Foster Care - Past Disclosure

I'm not a social worker, nor have I ever had or been a foster child - -however, last year I had the pleasure of interviewing and shadowing a social worker, and here's what she told me (bearing in mind that your mileage may vary dependign on location):

Social services agencies like DSS or whatever it's called in your area have a primary goal of keeping families together, rather than splitting them apart. Most of the kids who enter the system here in central Ohio remain in the foster system only as long as it takes to work out the problems that caused their removal in the first place -- mom completes rehab, dad undergoes anger management counseling, etc. In most cases, the kid at least gets to have a visitation with the parents, usually supervised. For a foster kid to have not seen her parents in a dozen years would not be as common, and you'd probably only have such a scenario in the case of Really Severe abuse or neglect, where the parents legal rights were terminated.

Obviously, this will be different in various parts of the country, but that's generally the way it works here, according to what this social worker told me.

Star said:

Can someone help me pretty please? I just got back my editor's notes. Boy, does she have some really important questions - stuff I never thought of.

In my novel, the foster child hasn't seen her parents since age 3. Now, at 15, how much would my protagonist know about her parents? Would she be told by her case worker? Any insight I greatly appreciate!

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Hi Star,

Your protagonist would only know as much or as little as the social worker or case worker knows. In New York City, after 15 months in care, the case is reviewed and if the parents are not compliant with the services, parental rights are terminated and the child is put up for adoption. This is called the ASFA law and it went into effect as of 2002.

Hope this helps.

Star said:

In my novel, the foster child hasn't seen her parents since age 3. Now, at 15, how much would my protagonist know about her parents? Would she be told by her case worker? Any insight I greatly appreciate!

Click to expand...

I used to work for Illinois DCFS. If you prefer her to know as little as possible about her birthparents you may have to rework a few things...

I would consider making her a) adopted from the foster care system, b) in relative care, or c) in a subsidized guardianship situation instead of a foster child. It's not likely a child these days would be in the foster care system for 12 years with no awareness of their birth family unless they have major special needs.

As a previous poster alluded to, unless parental rights were terminated early on in her life, she would have regular visits with her birth parents, and may have even been placed back with them on more than one occasion. And if parental rights were terminated early in her life, odds are she would have been adopted by now, either by a relative, or by a former foster family.

The exception to all of the above would be if your story is based in the 90's or earlier, when "permanancy planning" was not a big priority with kids in the system and they routinely stayed in foster care until the age of 18.

Another exception would be if she lived in a backwater state like Florida, which can't even keep track of the kids it has (it routinely "loses" them), much less find homes for them.

FYI, the case worker would have no choice but to tell her about her birth family, since its the case worker who would facility family visits.

Hope this is helpful,
Audrey

Star said:

Can someone help me pretty please? I just got back my editor's notes. Boy, does she have some really important questions - stuff I never thought of.

In my novel, the foster child hasn't seen her parents since age 3. Now, at 15, how much would my protagonist know about her parents? Would she be told by her case worker? Any insight I greatly appreciate!

Click to expand...

We went through the foster parentage process en-route to adopting, so we may have had more information than the usual foster parent, but we had everything the caseworker had. The mother, the father, their known whereabouts -- essentially, most caseworkers parrot into their reports everything they think might be important in future evaluations of said reports, and as the foster parent, you have access to those reports.

So we knew of alleged stories of sexual abuse that our foster daughter didn't -- and chose to never tell her about them. We later found out who her birth father is (she does not know), and chose not to divulge this as well, since the man who'd been with her mother during her early childhood (creep that he was) was even better than her sperm donor. But this part we found out specifically as part of the adoption process (had to get the birth father to waive rights. He and his life sentence agreed).