In an effort to embarrass my mother, a family friend once asked my sister, age 4 at the time, “where do babies come from?” Without a moment’s hesitation, my sister answered, “from the police in the middle of the night”. Growing up in my household, this was completely true. For most of my childhood, my family took in foster children, with over 150 children passing through our home over a 10-year period. Some of these children stayed for only a couple of days. Others stayed with us for several years. Growing up as a biological child of foster parents created unique family dynamics. In this paper I will discuss my experiences with the foster care system from a family systems perspective, examining our triangles and roles.
My sister and I would often be excited to hear a new foster child was arriving. This meant a new playmate. A new friend. Our understanding of why these children were coming to live with us was limited. All we knew was their own parents couldn’t take care of them at that time, so they would come share our parents. Many times we got along very well with our foster siblings. Some of them became as close as real siblings. One pair of siblings, Jamie and Janelle, lived with us for almost three years. I shared a room with Janelle for the entirety of her stay.
We were similar in age and quickly became best friends. Jamie would often crawl into bed with me after one of her night terrors. I considered them a part of my real family. Several times, my parents talked of adopting some of the foster children. Jamie and Janelle were candidates, but ended up being adopted by another family. This turned out to be a blessing in disguise, as later on my parents adopted another foster child, Phillip, who is now my brother. He has lived with us since he was nine days old. By the time he was 13-days-old, I told my mother, “He’s not going anywhere”. I turned out to be right.
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Though we got along with many of our foster siblings, it was hard to not get angry or jealous of them at times. Their presence meant a sacrifice on our part. We had to share our parents, our home, our food, our toys, our lives with these strangers. I remember several tantrums in which my sister or I would yell, “they aren’t your REAL parents!” at a foster child. Often, triangles were formed between my sister, myself, and a foster child, with an alliance between my sister and myself. Some children were physically violent, as this was often acceptable behavior in their homes.
My sister and I took the brunt of this violence, with my sister once requiring stitches for a large bite wound. While my sister was more passive and would just run away, I would fight back. As a result, I was in trouble a lot. “He started it” never worked in my household. My mother always said, “Never hit a foster child, Meagan. You have no idea what they’ve been through.” A study by Twigg (1994) found that 100% of biological children of foster families interviewed experienced some feeling of loss, either of their parents’ time and attention, a loss of family intimacy, or a loss of their role in the family. Kaplan (1988) found that the majority of biological children interviewed “verbalized worries and fears about loss or abandonment”, including the idea that they would be taken away if they were “bad” (p. 286).
As I grew older, I began to understand that many of these children were horrifically abused or neglected. I stopped asking questions about why detectives came into our house to take pictures of my new friends’ bruises or why my parents testified in court so much. With this understanding, my role as foster sibling seemed to change. As the eldest biological child, I felt a sense of responsibility and protectiveness of many of them and didn’t want them to leave the safety of our home.
Children came and children left. This was normal in my childhood. They would show up, often, in the middle of the night and disappear just as suddenly. Several times, I’d return home from school and one of the children would be gone, with a very limited explanation from my mother. It was rare that I would have much time, if any, to say goodbye. Social workers would show up, a bag would be packed, and a foster sibling would be gone.
After a foster child was placed in a long term home, adopted, or returned home, we were rarely able to remain in contact with them. Children who foster are “affected by problems with attachment and loss, especially with the repeated comings and goings of short-term foster care” (Pugh, 1996). A factor that is many times unrecognized in foster care is that the fostering family goes through a type of grieving process when a child leaves (Twigg & Swann, 2003). Throughout the years, this caused significant feelings of abandonment for both my sister and myself.
Many of these issues of abandonment persist in relationships I have to this day. For years I would panic about “losing” a friend or partner suddenly. I felt they would leave suddenly, without warning, or that our relationship would somehow disappear or disintegrate somehow. Throughout most of my childhood, people did just disappear, and I grew up feeling that this was normal. Because of this fear of abandonment, and the anxiety I have regarding interpersonal relationships, I often find myself taking the role of the pursuer (Nichols & Schwartz, 2004, p. 14).
Because I have a vested interest in this topic, I have been researching the biological children of foster families for several years. While there are thousands of studies on foster children, there is surprisingly little research on the dynamics of the foster family itself.
One prominent study in this field examines the varieties of permeable boundaries in foster families. These boundaries include “open boundary”, “partial seclusion”, “solid nucleus”, and “selective integration” (Heidbuurt, 2004). “Open boundary” families made attempts to fully accept the foster child as part of the family. In the study, many foster parents described their homes as open boundary, but very few of their biological children did. Biological children were more likely to describe their family model as “partial seclusion” or “selective integration”.
In the “partial seclusion” model, the biological child separates him/herself from both the foster child(ren) and the nuclear family, viewing themselves as not having a clear role in the family. In the “selective integration” model, foster children who remained in the home on a long-term basis were accepted as part of the family, while children who were in the home for a short period were not.
A completely different family model, the “solid nucleus”, often resulted from foster family “burn out”. In this model, the biological family was the core, with foster children held in the periphery, with the nuclear family having little emotional investment in them (Heidbuurt, 2004). When applying these models to my family, I would say we were the “selective integration” model, as it became too difficult to fully emotionally invest in every single foster child.
While being a member of a foster family was often a challenge, I could not imagine a different childhood. Examining my experience as a biological child in a foster family from a family theory perspective illuminates how learning about loss and the harsh realities of the outside world at an early age has impacted my career choices, my current family relationships and my expectations for the future. Simply put: I love pediatric nursing, I highly value the close trusting relationships I have with my parents and siblings, and as I look for a romantic partner I battle to trust and invest my love without guarantees – I battle against the threat of loss.
References
- Buttaro, T.M., Trybulski, J., Bailey, P.P., & Sandberg-Cook, J. (2008). Primary Care: A Collaborative Practice (3rd ed.). St. Louis, Missouri: Mosby.
- Heidbuurt, J. (2004). All in the family home: the biological children of parents who foster. Foster Family Based Treatment Association’s 18th Annual Conference on Treatment Foster Care.
- Kaplan, C. P. (1988). The biological children of foster parents in the foster family. Child and Adolescent Social Work, 5(4).
- Nichols, M., & Schwartz, R. (1994). Family therapy. Allyn & Bacon.
- Pugh, G. (1996). Seen but not heart: addressing the needs of children who foster. Adoption and Fostering, 20(1), 35-41.
- Twigg, R. C. (1994). The Unknown soldiers of foster care: foster care as loss for the foster parents’ own children. Smith College Studies in Social Work, 64(3).
- Twigg, R. C., & Swan, T. (2003). What about the kids? Looking at the effects of fostering on foster parents’ children. Foster Family Based Treatment Association’s 17th Annual Conference on Treatment Foster Care.
