A Patchwork Life - a discussion about the rights of foster children to have access to their previous caregivers

Do any of you remember a favorite patchwork quilt from your childhood? Perhaps your mother pieced it together from fragments of your baby blanket and favorite clothes. Maybe your grandmother made you one out of her best aprons. There's something special and lovely about a patchwork quilt. It carries memories thoughtfully gathered and preserved. The colorful remnants are skillfully bound together to be treasured and enjoyed in the future. Somehow it makes our past tangible. It allows us to revisit it, to process the joys and the pain over and over again. It's comforting to be wrapped in our personal history. How would it feel to be wrapped in your favorite quilt savoring it's warm memories and then suddenly have it snatched from you forever? Or perhaps just have someone cut out a piece or two and leave you clutching the remaining ragged edges?

Some of us have patchwork lives, but none more so than a foster child. Maybe you can remember something disruptive in your childhood. Was there a death of a parent or caregiver? What about the pain and confusion surrounding a divorce, illness, or relocation? Hopefully some caring adult saw the need to protect your young and tender heart. They preserved a treasured item from the fire. They encouraged you to talk about a lost loved one. They gave you some photos of your old home. They let you call an old friend. Perhaps someone who cared tried to beautify and strengthen the seams that held your life together. Hopefully family members and friends responded to the emotional emergency and rushed in to preserve your life quilt, to keep you warm and safe. If that didn't happen, you probably still feel the drafts through the trauma torn quilt. You might feel disconnected and unsure of your identity at times.

Think of the foster child. The bits and pieces of their lives get blown around like so much confetti as they journey through foster care. When someone does make efforts to gather and preserve the patches of their history, the quilt may be lost in future moves, it's tiny owner too young to insure it's safety. Sometimes social workers and foster parents don't see the value of the child's personal history. They don't realize how devastating it is to have your life quilt torn from you. Just like patchwork quilts, life quilts are not replaceable.

Relationships are like the patches in the quilt. They are the human fabric of our lives. The people they live with become part of their personal history whether we acknowledge it or not. Many social workers and foster parents alike feel that a past is not something worth preserving, but something that must be forgotten or discarded. The child's hard won relationships are not worthy of inconvenience or risk if they have no legal purpose in the child's life.

How can a foster child keep a warm heart with the drafts of grief and loss and separation whirling around them continuously? How can they be expected to desire to form new relationships when the ones they have so arduously formed are torn from their quilt without their permission? Don't they have the same rights as the rest of us?

If an adult is placed in a nursing home or hospital due to the inability to care for themselves independently, they retain their rights to relationships with family and friends. They cannot be kept from calling them. The interested parties cannot be kept from visiting them. If indeed they were denied these rights, this would amount to the civil crime of "false imprisonment". Of course, there may be new boundaries to personal contacts, but their rights to some form of access are protected because society quite recently (Omnibus Act of 1971) recognized it was not a good thing to deprive people of contact. It was finally noted after too many years that this was a form of abuse and deprivation. It did great harm to the ill and the elderly. How then would it not do great harm to a child?

How would it affect a little person with an immature ability to reason and understand what was happening to them when they are whisked from one living situation to another and their rights to remain connected are not protected? Don't we already know how active a child's imagination is? Don't we know that they blame themselves when relationships around them end? So not only do we have a child whose heart is unprotected from the chills of life, but one whose mind is constantly accusing them, battering their self worth . Don't we know that children fantasize about returning to previous homes and this can hinder their attachment to new ones? Allowing them to continue in their relationships even in a very limited way would go far in quieting their imaginings. Merely allowing is not enough. We must protect and facilitate these relationships. Small children are unable to take the initiative. There are multitudes of logistical and practical excuses we can make for failing to insure access, but they aren't justifiable. If everyone in the system was aware of and dedicated to the goal of continuity and access, it would be easy to accomplish. The alternative is being part of emotionally thwarting the next generation - hardly a higher aim of social work or foster parenting.

Social work has evolved to acknowledge the importance of retaining relationships to the foster child's birth families; many of whom did the child grave injustice or harm. Yet, as a child progresses through the system, the system fails to recognize that foster families become just as related to them in the childās mind as a birth family. A child entering the system at a preverbal stage may hardly remember birth family, but may regard their first long-term foster family as their family of origin. If the small child is not allowed to have any contact by phone, letter, or visitation with a family they consider their own, why wouldn't it be the same level of trauma that had been inflicted upon them when they were separated from their birth family? Further down the line, if the child lacks any positive contact with birth family for valid reasons, former foster families may be the ONLY family the child has to maintain contact with or reach back to for the remainder of their life, not just their time in foster care.

If the patches in our life quilt are not always blood relatives, then who are they? They are the people we spent our childhood with.

Some of us have nearly seamless quilts - just full layers of unbroken relationships bound together around the edges by beautiful blanket stitches. Some of us have a few seams here and there when Daddy went to war or when Mommy went to the hospital. Perhaps a teacher or day care provider nurtured us while our parents worked to feed and clothe us. Just the other day a friend of mine who does daycare remarked to me that one of her little charges reached up and took her cheeks in his tiny hands, looked adoringly into her eyes, and said, "Teresa, I love you." His parents are going through a divorce. His mother is now absent. My friend sensed that she had become an important piece of this four year olds life quilt. She didn't say it to the child, but she confided sadly in me, "Of course he loves me. I'm his mom. He's been with me almost every day since he was born." We can't control what material the patches are made from- parents, grandparents, teachers, nurses, doctors, neighbors, childhood friends, extended family, in-laws, or foster parents. They belong to our quilt! Life weaves the patterns in our quilt. It does not discriminate between legal relationships and "unlegal" ones. It's our personal history. And our personal history is an important and permanent part of our identity.

When people spend large amounts of time with other people something called "attachment" occurs. They become patches of our quilt and we become patches of theirs. When people spend time together in crisis settings, this "attachment" seems to occur more rapidly and form a deeper bond than usual. How many of us have felt the bond tighten after nursing someone through a serious illness? How about enduring a trauma together? What about combat buddies? How about victims of natural disasters? A lifelong bond is formed with adults in those situations. They have reunions after 30 years and are overjoyed to see each other! How do you expect a child to feel about people they have been with in their time of crisis, people who have comforted them, people who were the only ones at the time that they could turn to for any type of need? Do you really think it matters to the child how imperfect those people were? Do you think a few minor incidents of lost temper or misjudgment obliterate the value of that person to the child? If that was the case we should all resign as parents and social workers please. Do you think that just because the child was a handful or could not spend the rest of their childhood with a foster family that the family won't always love that child? We all know the answer.

When my sister was reunited with my parents after 3 years in various foster settings she was 5 years old. The last home was a traditional foster home whereas the other settings had been relatives and institutions. My mother did not feel my sister was treated well in the foster home but she couldn't ignore my sister's pleas to visit her "Auntie". Even though my mother had her private, negative, and valid reservations about "Auntie," she allowed and accompanied my sister to a visit because she recognized my sister's need to do it. Being so young, my sister didn't consciously recall any mistreatment. She just knew that Auntie was important somehow and she needed to see her. My mother had the wisdom and insight to know that she hadn't been there for my sister during that period of her life and in spite of her faults, Auntie had been.

Yet, aren't we quick to discard foster parents, quick to rip them out of the child's quilt? Or perhaps we just don't go far enough to keep them from being ripped out by circumstances. The foster parents are left to wonder how the child is doing. Left to console themselves with dreams of someday seeing the child when it is grown and being able to explain their long absence. The child is left equally bereft or more so, since they often have much less ability to understand the reasons for such sudden and total separation.

The emotional pain that these brutal, total, unresolved separations cause foster parents is well documented. It's a terrible gnawing kind of pain that comes over the foster parent almost daily often for months after a child leaves the home. It's the same kind of grief a parent feels when they have lost a child by sudden accidental death, where there is no time to say goodbye or adjust to the coming loss. On top of the physical aching to touch the child, the yearning to hear their voice, the desire to see their face, the tears that come when a hidden toy is discovered or a sock that was left behind is laundered, the desire to buy clothes for them when you pass the rack in their size, there is the additional blow to the heart - the issue of the injustice of it all. There is anger and despair. Why, after all, if the child didn't die, and you did only your best to care for this child, can't you just get a picture of them or send them a gift? Why can't you just talk for a few minutes on the phone now and then? When people have to suffer for a good cause at least they can justify it, but why for this?

Don't you think that if the separation is having that extreme emotional effect on the foster parents, it's highly predictable that the separated child is suffering a similar level of pain, loss, confusion, and anger? Very seldom are relationships so one sided that only one party feels the pain of separation. While the foster parents needs are important and can at least be expressed, the child's needs are paramount and often cannot be expressed. Foster parents suffer the world wide over the loss of their foster children. And foster children suffer the loss of their foster parents and foster siblings. The pain is a daily reality. But many times it would not have to be that way. Both parties could be spared the severity of their losses with just a little time to put their quilts together. The pain goes away so much faster with a little hug or two now and then, a little reassurance over the phone, a card and gift in the mail, just hearing each other's voices when the pain gets hard to bear. It's such a simple thing to offer. Why do we fail to help it happen?

As a foster mother I have been so grateful to those in my experience who have had the tenderheartedness to allow me and my family to see our foster children after they have left our home. When a child comes into your life you can't predict how deeply you will attach, or what factors will affect this curious process. One 11year -old girl came to us with her 9 year -old sibling. She only stayed with us for two weeks. She's been living with her grandmother on the east coast for two years. Her grandmother has been gracious enough, and wise enough, to encourage contact by mail. We send Christmas cards and photos and grandma calls us maybe once or twice a year to give us an update. The grandmother was just diagnosed with lung cancer. This child now writes to me by e-mail. And my heart is just as warm toward her as it was when I braided her beautiful long curly hair when she stayed with us. We are part of each other's quilts. Thank you, Grandma, for understanding the value of relationship.

If we appreciated the value of protecting those relationships, if access to their former foster parents was insured no matter where in the system the child ended up, and if we fathomed the cumulative damage we do by ignoring these relationships, the foster child could be spared avoidable loss. God knows they suffer enough unavoidable loss. It might enable a foster parent to continue fostering a little longer too. They might not reach their quota of loss so quickly.

Many foster parents must release children to be adopted by other families. This is considered by the system to be like a "relinquished child". To some degree that's true, but in reality, it cannot be treated the same way. There are major differences. And because becoming adopted can be a long and uncertain journey, why should the child have no contact with people who care and have invested in the child? Is there anyone else in the picture that loves or knows the child more? Deciding not to adopt a child should not disqualify a family from being the child's friends or advocates. And it must be remembered that children still in the system NEED friends and advocates. Social workers and therapists are not enough. Prospective adoptive parents are not a sure thing. A job change, lay off, pregnancy leave, transfer, or some form of disruption can remove these people from the child's life because the relationship is a working one or a legal one. This is not the case with friends, family, and advocates. They remain involved because they care and an attachment has formed. That's it. It's life quilt stuff. Children sense this difference acutely.

What if these children never find an adoptive home? Many don't. Who can they reach back to? Where in the world is their quilt? What can they wrap themselves in when life is lonely and scary? The problem is that we acknowledge that children need and deserve permanence only in the form of permanent parents, not permanent relationships wherever they form for the child in their journey through displacement. This is a serious error.

What if they do find adoptive homes? Don't they still deserve to keep their friends and their past? I'm so grateful for one adoptive mother who recognized her adopted children's need to retain access to the past. We fostered her oldest son for ten months. He came to us when he was 28 months old. We have so many pictures of him, many of them slides. Of course I gave her most of the photographs when the adoption was final, but I couldn't give up my slides. The slides had many darling shots of our own children with him and sparked such warm memories when we showed them to our family. So one night we invited this adoptive family over to our house for dinner. Then we had a slide show of this child's time with us. He was about 10 years old at the time. His mother told me how much he needed to see this. His smiles and his trust were her reward. We don't see each other much - maybe once a year. Yet, the access is there and the freedom to enjoy the mutual pieces of our quilts is such a treasure.

Sometimes children manage to keep "permanent" parents, but their dependent relationships and bonds don't form there. Sometimes it's our aunt that makes up most of our quilt because our mom was alcoholic. Maybe it's our older sister or brother because our mom was sick most of the time. We can't control where the deeper attachments form. Blood relationship isn't the key factor. It helps, because blood relationship usually implies more time spent with that person, more commitment in the relationship, but life isn't predictable. Mothers abandon children. Fathers do too. Mothers and fathers are put in prisons. Mothers and fathers get sick or die. Foster parents get sick and die. Marriages break up. Step -families form and disrupt. Adoptive placements disrupt. And even "successful adoptions" can leave children without adequate quilts.

My cousin was adopted at age three. It looked like a successful adoption to most of the family, but when he was grown he severed his ties to his adoptive parents completely. Years later we talked by phone. As we talked I could see that he had remained unattached throughout his childhood, had lots of conflicts surrounding his adoptive parents, was still troubled by his adoptive issues, and was still searching for his birth parents who are likely deceased by now.

As we age, the quilt grows. There are different people we focus on in our daily lives. If a child is adopted by new parents and is able to bond adequately, their need for contact with former foster parents will wane and finally cease altogether. But it doesn't mean they won't enjoy revisiting those relationships and that those times and people aren't part of the quilt that they find warm and reassuring - like the little slideshow we had for our former foster son. Even though there are new patches of fabric on their quilt now, those new pieces are still attached to the old ones, and they like to run their fingers over the old ones while they are enjoying the new ones as well. It makes them feel safe to see how the two pieces fit so nicely together, how securely they are attached to the quilt. They enjoy running their finger over the detailed stitching that some thoughtful foster parents and adoptive parents have made over the seams. It's reassuring to the child to see that people who love them can become friends and remain in the child's life. How settling this can be instead of the disturbing ragged edges and missing patches in their quilt. Displaced children have their loyalties divided asunder so much of their childhood. All the interested parties are fighting over custody, demanding loyalty or affection, the child having to play to every potential caregiver. What a relief when seams can be smoothed over and the child can retain relationships instead of having to forfeit one to gain another.

How many of us have revisited old neighbors and friends who knew us as children? Wasn't it a warm experience to hear people describe us as children? What we said. What we did. How we looked. Many now grown foster children never have these opportunities. They hunger for them all their adult lives. It doesn't have to be that way.

We have come so far as to ask foster parents to keep life books so that when foster children move on, they have some documentation of their life history. If mere documentation is vitally important, how can access or contact be less so? I have always prepared very detailed lifebooks for the children I have fostered. But it is with great trepidation that I hand those treasures over to the next set of caregivers. If those people don't even allow me to have contact with the child, how can I expect they won't want to destroy or deny the child access to the lifebook too? If they have the distorted idea that they must wipe the child's slate clean before they can begin to fill the pages how can I expect them to recognize the value of a lifebook? If they can't handle contact with me, I know they probably can't handle the child's personal history in the long run.

The facts are that nobody can erase a child's past. We cannot drown out their experiences of neglect and abuse with wonderful new experiences of nurturing. We can't make them forget their feelings for their dysfunctional biological family by giving them a functional foster family. We cannot make them forget their feelings for their temporary foster family by giving them a permanent adoptive family. We can't simply replace significant relationships with different ones. Kids resent this intensely.

Ask any step-parent! Ask any psychologist! You must build on top of the foundation of relationships that already exists in their lives. And you must acknowledge it's value and respect it's permanent place in their heart. You must get permission from the child to add your piece to his quilt. And then you must begin to carefully weave your life into his. That shouldn't be a destructive invasion of his quilt that leaves him feeling that his old patches are worthless to you or him. As tattered and imperfect as it may seem to you, it's the only life quilt he has. Heās entitled to it. Please, please realize that the child needs it so badly. And that if you share it with him respectfully and thoughtfully, he might let you into the little heart it's keeping warm.

I'll share an instance with my adopted son. He was nine years old and had been dropped off at social services with three black plastic bags of clothing that didn't fit him. He had been in the previous foster home for 11 months. He thought these parents were going to adopt him and his sister. After a hard week of severe acting out on his part, the young parents were beyond reason. They dumped him completely - emotionally and physically, suddenly and totally. Of course he was frightened and devastated by the rejection but he still asked to call them after coming to our home. I allowed him to and they were kind enough to speak with him a few times as he reached back. I was outraged at their cruelty at the time, but I was amazed at the affection he seemed to have for them. I could tell that in their home he had experienced a taste of normal childhood that had eluded him in the tragic course of his young life previous. His home of origin was the "home from hell". Drugs, violence, abuse of every description , along with severe neglect had been his daily lot. After life on the streets from age four to six he was placed in three foster homes before this last one that dumped him. The amazing thing to me though, was the obvious attachment that my son had formed with this couple. The pain of his loss was deep. He had wanted to be their son.

One day my husband was gathering the boys up for a trip to the dump, something they all loved. I noticed my new foster son got a pained look on his face and refused to go. It was an odd reaction that continued through two more trips to the dump. Fearing the worst, I began thinking perhaps he had seen some trauma at the dump. His life had been so violent I couldn't discount any possibility. I began to probe him about his aversion to the dump. He would not budge on the issue except to say that his former foster father had often taken him to the dump. Scenarios of sexual abuse floated through my mind. Maybe the dump trips had been opportunities for perpetration. As I continued to play detective I got more disturbed about it. One night before I turned in, I drug my sleepy foster son out of bed for a heart to heart talk. At last he was unarmed enough to spit out the truth. He refused to go to the dump because it made him sad to remember the times he had gone there with his foster father. He began to sob and tell me how he and his foster father had done this job together and he always "got to help". My theories of perpetration and trauma went out the window as it dawned on me that this child was grief stricken! The bottom line was "I miss him" and he collapsed in a puddle of tears in my arms. He shared his patch with me. I acknowledged his affection for his foster father. I allowed him to love this man, even though I was personally disgusted at the guy at the time. However, a few years into raising this very disordered child, my judgments of this couple certainly softened, and my son confided many things he had done to this couple in his uncontrolled rage. He knew that they had tried their best to love and accept him and just couldn't do it. He watched as we struggled with his behaviors and he recognized that they had neither the maturity nor solidarity that was needed to manage him. He deemed that they deserved a place in his quilt for their efforts and he needed to be free to have his feelings for them. He needed to share them with us without it being a threat to our budding relationship. And so it went. Many times he told me about what happened to him, both good and bad, when he stayed with this couple. I learned much about him by listening and respecting his quilt. He let us in a little closer to his wounded heart because of it.

Trying to help children forget by depriving them of contact with prior relationships is counterproductive. It does not help them integrate the new relationships into their life. It prevents them from doing so. They will desperately attempt to hold on to what they had before to the point of sacrificing present and future relationships. This is called "attachment disorder". They refuse to add any more pieces to their quilt. They are stuck there in their grief, clutching the piece or two of their quilt and trying desperately to make it stretch to protect their exposed hearts. Without outside help and ongoing support, this becomes a futile effort. Children in this condition are often unable to form meaningful human relationships for the rest of their lives. Their distrust, frustration, confusion, anger, and pain cause them to decide to detach entirely from humanity and discard their life quilt. Need I remind any of you what kind of adults these children are likely to become? Do you think they will have very warm hearts? Do any of us want to become a party to the destruction of a childās emotional capability to attach to humanity when better options are just a phone call away?

How do we know when a child crosses that line? One more loss? One more move? One more patch that gets tossed away carelessly? Shouldn't we be about the business of preserving every relationship to the best of our ability?

Excuses are not good enough. We need to put a high priority on preserving access to relationships wherever they form in a child's life. The most frightening thing is that we seem to be socially and professionally blind to these relationships. Here are three examples that may help illustrate my point:

1. A young social worker in England writes on the internet that she can't get time off from work to go to the funeral of a former foster mother. She laments that she can't understand how her supervisors could imagine her not going. She lived with this woman for several years. The fact that she had many foster parents doesn't diminish her feelings for this foster mother. She goes to the funeral anyway and is incapable of functioning because of her grief for a few days. Nobody at the office understands what she is going through. Yet if she had lost a biological parent, everybody would understand. How can she get them to understand that she had many parents? And that the fact they weren't biological doesn't affect her feelings for them? A piece of her life quilt is being torn away by death, she's shaking from the cold, yet nobody realizes she needs comfort. Instead they belittle her needs. "If you take time off to attend all of your foster parents funerals. . . . you had so many. . . "
2. An eight year old boy is in a group home for three years. His three siblings are adopted but he is left at the home because of his emotional problems. A young family takes an interest in him. They visit him and bring him home on weekends and holidays for six months. He begins to thrive. His therapist says he is making progress for the first time in three years. He wants to be adopted by the family but they cannot make the commitment at that time. Another family becomes interested in adoption and the boy must say goodbye to the first family. During his time with the first family they bought him a bike and taught him how to ride it. They help pack up his possessions and wish him the best. They are nervous about the sudden placement. He moves in with the new family. He is old enough to use the phone so he sneaks calls to the first family. Even though they are polite, the second family doesn't appreciate the value of the first family in their new child's life. One day they drive up and return the bicycle the first family bought the child because they bought him a new one. The first family recognizes sadly that they have been "erased". They had hoped they could at least have a small place in the child's new life. The child is adopted. When he is 13, the adoption disrupts and he returns to foster care. He and his whereabouts are forever lost to the first family and them to him. They still think of him on his birthday and wonder how he is 15 years later.
3. Two young children come into foster care. Their natural parents are mentally handicapped. The youngest child is also. The foster family struggles with them as they are almost feral at first. After 18 months the family wants to adopt them. The social worker makes a judgment call that there was one incident of rough treatment with the little child. The foster parents deny the claim but they can't dig their way out of the social workers heap of accusation. The plot thickens and the children are removed. The therapist is alarmed. The foster parents are devastated. Let's even give the social worker the benefit of the doubt. Maybe she's right to move the kids, but the clincher is that the social worker prevents the foster family from having ANY contact with the children after the move. The children thrived and improved for 18 months in this home but now the foster parents are so dangerous that we need to re-traumatize the children by keeping them away from them completely? To the point of not even allowing any contact by phone or letter or visit? This could have been prevented by staffing the move, rather than allowing one worker total control over this particular facet of the case. It was also assumed these children would be adopted in their new placement. It's been four years. They are still in foster care. How have the children fared? Who knows? Why did the children have to suffer a COMPLETE loss just because they were moved? A few short supervised after-visits, an occasional phone call, some letters or cards could have changed the entire picture for both foster parents and the children. Ongoing access by mail could have eased everybody out of the pain and confusion. They could have processed their losses, patched up their quilts, and gone on with warmer hearts. Instead, every party is left in the cold. Why?

Let me try to walk you through this another way. Most of you probably have some people in your life that you only hear from at Christmas time. Every year you await that letter that updates you on the life of that person. Isn't it very satisfying to hear from people in your past, even just once a year? Don't you wonder what happened to them if you don't hear from them? Most of you probably have a close family member that you keep in touch with by phone on occasion. Maybe you only hear from your sister or brother once in awhile, but nobody says you cannot call that person do they? What if they did? What if you got a letter in the mail from a hospital or a phone call from an administrator. They informed you that your brother had spent a year in their facility and had recently been moved. You asked for information and they denied you access to your brother's whereabouts. They said this would be best for both of you so that you could go on with your lives.

Think about that. Pretend this has really happened to you. Would all your feelings for your brother just end there? Or would you feel even more driven to contact him than before? As long as we know we have access to people, we are often content with very little contact. But just cut off our access, deny us the right to any contact at all, and watch what happens. Panic takes over! We may begin to mourn and grieve our loss. Or, some of us begin to search, or fight, or whatever we think it will take to regain access to that person.

There is something very dehumanizing about being denied contact with people in our lives. It's one of the things we use in our society as an ultimate form of punishment for crime. Isn't it shocking to think we do this very thing to foster children continuously? Our freedom of relationships is one of the basic freedoms we enjoy here in America unless we do something criminal to restrict our contact. Being a foster parent, being an adopted child, being a foster child is not criminal. It should never bar us from contacting those we love.

It has taken us so long to recognize that adoptees have a right to their histories. It has taken us so long to recognize what losing parents and loved ones in wars has done to the survivors. Now we try better to honor their memories and provide places for mourning. In a sense, these measures provide a freedom of access. The time has come for us to recognize that displaced children have the right to retain voluntary access to previous caretakers. Some boundaries may need to be in place, but total cut off must be prohibited unless there is legal proof of harm, not just allegations or circumstances or opinions or preferences or fears expressed by various parties.

If you don't trust a child with their own past, they won't trust you with their future. It's that simple.

If you are a foster parent, an adoptive parent, a social worker, a step parent, an involved relative, an involved friend, a therapist, an advocate for children in any context, I am pleading with you to consider this aspect of working with children. I am asking you to take a long, hard look at it and help us as a society to place a proper priority on it.

People who are deprived of contact with significant people in their past feel a deep sense of violation and loss. If this has never happened to you, then perhaps you can't identify with it. But please try to. We have plenty of examples of this in our history books. Have you read about the hidden survivors of the Holocaust? Those were the Jewish children placed in Christian homes for their safety during Hitler's rampage. When their birth parents came back to claim them they were totally traumatized by the separations from their foster families. Have you watched or read Alex Haley's ROOTS? Slaves were treated with total disregard for human relationships or ties. Generations of African Americans still suffer from the scars.

If you want to be a part of the healing of human hearts rather than the destruction of them, you must be awakened to this issue. The issue is this: Kids remember everybody in their lives. They especially remember people they have lived with. It's a sad reality that sometimes kids have to be rescued. It's a sad fact that foster parents can't adopt all their foster children. But why be a party to further damage by taking people out of kidsā lives if a positive relationship can be salvaged? Whether that's a bio parent, foster parent, a bio sibling or a foster sibling, a grandmother, an aunt, or a cousin. If the child can't live with these people anymore for the multitude of unfortunate reasons we all know too well, be a part of keeping the child's access to them open, not a part of closing the child's access to them. If you understood the pain the losses cause them, believe me, you wouldn't want it on your conscience. I don't want it on mine and that is why I feel so compelled to speak out. It's a barbaric practice. Please listen, not just to me, but to all of those who have taken the time to write their stories, to those who have spent their lives searching for and piecing together their histories, their life quilts. And take a hard look at those who now live on the fringes of humanity, those homeless foster kids now grown up, those in prisons, those that are too crippled by their losses to respond in acceptable ways anymore, whose hearts are forever frozen from the cold. Maybe one preserved relationship could have made the difference.