This article aims to understand the consequences for a foster care child of the care path produced by a placement.
However, when children are displaced multiple times, it's sad to note that there is no one who deals with diminishing the impact of this loss of stability benchmarks or helping the child cope with the various obstacles that this raises: new environment, new family, new school, etc.
This article is the result of conversations held in 2016, 2017 and 2018 with eighteen young people from two communities in the process of finally getting out of the youth protection system. Marie, one of my last champion-drivers, also contributed to the reflection upon these conversations for the writing of the article.
Several studies show that the threat of instability or discontinuity in a young person's situation can significantly affect the development of his identity.
The "displaced children" are those who have experienced several places of placement without ever returning to the family home. At the beginning, the child invests little in the placement because he perceives that his condition is not going to last.
The exhaustion and the fear of creating relationships is weakened so that the child protected by the placement finds himself in a situation where security is not necessarily more acquired than in his environment of origin.
This article seeks to highlight the stages, the obligatory passages of the placements and the correlative modifications in the perception of the placement for the mobilized youths.
The more times a child is moved, the more likely he is to have a higher incidence of mental disturbances than kids not in foster care.
The concept of a moral career as defined and used by Erving Goffman comes to mind. As they inform me: "We concentrate on simple events to focus on lasting changes, important enough to be considered fundamental and that might change our lives".
Their claim suggests that they belong to a particular social category, even though events affect each of them separately.
The child often sees his placement as a destabilizing event since it is not surrounded by known landmarks and hardly ever has had its conditions explained.
"The fact of being in your real family and then we are placed in a center and after, we are recovered in another family. I think it's a bit complicated when you're small. […] We are lost. (Maude, 16 years old)". It is in the daily experience that the child will make his new bearings.
Displacement is experienced as insecure and the sense of security is only rebuilt as the physical, social and human environment becomes more familiar.
Not dissociating from his parents, the child seems at first assured that it is the social services and it worker and justice that want to "harm" him and his family.
He cannot consider the measures as a possible protection, he is suspicious and his representation of the placement is almost identical to that of his parents. This fear is justified if we consider the changes during the care-taking events.
The act of separation confirms this first representation of the placement. When youths remember and tell, cries and tears translate the fear and the symbolic and physical violence of the interventions.
Even in the case of prepared placements, the child seems particularly affected by parental fears; he knows it is not a summer camp but a placement with the fear that a temporary home will be transformed into a permanent placement.
The silence around the separation provokes in the child a trauma doubling that of the separation.
There is in every placement a form of gravity which cannot escape the child. There is in every placement parents who are challenged or who feel challenged, and this does not escape the child either.
Whether the placement results from a judicial or administrative decision seems ultimately to have little influence on the ways in which everyone sees an institution that remains, above all, one depriving children of their parents, the parents of their children, on a daily basis.
The child is far from being able perceive the system of protection as a whole, with its organization and its hierarchies. The face of placement is often for him that of the social worker who, even if he is not the character in charge of the final decision, acts toward the path for placement and thus becomes an "enemy" for his parents and, in turn, for the child.
Even when their family is abusive or neglectful, a child in foster care may experience emotional disorders such as depression, inability to form attachments with substitute parents or caregivers, and mental health issues. A foster child sometimes performs at a lower level at school, repeats classes more often and earns lower grades.
Depression, poor social skills, and negative behaviors such as anger and aggression often occur in all children. Children in foster care are more likely to form fleeting attachments. He might be distrustful and suspicious, unable to follow rules, or appear to have no sense of guilt over his behavior. Some attach to any adult indiscriminately, but on a superficial level.
Many children are anxious and have trouble sleeping before visiting with their biological family members. They also express unrealistic ideas about what the visit will be, especially if they have not seen the parent recently.
Visits often turn foster households upside down, both before and after. Acting out after visits is common; crying, anger, sadness, and withdrawal are all typical behaviors.
Some think it means that the child would be better without the visits, but that is not the case. As difficult as these behaviors are, it is still important to maintain contact with biological parents unless there is evidence that visits are actually harmful.
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