Trauma: “Trauma is the lasting emotional response that often results from living through a distressing event.”
90% of foster care children have experienced a traumatic event in their life, while 25% of them have PTSD. These traumas can come from a variety of events. Some of them include: parental abuse both mentally and physically, incarceration, neglect, addiction (substances, alcohol, drugs, etc), or abandonment. In many situations, it is often a combination of multiple things.
When children experience these traumas, they often then develop unhealthy symptoms and behaviors, because of what they went through. These symptoms include mental health problems, anxiety, depression, chronic illnesses, social isolation, difficulties forming relationships, avoidance of certain: places, people of things, nightmares, physical symptoms such as constant intrusive flashbacks or heart palpitations, and constant feelings of fear, anger, and feeling like they are out of control.
So, for those children, the foster care system is brutal. Not only are the forcibly removed from their home, but they lose full control of making decisions. The CPS workers become their new “parents” and get to control every aspect of their lives, who is allowed to visit, which home they can live in and how long they stay for, where they go to school, when they are allowed to go to appointments, how often they go to therapy, etc. These decisions are supposed to be made mainly regarding the safety of the children and what would be best suitable for them. However, in most cases that is not the case. CPS workers made decisions on what they think would be right, without knowing what the children actually want or need, or acknowledging what they actually went through. This usually results in the child constantly being removed and replaced into different homes, constantly changing who they live with, their routines, and therefore making the child lose all sense of a feeling of control or stability. So, this process which is supposed to be helping the kids to find them a safer, new home, is actually harming them instead because their previous trauma isn’t being accounted for, which only causes worsened symptoms. To add to the problem, their past trauma isn’t being properly cared for, which is causing an additional trauma of simply being in the foster care system itself.
In order to actually help foster children in the best way possible, CPS workers need more training in trauma and the best way to help children going through trauma. As proven, kids need a sense of stability to help them cope with their trauma, but instead their symptoms are worsening as their feelings and right to make decisions are not being accounted for. The CPS workers make every decision for them. But, these decisions aren’t based on well informed knowledge and facts, so instead of helping the foster children, it’s actually making their situation, trauma, and life worse. For example, often kids are moved throughout many different homes in the foster care system, but repeated data has proven that long term placements are shown to be better for the mental and physical health of foster children compared to short term placements.
What is ptsd