While sitting in the airport waiting for a delayed flight, I overheard a very loud exposition on people with mental illness. The speaker, a fellow traveler, was marveling a group of young listeners with her experiences as a prison nurse and the appalling criminals she had met. The oration included such radical statements as "all their heads should be cut off" and "people with personality disorders do not have a chemical imbalance like people with mental illness; they're sociopaths; they have a choice to do what they do." I must address this situation because unknowingly this woman was impacting public stigma towards people with mental illness, a stigma that does not need help in the realm of negative impressions.
Kids in foster care are in the same position. They do not need our help to look bad in the public eye, nor do they need our help to look pitiful or feel shameful or guilty. Foster kids are often dealing with mental illness (depression, bipolar disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, disruptive behavior, reactive attachment disorder) on top of having suffered neglect, abuse, and removal from the only family they have ever known. Kids deal with big adult issues the only way they know how, and often this means reverting to the coping mechanisms they've learned from they're environment, coping mechanisms that allow for survival not necessarily for social norms. Successful coping mechanisms may include stealing, fighting, drinking and drugging, sexually inappropriate behaviors, hoarding food. The list goes on and on.
To many people these behaviors are quickly interpreted with moral judgments (ranging from our dear traveler's "they're sociopaths and their heads need to be cut off" to the more common this child is "lazy", "rebellious", "ungrateful", or "a tramp"). Our job, as foster care workers and foster parents, is not to fall into this trap of placing value judgments on behaviors. It is our job to see past the behaviors and help the child identify the feelings that cause them. We must be extremely sensitive to our words, our offhand comments both in our home and in public. More importantly we must guard our hearts for "As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he" (Proverbs 23:7). We influence our community's perception of the children we have in our care. How we talk about them in public or to our spouses impacts the hurdles they meet in the community. We cannot help those whom we pity or objectify with our judgments.
I would like to take this moment to say that we all have a choice to do what we do, but we make those choices based on our perceived reality. This perceived reality varies from person to person. Your reality is based on chemical influences (internal or external), cultural backgrounds, and family grooming, personal experiences and what they've taught you to believe. Someone with paranoid schizophrenia may experience a reality in which people are constantly spying on them which will result in some very out of the ordinary behaviors. Children who believe that they are worthless and cannot get attention any other way may resort to sexual exploits that are unsafe or far beyond their age level. We all have our own struggles and our own personal realities that we respond to, whether that is believing you are fat or ugly or unlovable, whether it is believing you will be denied what you want, or cheated out of what you work hard for, or rejected when you reach out. We behave in response to the things we have been taught and the things that we believe about ourselves.
For ourselves, for each other, and for our children we need to speak and believe a higher Truth. A truth that says we are capable, lovable, responsible, and worthwhile; a Truth that is not based on our behaviors, but on how we were created. We are created Good.
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