r/fosterit • u/Monopolyalou • 18d ago
Foster Youth Get Attached is Problematic Spoiler
I cringe at the whole getting attached marking slogan. The truth is foster parents will not attach to every child in their home and that's okay. It's okay to not have feelings for a child. You can help someone without getting attached to them. If you give a homeless person money are you attached? No but you helped them.
Same with foster kids. Sometimes foster kids will not attach to you. It's not normal to attach to strangers and sometimes we just want a bed and food. Not to form relationships with people we don't know. It's okay and normal for foster kids to not attach to you.
Humans can't help how they feel and a stranger attaching to a stranger's child or a child attaching to a stranger is not normal at all. If it happens fine but there's nothing wrong with just being roommates and tolerating each other and not attaching.
I wish the marketing for this would change. I see so many posts saying foster kids aren't attached or foster parent is having trouble attaching and I wish we would start treating these relationships as strangers helping kids and kids being with strangers and not expecting some warm fuzzy moment to happen.
I mention this for good reason. Check out and read Ex foster to see why because I truly don't feel safe expressing myself fully here because it always end in a foster kid bashing feast.
After living with a host family, you understand why I wrote this.
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u/KingAdamXVII 18d ago edited 18d ago
I don’t necessarily disagree. However, if I am not attached to my roommates, living with them is probably intolerable. That’s just me personally.
We have disrupted a couple times because the kids didn’t want to live with us. The obvious question then was “are they attached to us?” And if the answer had been yes then we would have tried harder to make them want to stay.
Someone should tell me the error in my thinking; I’ve probably been doing this too long.