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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 Defend your civil liberties! 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