the perils of foster caring, part 2
The boy in question had been, at fourteen, the youngest of the boys in my care, and also the most demanding. The program I was part of usually handled kids closer to adulthood, the idea being to protect and encourage them in their transition to wholly independent living, but of course with the demand pressures and the crisis in supply of foster carers it was almost inevitable that the rules would be set aside in the name of urgency.
This boy was only the second to come into my care, and I was very much learning on the job. I’d completed a tricky twelve-month stint in charge of a gay lad with whom I’d found it difficult to connect. My approach was decidedly hands-off and undisciplined, and during our period of cohabitation he changed from a neat, polite, punctual, heavily routinised adolescent to a metal-adorned bottle blond with a wise-cracking habit, a clutch of pretty female fag-hag hangers-on (in fact they were all sweet kids), a small galaxy of older male hoverers, and an uncanny ability to wheedle more money out of me than I knew was good for him (or for me). His school life had gone largely by the bye, and he was in fact kicked out just after the placement ended, a few months before his eighteenth birthday. He still rings me from time to time, but only to borrow money.
The people at Anglicare assured me, after the cagily ultra-positive manner of social workers everywhere, that this placement had been a success, but I remained unconvinced. It was inevitable, I suppose, that I’d give the kid plenty of space, because I like to be given space myself. It’s a question though, whether taking so much space to myself has done me more harm than good. In any case, the Anglicare approach was to set up some clear guidelines to start with – house rules, or ‘norms’, division of labour, consequences attendant upon failing to keep up with what were fairly unintimidating standards. Once they’d fitted in with this, cut them some slack. This was what I’d been advised as a trainee teacher too, but I’d never been able to put it into practice.
In any case my match-up with my first foster-kid coincided with one of those regular occurrences in social worker workplaces, a staff upheaval in which a number of workers decided at more or less the same time, no doubt influenced by each others’ demoralisation, that they’d had enough, they were burnt out and needed something new, like domestic engineering or cycling round Australia or opening a clothes shop. My charge and I were left unsupervised, and by the time my current liaison person was appointed to us, the unhealthy pattern of our relationship was set. It was, basically, another illustration of this dictum by William Hazlitt (via Alan Bennett):
None of this really prepared me for the next lad. His age and level of development meant that I couldn’t adopt the same slightly distant approach. He was needy and dependent, always around. And noisy with it. When he couldn’t think of anything to say, he’d repeat stock phrases in funny voices – a sort of adolescent echolalia. He’d take things of mine - books with lascivious-sounding titles, or screwdrivers or clock-radios or mobile phones, and secrete them in his room. He’d steal into my bedroom when I wasn’t around, and download porn from the internet. He even did this on Sarah’s computer next door, when she was in the next room. He was regularly suspended from school for various pieces of cheekiness, nothing serious (hardly anything to warrant suspension in fact, but they do things differently these days).
Yet with all that, I coped quite well. We struck up an easy, bantering relationship. And there was the added boon of his going to bed at eight-thirty sharp every night. On weekends he stayed with his mother.
He was in my care for about five months all up, between May and October last year. We had regularly weekly meetings with Anglicare, and monthly review meetings involving the department (CYFS), and no serious issues were brought up. When asked how happy he was with the placement, the boy invariably gave it a score of ten out of ten (though I never set much store by this – he knew how to give the right answers).
Of course I knew I had to be careful. He was constantly pushing at, and past, the boundaries. Take smoking - he knew he wasn’t allowed to smoke in the house, and made many solemn assurances that he would never do such a thing, never be so disrespectful (I suffer from chronic bronchitis, as he knew), but I continually found cigarette traces in the toilet or his bedroom (I rarely entered his bedroom, but when I did so after he’d been cleared out, I found dozens of butts in a bottom drawer by his bed). I often ignored this, but sometimes confronted him or reported him. The matter of his smoking in the bedroom, or his bed, was of course a serious OH&S issue, especially given that he’d been a regular fire-starter in earlier days. The smoking problem was compounded by the fact that his mother let him smoke at her house – one of the many differences between us that probably led to my undoing.
These constant transgressions, the petty pilfering, the noise and babble, the stream of bullshit (he often told a story of some burglar who broke into his mother’s house, and he’d attacked the burglar and chased him off – though in one version of the story he’d broken both the burglar’s legs), these sometimes got to me. I felt like strangling him (but I didn’t do it, honest). The difficulty is that when a kid persists in behaving badly, you’re forced to ‘intervene’, and this can be used against you if you’re not careful. For example, I was driving him to school, and he was being more than usually noisy. He’d taken my steering-wheel-lock and was machine-gunning schoolkids and their loving parents on both sides of the street. I might’ve felt some sympathy, but this wasn’t the first time he’d done this, and he’d been doing it for some time in spite of my too-light-hearted requests for him to stop. Finally I reached over, grabbed the thing off him and flung it on the back seat. He’d flinched and, for an instant, held on to it more tightly, so that there was a tiny moment of grappling. Now, what if this had lasted longer and if, in trying to wrestle the heavy bar of metal from him, I’d inadvertently struck him a blow on the scone?
This boy was only the second to come into my care, and I was very much learning on the job. I’d completed a tricky twelve-month stint in charge of a gay lad with whom I’d found it difficult to connect. My approach was decidedly hands-off and undisciplined, and during our period of cohabitation he changed from a neat, polite, punctual, heavily routinised adolescent to a metal-adorned bottle blond with a wise-cracking habit, a clutch of pretty female fag-hag hangers-on (in fact they were all sweet kids), a small galaxy of older male hoverers, and an uncanny ability to wheedle more money out of me than I knew was good for him (or for me). His school life had gone largely by the bye, and he was in fact kicked out just after the placement ended, a few months before his eighteenth birthday. He still rings me from time to time, but only to borrow money.
The people at Anglicare assured me, after the cagily ultra-positive manner of social workers everywhere, that this placement had been a success, but I remained unconvinced. It was inevitable, I suppose, that I’d give the kid plenty of space, because I like to be given space myself. It’s a question though, whether taking so much space to myself has done me more harm than good. In any case, the Anglicare approach was to set up some clear guidelines to start with – house rules, or ‘norms’, division of labour, consequences attendant upon failing to keep up with what were fairly unintimidating standards. Once they’d fitted in with this, cut them some slack. This was what I’d been advised as a trainee teacher too, but I’d never been able to put it into practice.
In any case my match-up with my first foster-kid coincided with one of those regular occurrences in social worker workplaces, a staff upheaval in which a number of workers decided at more or less the same time, no doubt influenced by each others’ demoralisation, that they’d had enough, they were burnt out and needed something new, like domestic engineering or cycling round Australia or opening a clothes shop. My charge and I were left unsupervised, and by the time my current liaison person was appointed to us, the unhealthy pattern of our relationship was set. It was, basically, another illustration of this dictum by William Hazlitt (via Alan Bennett):
Good nature, or what is often considered as such, is the most selfish of all virtues: it is nine times out of ten mere indolence of disposition.
None of this really prepared me for the next lad. His age and level of development meant that I couldn’t adopt the same slightly distant approach. He was needy and dependent, always around. And noisy with it. When he couldn’t think of anything to say, he’d repeat stock phrases in funny voices – a sort of adolescent echolalia. He’d take things of mine - books with lascivious-sounding titles, or screwdrivers or clock-radios or mobile phones, and secrete them in his room. He’d steal into my bedroom when I wasn’t around, and download porn from the internet. He even did this on Sarah’s computer next door, when she was in the next room. He was regularly suspended from school for various pieces of cheekiness, nothing serious (hardly anything to warrant suspension in fact, but they do things differently these days).
Yet with all that, I coped quite well. We struck up an easy, bantering relationship. And there was the added boon of his going to bed at eight-thirty sharp every night. On weekends he stayed with his mother.
He was in my care for about five months all up, between May and October last year. We had regularly weekly meetings with Anglicare, and monthly review meetings involving the department (CYFS), and no serious issues were brought up. When asked how happy he was with the placement, the boy invariably gave it a score of ten out of ten (though I never set much store by this – he knew how to give the right answers).
Of course I knew I had to be careful. He was constantly pushing at, and past, the boundaries. Take smoking - he knew he wasn’t allowed to smoke in the house, and made many solemn assurances that he would never do such a thing, never be so disrespectful (I suffer from chronic bronchitis, as he knew), but I continually found cigarette traces in the toilet or his bedroom (I rarely entered his bedroom, but when I did so after he’d been cleared out, I found dozens of butts in a bottom drawer by his bed). I often ignored this, but sometimes confronted him or reported him. The matter of his smoking in the bedroom, or his bed, was of course a serious OH&S issue, especially given that he’d been a regular fire-starter in earlier days. The smoking problem was compounded by the fact that his mother let him smoke at her house – one of the many differences between us that probably led to my undoing.
These constant transgressions, the petty pilfering, the noise and babble, the stream of bullshit (he often told a story of some burglar who broke into his mother’s house, and he’d attacked the burglar and chased him off – though in one version of the story he’d broken both the burglar’s legs), these sometimes got to me. I felt like strangling him (but I didn’t do it, honest). The difficulty is that when a kid persists in behaving badly, you’re forced to ‘intervene’, and this can be used against you if you’re not careful. For example, I was driving him to school, and he was being more than usually noisy. He’d taken my steering-wheel-lock and was machine-gunning schoolkids and their loving parents on both sides of the street. I might’ve felt some sympathy, but this wasn’t the first time he’d done this, and he’d been doing it for some time in spite of my too-light-hearted requests for him to stop. Finally I reached over, grabbed the thing off him and flung it on the back seat. He’d flinched and, for an instant, held on to it more tightly, so that there was a tiny moment of grappling. Now, what if this had lasted longer and if, in trying to wrestle the heavy bar of metal from him, I’d inadvertently struck him a blow on the scone?
posted by Stewart at 1:26 pm
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