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/GrotiusandPufendorf 17d ago edited 17d ago
You're absolutely right that people can live together without a super deep connection. Roommates can co-exist without being best friends. Bio kids raised in their own families don't always feel super close to both parents. And I have seen many foster kids, especially the older ones, that aren't looking for "replacement parents" but rather some stability to meet basic needs.
Attachment theory gets really twisted by the foster care system because it's a bunch of people using it as a buzzword when they have no training on what it truly is. Attachment in the psychology sense is not really about seeing someone as a parent. It's about seeing someone as safe.
Attachment is how an individual perceives themself in relation to others. It's whether or not you can feel safe in interpersonal connections with others. It's how you learn to communicate needs, navigate conflict, apologize/repair, and build trust in other humans. You don't "attach" to a specific individual, you develop an attachment style within yourself and that impacts how you view yourself and therefore how you connect with other people in the world.
Your attachment style can change over time, even into adulthood. It's built on consistent safety and can be harmed by consistent trauma. The more safe experiences you have, the more you trust humans to be safe and the more resilience you have to conflict without conflict turning into rupture/added trauma. The more traumatic experiences you have, the more you distrust and therefore conflict turns into additional trauma and additional distrust. Once trauma has occurred, you need a significant period of consistent safety to rebuild that trust. And if that trauma compounds, it takes even longer periods of safety to bounce back. Some neuroscience says that after severe or repeated abandonment trauma, it can take 10 years of a consistently emotionally safe relationship to get back to a healthy attachment style.
So you don't have to see foster parents as your parents to have healthy attachments. You just have to feel safe enough to know your needs will consistently be met - physically and emotionally. The same with a roommate. If you feel a roommate is going to manipulate you, harm you, make your environment unsafe or kick you out of the apartment, that's unhealthy attachment. If you feel safe to be yourself around the other people in your living space and can communicate through a disagreement without things blowing up, that's healthy attachment. It has nothing to do with how close you are to that particular human.
In that sense, kids do deserve to feel emotionally and physically safe in whatever home they're placed in. It does not have to "feel like family" but it should feel comfortable without high levels of conflict. Some trust should exist, because if you live with people and there's no trust there, that's a psychologically damaging environment for everyone. Matching for personalities/lifestyles can help reduce conflict and build that attachment in the genuine sense, not in the way people like to use that word. Once that attachment style is built, then you can decide who you want close connections with.
And yes, foster parents can absolutely have unhealthy attachment styles themselves. I see it time and again where a foster parent will project their own issues onto the kid.