New Foster Parent

I just moved one of the kids on my caseload to a new foster home yesterday. I hate moving kids for lots of reasons (won't even go into that now). However, in this situation I didn't have a choice. The foster parent packed up his stuff, sent him and all his things off to a visit with his father. She called and said she couldn't do it anymore. She was very sorry but I needed to find another placement for the child. I'd spoken to this foster parent the day before and at that point she'd asked me to find him a new home. I let her know I agreed that it probably wasn't the best fit. However, this child (whom I'll call Timmy) had been with her for about five months already and I didn't have a foster home quite yet lined up for him. I wanted to make sure that the next place I moved him would really work. The following day she called my supervisor and told her that he needed to go. Normally we ask foster parents to at least give us a week or so to find an appropriate placement. It's often traumatic for kids to move to new homes and I didn't want to put him in a temporary placement just to have to move him again. Luckily one of the foster care certifer's just certified a new home. A 39yr old single woman. The certifyer was reluctant to have me move my child to this new foster parents home. "I don't want to give her a kid with too many behaviors or problems for a first kid." but in reality we often don't know what kind of behaviors the kids really do or don't have. A lot of behaviors are symptoms of their environment. I've often had kids who've been described as oppositionally defiant and extremely aggresive and then when they're placed with just the right person, those behaviors magically disapear. My theory is that a lot of our kids are misdiagnosed for these reasons. I believe that Timmy is one of those children. "He is constantly hiding, he runs off, I can't be liable for him. He often shuts down and won't talk at all." is what his previous foster parent reported to me. I take it very seriously but I also feel like these are pretty normal behaviors for a child who's very young, has been in foster care multiple times in his life and been very neglected by his parents. One afternoon I walked up to the lobby to meet with the foster parent. I saw Timmy crawling on the floor behind her chair. I snuck up behind him and tickled his sides, making him laugh and jump up. I smiled at her and she immediately got a frown on her face and said "This is what he's been doing all morning! He just keeps hiding and now he won't talk. He got up all night and hid. I can't take this." I sat and listened but I didn't have many solutions to her problem. I let her know I'd touch base with his counselor and see if we could come up with any ideas. I tried to empathize with her and recognized that it probably scares her when she can't find him. I brought up a different issue that I think has something to do with Timmy's behaviors. "So I just thought I'd bring this up. I was speaking to Timmy's Mother and she says that you call him Tommy. I'm sure it's just a mistake but I know that it really upsets her that you aren't calling him the right name." She shook her head and looked frustrated. "See! This is why I don't like dealing with parents". I didn't know how to respond after that. It seems to me that calling a child by the wrong name is a pretty big.

I went to the new foster parents home today. She lives in a cute little house, nicely decorated and spacious. I found her and Timmy in the backyard together. He smiled when he saw me and laughed. Her dog jumped up on me and she shooed him away. Timmy laughed saying "He did that to me too when I first met him!" We went into the house and Timmy grabbed my hand and dragged me back to his new room. He jumped around and showed me all his new stuff. "She got me a big bouncy ball (pilates ball) and these action toys and we got new school supplies and look I have my own desk" Next to his bed were also pictures of him and his Mother taped to the wall. The foster parent remarked that they were still working on getting the room set up. We sat down and I went over all his school, doctors and other contacts. Timmy came in every few minutes and told me about some new thing he'd done with the foster Mother. "We went to the coast yesterday and I've got a shell for you!" he pulled out a little shell and placed it in my hand. I'd never seen him so comfortable, aside from being with his Mother.

I asked the new foster Mother how she felt about meeting his Mother. She didn't hesitate for a moment. "Oh I have no problem with that at all." I asked if she'd drive him to visits with his Mother. No problem. She said she was surprised that everyone described him as having so many behaviors because she saw him as being a very sweet kid. Everyone told her that he'd be hard to understand (he has speech problems) but she could understand him pretty well. As I left, she was on the way out the door to take him to a visit with his Mother.

I just want to put out there to any similar foster parents how much we LOVE having foster parents like you. I want to keep this foster mother a secret and use her for a placement again. I do realize that many people aren't willing to do as much, only after being burned. Burned by bio parents, burned by the child welfare system and whomever else they have to deal with. It's a real hard job. The hardest by far. It's just really encouraging to meet another really great new foster parent. It just blows my mind the kinds of strides kids can make when they feel like everyone is in it together for their benefit. If bio parents and foster parents can work together and try not to judge one another, it can produce such wonderful things! So leaving work on a friday in a very positive note.

Underage Prostitution

I've taken trainings on underage girls prostituting but I just watched this video and it really made a much bigger impact on me. This seems like an area that has the least programs and research. I'm feeling like this is something I'd like to find more solutions and supports for. I've seen a lot about how pimps get young girls and why the girls stay but there isn't a lot of information about what helps and how to stop this from happening. It's not like rehab for drug addicts, there aren't really any "rehab" from prostituting.

Where to go from here

When I'm feeling down or out of sorts I look at my horoscope, check to see if Mercury is in Retrograde, or if I'm a week away from my period. Today I couldn't blame my depressed feeling on any of those things. I just felt low. Last week I felt pretty unproductive and down at work as well. I'm feeling a little lost at the moment. I spent most of my young adult years working towards a work goal, to become a case worker and work specifically with teens. Now I'm doing it. Great. I love my teens and love listening to them and helping them but that is about all I love about my job anymore. I suppose that is the important part but spending the other 75% of my time talking to attorney's, judge's, writing court reports, documenting my face to face contacts, speaking to crazy relatives, filling out forms determining how much money a foster parent will get for taking care of a kid, calling treatment providers and requesting updates, calling therapists and arguing over how often a kid should be seen, speaking to the citizens' review board about my cases, reading through thousands of emails, filling out more funding requests, attending system of care committee's to get funding for various things for my clients, checking in with my supervisor, listening to lots of voice-mail's, defusing angry people, handling crisis and generally staring straight ahead at my Grey cubicle wall wishing I were anywhere else.

I suppose I sound like a broken record with these complaints but I've got to write it out to determine exactly what it is that I do like and don't like about my job so that I can move forward to maybe look for something better. I keep tossing around the idea of opening up my own non-profit. I wouldn't have to deal with the same bureaucratic shit that I deal with working for the state but I don't know that it would really resolve any of the frustrations that I have with doing lots of paperwork and non social work related activities. In fact, it would probably require more of that than I'm doing currently. Maybe I should just become a teen counselor. That seems to be the part of the job that I really enjoy the most, helping kids process what is going on in their lives. I keep coming back to the fact that being in a powerful position as a caseworker, I have the potential to really help these kids who are maybe not understood as well by a lot of people. I'm also good at working with this population. I'd somehow feel guilty not utilizing my strengths because I'm tired of the other shit. Maybe if I do this for another year or so I'll figure out something that might not be so frustrating. I feel pretty angry that there is just no way around it. I need to keep doing my job because I haven't learned everything I should have from it yet. I just feel like everything in my life is a struggle right now. Recently my friend said "anything worth doing is frustrating and hard." He's right. Damn him.

Long Time

Sorry for my absence in blogging. I guess I've been busy living. I've been putting a lot of energy towards improving the quality of my life which hopefully will improve my ability to handle the stress of this job.

Things have been good though. Still loving my teens. I'm getting nervous as I'm about to take on a few more cases that are not teen Moms. My caseload is suppose to be specific to this population but they are desperate need of people to take on other type of cases right now. They sound horrible though and I'm not looking forward to taking them on. I got out of the young children's unit for a reason. It's really freaking hard and I don't enjoy little kids nearly as much as teens. The more I work with Teens, the more I know that it's the population I'm meant to work with.

I took one of my girls out the other day to help her apply for some benefits and to visit with her. She's 18 now and could really be dismissed as a ward of the court but she'd like to have some help still. She's a new Mom, hasn't graduated high school, is living with her boyfriend and his family and doesn't have any job or income. This is a very common thing for young girls without family support. They have to find a boyfriend or other support. I just worry that she'll get stuck in a situation that she doesn't want to be in because she doesn't have any other options. She recently broke up with her boyfriend but she's still living with him. I'd like to find her a foster placement but she's most certainly not a child that looks good on paper. Past felony's, drug abuse, run away, pretty much anything you can think of, she's done. If I wasn't her caseworker, I'd take her in myself. She's not that kid anymore and she really just needs a chance to live her life in a healthy way with support.

This leads me to something else. Being a foster parent. I've decided that I'd like to be a foster parent in about five years or so for teen Mom's. Every year I get older, the thought of having a baby, doesn't really appeal to me as much. The thought of helping and mentoring teen Mom's and their babies makes me giddy. The one thing I've noticed (although already knew) since doing this job is that there are so few placements for these girls. Oddly enough, these kids are some of the easiest to be foster parents to. They aren't going to be running away for the most part because they have babies to think about. They want to do what is best because they know that if they don't, they risk not being able to parent. And while that is incredibly messed up, it's also true. They don't want their kids to grow up in a foster home like many of them have and i think that motivates them more than anything could. For some of my Mom's they've said it saved their life. Having something/someone else to worry about has made them more responsible. Plus I just feel for these girls who haven't always had the best examples or no examples of what it's like to be loved by a parent unconditionally.

Luckily, the foster parents that I'm working with now are great for my girls. However there are just so few. I can only think of literally a handful that will take them. Out of those, maybe four that are really good. It's hard though and most people really don't know how to deal with teens who are so emotionally screwed up. Maybe I should just do some recruiting and training for now. That could be pretty rewarding too.

It's been a PMS day.

The thing about doing social work is that you can never fully take ownership of someone's success or failures. You're usually just one person in a long string of people who are trying to help. There is never just one person who changes another’s life. It’s always a collective of people. You may have a good moment of advice or be helpful in some way but ultimately it's the person whose life it is, that makes the decision to change. I think what typically happens is that someone gets told the same thing by multiple people and eventually after the 100th time it kind of sinks in. It's ultimately the person who needs the help that is the one who should get credit, for the good and bad decisions they make.

As someone in the helping field, this is something that I think a lot of people forget. Myself included. I've got a specific case in my mind that really is bugging me. I had a phone conversation with another provider for a teen that I work with. I've been trying to figure out what it is about this conversation that rubbed me the wrong way so badly. I’m also trying to determine if I’m being irrational for being so irritated.

I have a teen Mom who I suspect is prostituting, having all kinds of issues with drugs and not attending school or treatment. She’s not being doing well at all and she’s had a HUGE team of people that have been trying to help her. There is a program called Wrap Around that is suppose to meet with her weekly although usually when they try, she disappears. She also has lots of family who have tried to support and help her through out the years. She also has school support as well as my support as her worker. I’ve tried so hard to engage this child with little luck. We did have a few conversations with her but she never really followed through with anything and made a lot of excuses. I tried hard though. I’d call her almost every day, go to her home to see if I could catch her before she’d be out on the street, I’d talk to her Grandmother to give advice about parenting and help with ideas. I spoke to the school, to her counselor and then continued to check in with her through her myspace and when she’d come to the office to visit her baby. She’s very young and so I tried to be sensitive in the way that I phrased things so that she’d feel comfortable building a trusting relationship with me.

However, things were not looking good so I finally decided I needed to take a different approach and was more upfront with her. I told her that I didn’t believe she was really doing anything and at this rate, she would not get her daughter back. I made it clear that in a month we were going to have a permanency hearing and at that time, the plan would be changed to adoption if she continued the way she was going. She scoffed at me and then refused to talk anymore.

However, a week later she all of a sudden started engaging in all kinds of stuff. She started to go to school, she met with the wrap around team, and she seemed much more engaged. I got a phone call from a new person who was part of her wrap around team. We talked about her progress and I said that I was thrilled that she actually engaging for once. This new provider made a statement like “Well at Wrap Around we have a different approach. We really try to relate to our clients, get to know them, build trust so that they’ll work with us. Then we can relay progress to you.” It felt so condescending and judgmental. I felt like she was telling me that I hadn’t been doing those things and attributing this Teens recent success solely to her efforts. I think I felt the most offended because I’d sent this teen several messages about taking her out to dinner, doing things to get to know her and know who she was so that I could better help her. How dare she assume she knows my approach to dealing with clients just because I’m a DHS worker. I also kind of feel like, how dare her for taking credit for anything, having just met this youth for the very first time. If anyone should be taking credit, it’s the child who decided to finally start to engage. Who knows what started it. It could have been a family member who finally got into her head. I don’t know. I’m just in an irritable mood today. I'm sure i'm partly irrated because I suppose I'd like to believe that I had a small part in helping as well. Which I'm sure I did along with many other people. grr.

To Be Heard

I spoke to this teen last week for about an hour on the phone. She was really upset with her new foster Mom. She was screaming that I needed to find anywhere else for her. She's the same child I talked about in a previous post. She'd been fighting with her foster Mom over internet use. The foster parent is very similar to this child and is not going to allow her to get the last word. She also gets a little bit of attitude, which again is similar to this kid. As she told me the story, I said to her.
"well that's funny because she sounds just like you. You don't like people telling you that you're wrong and you're going to defend yourself, right?"

Sara laughed.

"I know and I can't stand it! She's just not always going to get the last word! I've spend so much of my life not being heard and I'm not going to let that happen anymore. I'm going to stick up for myself and I'm not letting anyone walk on me."

I responded

"That must have really sucked. It's terrible to not feel like you are being listened to. You are right, you're really good at letting yourself be heard. I think that's great but you need to pick your battles. You have such bigger issues to get upset about, why expend all this energy getting upset about something so little. It's kind of like the 'boy who cried wolf'. It's going to be harder for people to listen to you if you get upset about every small thing. I think you should use this as practice on how to control those angry feelings because in the real world people are going to tell you things you don't like and sometimes you just have to bite your tongue. I have clients call me up and call me bad names all the time but I don't yell back at them."

We hung up on a good note and she said she'd try to make it work.

A week later we had a wrap around meeting. The team asked her how the new foster home was going. She said that things were actually ok. She'd gotten off to a rough start but was doing better. Then she said "------ told me to use this as practice and so I've been calmer and told her that sometimes when she talks to me a certain way it makes me upset" I about fell out of my seat. Everyone in the room looked at her and then at me and raised their brows and said "wow, well that's great Sara". Do you know how gratifying it is to actually be listened to!? It's so great to know that she trusts me enough to actually try something I suggested. It also means that she's mature enough to realize that someone else might know a better way to handle a situation. It was a real good day.

This Is So My Life

You have to read this HILARIOUS article. It pretty much sums up my job and life!

Shit Car