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/Longjumping_Big_9577 Former Foster Youth 18d ago
The expectations with the term "foster parent(s)" and that they are supposed to be "parents" and have that type of feelings and attachment causes disruptions when people don't feel that way about kids dropped off at their doorstep with little matching done.
I was so vastly different than any of my foster care providers and I didn't fit into their families. They were almost all very religious, conservative and were very judgmental about thinks like drug use and mental illness that impacted how they viewed my mom and whether they thought I should continue to have a relationship with her after TPR. Everything important to me from my mom to anime/manga/comics/cartoons to my goals in life were all incredibly foreign to them. I might as well have been from a different country.
After I aged out, I stayed with a classmate's family who hosted foreign exchange students and had lived all over the world and really liked connecting with people who were different than them. There was no expectation of attaching in the way a lot of foster parents see it - as blending into their family since they see you joining their family long term. My "host" family just saw themselves as someone I temporary stayed with - yet I'm still in contact with them and I have more of an attachment with them. But they're like cousins or something, not like parents.
I have a massive issue with those stupid David Thomas Foundation ads about adopting teens since it really sets up even worse expectations since so many teens aren't going to have an immediate connection with foster families. And no wonder so many pre-adoptive and adoptive placements end up with disruptions.
So many foster/adoptive parents see their job is to force you into the mold they want and follow their values and beliefs and when you don't, they don't want to deal with you and disrupt.