They remind me of how each child I worked with and each situation I encountered helped not only develop my philosophy in appropriate intervention in child abuse but also just who I have become as a person, as leader, and as a parent.
Our experiences help to shape who we are—both the good and the bad. They help us to set boundaries and help to set limits on what we will “accept” and what we will not when interacting with the world around us.
One of those shaping experiences for me was while working with a young man. He was one of a sibling group of two. I worked with both he and his sister. They were both in their teens. They had both blown through so many foster and residential placements by the time I inherited their case and there were not many options left. I barely remember the girl. I remember her name but for some reason I don’t remember as much about her personally. She was quiet. He was labeled aggressive. Maybe I remember him more because he was a challenge.
He was a tall young man. While he had been aggressive and argumentative with most who interacted with him. He was not that way with me. By the time I inherited his case he had been in foster care for five plus years and had blown through over 15 to 20 placements. He was around 15 when I started working with him. I don’t remember his exact age. I remember his whit. I remember his persistence. I remember his smile that when he chose to use would light up the room. I also remember that I was tasked with the last ditch effort to get this child and his sister home with their mom.
I was working in Louisiana. The mom had moved to Houston, Texas. While not that far apart in miles, it would take moving half the world in red tape and paperwork to reunite this young man with him mom after five years of mom doing no work on her treatment plan. Now in present time, we would not have held those children in foster care so long without either returning home or terminating parental rights so that they could be adopted. Then…in the early nineties, we would sometimes spend years trying to coax a parent into engaging in a treatment plan. In hindsight, our hands were tied from the very beginning. Mom had the power and she chose not to exert it. She could have done one thing on that treatment plan like visit regularly or take a parenting class and she would have had these kids returned. The problem was that she never engaged. Ever. These children were removed because her neglect put them in danger. Her lack of engagement with her children was the reason a case had opened in the first place. The children were removed because they were found wondering on the military base alone at 2:00 a.m. in the morning. And it wasn’t the first time. The children missed school all the time. They were not cared for. They were hungry. Mom was in the Army. Her command got involved and she chose to be chaptered out (for civilians that means kicked out). She had a drug problem. She was not a good soldier. She was not a good mother. Her kids were found half naked in the streets before they were old enough to ride a bike well.
We were able to get him placed in a residential placement twenty minutes from his mother’s apartment in Katy Texas. I remember how hopeful he was. As we entered the outskirts of the city, I remember him gasping “Miss Tammi, it looks like heaven”. I looked over at him and he was smiling—so happy. I never knew if it looked like heaven because of how the buildings rose out of the smog or if it looked like heaven because he was close to his mom. Sadly, mom never visited him. I made the trek every month round trip eight hours to visit with him. She never showed up. I went by her address and left a card –she had a caseworker assigned to her from her local Child Protection Agency but she was never home and never engaged. I think I may have talked to her once or twice. I barely remember her.
I remember being so angry at her that I had to deal with the angry outburst and begging for placements to keep him and give him another chance. All the while, she remained absent and uninterested.
Every month, he would greet me as I came into the facility. Smiling—asking me if I had brought him anything from McDonald’s. Sometimes the answer was yes. Other times it was no. He never got to leave the facility because he was always so angry he could not keep his behavior in check enough to earn privileges.
I don’t know what happened to this young man. I left the foster care unit. His case was assigned to a new worker. He aged out of foster care.
Why is this story number eight? One without what I would call a happy ending or even closure. I learned a lot from this young man. I learned that if you treat people with respect and dignity, you are not likely to get the brunt of their anger. I never got the anger or the aggression. I always got the bright 1000 watt smile. I asked him why he couldn’t flash that smile and show others his very engaging personality. He told me no one ever gave him a chance.
I also learned the hard reality that while we want to give every child a fairy tale childhood, that is not likely to happen. Part two of this particular lesson was that if we make the decision to remove a child from their parent then we need to make sure that there are no other options and that we have a plan that is viable for that child’s sustained stability.
This “case” also taught me that we can want good things for kids in foster care but if we can’t get the parent engaged early on, it is not likely that good things will happen. Even in the early to mid-nineties and even in my very rural community, we were doing family centered practice. We were required to create treatment plans with the families we worked with. We identified the reason a child came into care and the problems that existed together with the family and came up with strategic ways to solve the issues that kept the child from returning home. In this case, we somehow did not get total engagement in the treatment plan even though she helped create it. In the end, the key for children to return home lies with our ability to work with and engage with the parent.
How does this fit in with the building resiliency or self-care? I think it shows we have to recognize we are all human and all that can be asked of us as individuals is to show up and approach this work with humility, compassion, empathy, and grace. Humility so that we are able to continually learn from people we come in contact with….from those with lots of credentials and years of experience, from those new to the work and most importantly from the children and families we work with; after all they are the experts in the impact and effectiveness of our collective and individual work after abuse. I was once told no one will care what you know until they know how much you care. I don’t remember who said this originally but it certainly struck a chord when it was shared with me. Compassion and empathy are such key components to engaging parents and children in treatment. Grace! We need to extend grace to everyone on our team that we work alongside. We will make mistakes. We will not all approach this work with the same agenda or perspective. But we do need to recover from those mistakes. We need to learn from hearing someone else’s perspective. And in order to find sustainability in this work, we really need to work together for better outcomes for children. One person cannot bear all the responsibility for securing safety and finding recovery for children after they experience abuse. It takes us all.
