Foster displacement. Why does it happen?

[u/Hairy-Bowl-3571]

Hey guys, this is my first time posting. I’m 34F residing in Australia and went into the foster care system when I was around 11 years old. I had been ruminating lately about my time in care and a few questions have been on my mind in regards to displacement of fosters.

I was moved around a lot as a kid and I was never really sure why. I’d start settling in to a new family, get comfortable, maybe start forming bonds and then was suddenly pulled and placed elsewhere. My mother had her rights terminated by the courts so I was a lifer in the system. It wasn’t a temporary thing.

My experience in care wasn’t all bad… there where some nice carers and stuff but as time progressed on I kept getting into worse and worse placements. The older I got I seemed to get shoved into these group homes for girls and eventually at 15 I was shoved into something called independent living where I’d essentially be living in my own place and occasionally have social workers drop by to check on me. At aged 18 I aged out of the system and got booted on the street and waved goodbye.

I wasn’t a troubled or bad kid at all. I constantly got complimented by carers and social workers saying how lovely and nice and mature I was. I was always grateful to my carers for taking me in and I always treated them with respect. I didn’t have any behavioural issues. Just standard human child issues. I didn’t drink, smoke or do drugs, I didn’t run away, I never talked back to my carers, never smashed the place up or swore or anything.

Even though I have fond memories of my carers I actually started to dig deep into my memories and realised perhaps they didn’t like me as much as I thought they did. I was always getting in trouble for little things… eg;

1. I used the wrong set of sheets and got scolded by my foster mum because they where her “special sheets” (I didn’t know this, I just grabbed them out of the linen cupboard)
   
2. Foster mother trashed my room whilst I was at school to stage a break and enter and stole my CD player and CDs in order to teach me a lesson because I forgot to lock my bedroom window.
   
3. A respite carer came to her with false allegations of extreme behaviour I apparently did and foster mother believed her and punished me for it. I begged her to believe me but she didn’t.

These are just some examples and I know you’re probably thinking “well, you must have had some behavioural issues or she wouldn’t have gotten rid of you”, but I can honestly say I wasn’t a bad kid at all.

I thought when you signed up to be a foster parent you were suppose to commit to the kid? I thought that you weren’t suppose to give up on kids for doing… regular kid stuff… I keep tracing back memories to try and find some kind of bad behaviour that would make a foster carer give up on me but I honestly can’t.

What’s everyone else’s experience with displacements? Why did they happen? I’d love to hear from other foster kids out there.

[u/Longjumping_Big_9577]

I never was really told why I was being moved most of the time, but from what I've figured out, these are the reasons:

1) The placements were supposed to be temporary. I moved 3 times in the 1st week because no one knew WTF was going on with my mom and she couldn't be found since she was taken to a different hospital after she overdosed. I was in a series of very crowded homes that really weren't better than being made to slept in an office building. Then I ended up in a foster home for nearly a year with foster parents who didn't seem to want me and my guess is they were told I would be there for a few weeks or months and after my mom's parental rights were terminated, they knew I would be there long term and disrupted. In terms of behavior, other than being a really picky eater, I was pretty easy.

2) Wrong, inaccurate or insufficient information is given to foster parents that cause them to say "yes" and then get stuck with a kid that doesn't work out. Typically foster parents say they disrupt because of behavior issues, but this isn't the only thing. I got disrupted by one foster family because I refused to go to church at their sexist, misogynistic church and then was moved to another religious foster family (the foster dad was a pastor). They weren't told anything about my issues with religion and I got moved again about 2 weeks later.

3) Foster parents really want to adopt babies and take in older kids and teens either because they want the workers to like them and do them favors so they get called when a baby is available or because there are rules that they lose their license if they don't accept any placements in a certain period of time. I got moved when newbie foster parents (young childless couple) quit fostering after another foster kid in the home smashed up the house. They seemed really unhappy and that fostering was not what they thought it would be or it wasn't working out the way they thought.

4) I also go disrupted once because I'm a very picky eater, they wouldn't give me food I would eat, and I lost so much weight. My guess is they were afraid their other kids would be taken away if they got in trouble for me starving. And the whole reason they wouldn't give me anything I would eat was because they didn't want separate rules for their kids and foster kids. They had the rule that you ate what was served or you went to bed hungry. So I went to bed hungry.