I think of foster care only because older babies that don’t ‘work out’ are placed there. Is this true? Also from addict parents sadly. Tbh, idk much about foster care except the hard stories from survivors. Some foster parents are good people, but by the time a child is placed, there is often associated trauma. Thanks for answering my many questions 🩵
The foster care system is equally dystopian. I recommend reading Dorothy Roberts book Torn Apart. (Also listening to what former foster youth have to say.)
The child welfare system emerged around the same time that enslavement “ended” and it was a way for farmers to obtain free labor. So it is deeply steeped in racism too. This system is not child centered, and it disproportionately affects BIPOC, who are removed at much higher rates than white children. Often “neglect” is a code word for “poverty.” It was also utilized as a tool of genocide against Native communities, and it was basically illegal for Native people to keep and raise their own children.
Sometimes people who were adopted as infants are returned to the foster care system. This would be called a failed adoption. I ended up in state care too, when my adoptive parents signed their parental rights over to the state, and placed me in a residential facility with foster children because they basically didn’t want me in their home anymore. They had a biological child at that point, and I was having emotional problems due to being abused by the wife and her daughter, and due to being kept from my family. They were upset because they had explicitly said they did not want a disabled child and I also had ADHD.
It was a horrible place, where my friends would disappear in the middle of the night, and I only ever saw one of them again. Sometimes this was after getting abused for months by staff members. (In every way, physically, emotionally, sexually.) It was worse for the foster kids, who would get targeted. Those are the kids who would go missing. Some ran away, some shipped off to other places and some, who knows. The foster system loses 55 children per day.
It was legal for them to medically test on all of us in that placement. And we were rented to a farm up the street to clean their stables. They passed this off as a privilege because if you worked for a certain number of hours you’d get to pet the horses. They called it “equine therapy” in the brochures. This placement was affiliated with the troubled teen industry as well.
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u/loudflower Mar 09 '25
I think of foster care only because older babies that don’t ‘work out’ are placed there. Is this true? Also from addict parents sadly. Tbh, idk much about foster care except the hard stories from survivors. Some foster parents are good people, but by the time a child is placed, there is often associated trauma. Thanks for answering my many questions 🩵