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Children benefit from relationships between birth parents and foster parents



 
 
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Old June 28th 04, 04:54 PM
wexwimpy
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Default Children benefit from relationships between birth parents and foster parents

What do ypu think?
Children benefit from relationships between birth parents and foster
parents

By Monique Beeler
STAFF WRITER

Sunday, June 27, 2004 - SUNGLASSES dangling from a strap around her
neck, Diane Carleson bustles through the front screen door with her
arms wrapped around a car seat. Inside, an infant with a head full of
tiny black curls rests silently in a cloud of fuzzy pink fleece.

Her arms full, Carleson asks her 17-year-old daughter, Tamisha, to
lend a hand with a second baby, still buckled into the car in the
driveway. The minivan looks perfectly in place on this San Mateo
street marked by mature trees, landscaped yards brimming with purple
pansies and pink roses and a general sense that things here are cared
for well.

It's an atmosphere that extends inside the Carleson residence where
for 30 years foster children in need of a temporary home and an
interim family have found a mother in Diane Carleson.

Carleson and her husband, Don, who died in 1996, raised four children
of their own before opening their home to other people's children.
They adopted Tamisha, their fifth and youngest child, after she had
lived with them as a foster child for the first four years of her
life.

The birth parents of foster children are often drug and alcohol
addicts and suffering from mental, emotional and financial problems.
Yet more often than ever they are remaining involved in their
children's lives.

Once considered off-limits, contact between foster and biological
parents increasingly is encouraged by social workers and other human
services professionals.

"When I first went into foster care there was no contact at all with
birth families," says Carleson, who was born in Alameda and grew up in
Oakland. "It was all clandestine and hush-hush."

She welcomes the change in policy. It's

better for the child, better for the parent and better for the foster
family, experts say.

"We really encourage relationships between foster and birth families
to remind people the child has a past," Carleson says. "Who's going to
know more about the child than the birth family, even if it's a
drug-use family? I remember one time I had a child who I was sure had
a (medical) syndrome till I saw his mother. She looked just like the
child."

Birth parents also can share information, such as bedtime rituals and
favorite foods, that will help soothe the child and make him feel more
comfortable during his stay in a foster home.

This day, Carleson has just returned from visiting the mothers of the
babies she's looking after.

"These poor things have been awake all day, because this one had a
visit with her mom this morning and this one had a visit this
afternoon," she says, nodding toward her 4-month-old and 5-month-old
foster daughters.

Both infants lie in their carriers in silence, making no fuss, their
big brown eyes following Carleson or Tamisha as they move in and out
of the living room. Because of privacy rules regarding foster
children, Carleson can't reveal their names.

The atmosphere of relative openness between parents and foster
families has been spurred on in part by Family to Family.

Family to Family is a nationwide foster care reform initiative adopted
by 22 counties statewide, including San Mateo, which introduced the
program in 2001. Alameda, Contra Costa and Santa Clara counties also
have embraced Family to Family.

Team approach

The program, developed by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, seeks to keep
foster children in their own neighborhoods and calls for a
team-approach, including feedback from birth parents, when making
decisions about a child's placement. It also emphasizes recruitment,
support and training for foster parents that emphasizes returning the
child to his family when possible. Nationwide, about 556,000 children
live with a foster family; nearly half end up returning home.

About 46 percent of foster children in San Mateo and Alameda counties
returned to live with a parent or family member in 2002, according to
the Center for Social Services Research at the University of
California at Berkeley. The rate of reunification was 40 percent in
Contra Costa County and 37 percent in San Joaquin County. (These
figures reflect the percentage of foster children reunited with their
families in a 12-month period; a substantial number ultimately return
to their families after the first year.)

Experts say the chances of permanently returning children to their
families increases when a strong mentor-type relationship exists
between the foster and birth parents.

"If there's a good relationship between the foster and birth parents,
it makes the visitations go better and fosters conversation," says
Mark Lane, director of Children and Family Services for San Mateo
County. Research suggests that when birth parents regularly visit
their children, they're more likely to have their children returned to
them.

For the first visit with a biological parent, Carleson makes a point
of bringing along a camera.

"I like the child to have a photo when they move on," Carleson says.
"It's really important. I like to give them to the birth family, too.
Sometimes they never see their child (again). It gives them a little
closure."

Tamisha, who originally came to the Carleson home as a foster child
when she was 4 days old, puts together on her computer a small album
of photo collages for each child to take when he or she leaves.

Carleson lost count a few years back, but she says she's fostered more
than 400 children, probably closer to 500 by now.

"It's my passion," says Carleson, a former school teacher who moves
with purpose and speaks candidly about everything from the challenges
to the delights of fostering children. "I've been a foster parent
forever. It's something once you start, it's hard to give up."

Carleson specializes in caring for medically fragile infants. She's
fostered children who are HIV positive, those suffering from profound
injuries or birth defects and chronic health problems such as severe
asthma.

But most were born drug-exposed, including her adopted daughter and
the two infant girls currently in her care.

"The majority of my babies come in with substance abuse issues, which
sometimes with older children leads into (being) physically abused,"
says Carleson, seated on a sofa near a playpen filled with colorful
toys. "You see a lot of them come in with methadone withdrawal."

As fond as Carleson grows of her little ones, she doesn't plan to
adopt again.

"No way I'm going to be doing that," she says. "The kid would be
pushing me in my wheelchair. I'm strictly here to do fostering at this
point in my life."

After years of providing a temporary haven for children in need, some
parts of the job have grown easier while others have changed little.

In the early days, she says she and her husband cried buckets full of
tears each time they surrendered a child.

"I'm a marshmallow; I cry all the time," Carleson says. "The truth of
it is, it's painful to give them up. But it's part of the deal."

Fortunately, experience and age -- she won't reveal her precise age --
have brought rewards. Namely, they've helped birth parents to accept
her presence more easily.

"It's important for the birth family to know this is their child and I
don't want to appear to be a threat, which is a lot easier now that
I'm out of my 30s and 40s," Carleson says. "I try to perform a
mentoring role, because a lot of the families didn't have good
parenting."

Geographic challenges

Programs such as Family to Family actively encourage such
relationships between biological and foster parents, although it can
be a challenge to promote strong ties if the two live far apart
geographically.

In San Mateo County, for instance, 450 children need foster care but
only 131 licensed foster families live within the county. In Alameda
County, slightly fewer than 4,000 children are in need of care but
only 200 foster families live within county limits. The three
communities from which most Alameda County foster children come are
East Oakland, West Oakland and South Hayward, says Lori Jones, who
coordinates Family to Family for Alameda County.

"That's where the majority of our children come from," she says.
"That's not where the majority are placed."

Many end up in cities from Fairfield to Stockton.

"Numbers-wise, we'll never have enough (foster) homes," says Barbara
Needell, research specialist at UC Berkeley's Center for Social
Services Research. "We have got to work on reunification if we don't
want children to grow up in foster care."

Family to Family's emphasis on bringing together as a team all the
decision makers in a child's life promises better results than did
past strategies, which kept birth parents and foster parents apart,
Needell says.

"Most children who come into foster care are going to come home," she
says. "And anything we can do that helps support that effort, anything
we can do to strengthen and support the efforts of the birth parent,
we need to do. Foster parents are in a unique position to help that
happen."

Alameda County began putting into practice Family to Family
recommendations in May 2003 and still is in the process of adopting
key aspects of the program.

Jones and other foster care experts readily acknowledge that in the
past, counties didn't do the best job of talking regularly to foster
parents, much less encourage conversations between foster and birth
parents.

Good reasons exist for promoting ties between both sets of parents in
a foster child's life.

In the past, fear and prejudice kept the two apart rather than joining
forces in a common cause: the child's well-being.

Birth parents often viewed foster parents as the enemy trying to keep
them from their children. Foster parents, on the other hand,
frequently were wary of birth parents who may have had substance abuse
problems or a criminal record.

While substance abuse, including alcoholism, is common among the
families she works with, Jones says it's not the leading factor
propelling most children into foster care.

"Most of the kids come into care from neglect," Jones says. "Sometimes
neglect is a byproduct of poverty, lack of resources."

Foster parents such as Carleson do their best to keep these difficult
circumstances in mind when getting to know birth parents.

"I try not to be too judgmental," Carleson says. "I feel there but for
the grace of God go I. The majority of these people don't have (ill)
intent."

"Economically, around here it's hard to live," she says. "Many of them
have not had good parents themselves, so they've repeated (the
pattern)."

For many birth parents, spending time with someone such as Carleson
who can demonstrate good parenting skills may do far more than
attending a parenting class, says Lane of San Mateo County.

"It's acting like on-the-job-training," Lane says. "With new parents
and young parents, particularly if they've been struggling with
raising an infant and don't have extended family to help them, they
can talk (with the foster parent) about some of the things they've
tried, in particular if the baby's colicky.

"The foster parent can maybe be the missing link to transfer some of
those parenting skills."
http://www.timesstar.com/cda/article...238700,00.html

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