with
ARS 15-816.01) and/or continue to participate in church/scouting
activities? Can we enlist the assistance of safe family members for
transportation to and from these locations to help keep the child’s connection
to friends and family strong? How can we
safely help the child preserve some connection to his extended family,
neighborhood, school, church, extracurricular activity? Children removed from
their homes will always have difficulty adjusting to a new environment, but the
more “cultural” connections we can maintain for them, the less “culturally shocking” their
move will be.
*We
were in foster care each time our mother, who was battling cancer, was
hospitalized, which was quite often, but we returned home when she did. We
returned to foster care after she died and eventually were placed with an aunt
and uncle. Our older brothers were self-sufficient
