AFFECTION STARVATION

Message from Dave Jan 6 2001

Hi:

The two week school break for Christmas and the new year has been good for our family. It's given all of our children lots of time to be around one another, and around us, on a continual basis again. There have been fewer and fewer selfishness attacks, and there has been more and more sharing, as the time progressed.

Our children, upon their return home, demonstrated an unbelievable amount of affection starvation. At the outset, especially with the routine hecticness of a normal school day, it seemed beyond what we could do to accommodate this collective need. This two week break, too, has gone a long way towards helping us resolve this problem. Our children now rarely selfishly vie for our individual attention, tend to be willing to give each other turns, and often play together without insisting on our immediate presence.

This foster "care" developed serious affection starvation must have been what caused the social workers, and even the children's lawyer (until she visited her clients at home), to suspect that we might be guilty of "insufficient nurturing". I don't fault the foster parents for it, especially since I've directly observed a couple of them actively work at trying to steal our children's affections. I believe, rather, that it's simply yet another symptom of what happens when children are removed from their parents and from one another. It's impossible to provide natural affection artificially.

Although, when we moved, we brought along a lot of our children's clothing, we welcomed importing the clothes which were bought by the foster parents since that would save us a bit of money. We also, however, in an attempt to reduce our inventory to a manageable level, asked our children to get rid of clothing which they didn't want or felt they wouldn't use. Without any attempt on our part to dictate what stayed and what went, our children got rid of most of the clothing which was bought by their foster parents. Their reason was that they didn't want to wear things which reminded them of their apprehension.

Our children still, on occasion, still launch into group CAS condemnation sessions. When this happens, I usually discuss their ordeal with them for a while, partly because they probably do need to talk about it and partly because I want to find out as much information as possible, but eventually try, with limited success, to redirect them towards an attitude of forgiveness (if only the CAS would ask for it) and compassion in light of what the eternal destiny must surely be for those who inflict such domestic strife.

During one such session, our 14- and 12-year-old daughters recounted an incident which reveals, in an ugly way, the double standard which the CAS in-take workers have with respect to foster homes. Shortly after their apprehension, their in-take worker came to visit them in their foster home. While she was there, their foster mother's sister walked into the room and intentionally kicked her (the worker). When she (the foster aunt) realized that she'd kicked a social worker, she apologized, explaining that she'd thought she was one of the foster children. Instead of reacting with horror and condemning the foster home, the in-take worker wrote off the incident, simply saying that it was okay.

The public schools maintain demographic information on each student, including detailed information on who he's living with and who his legal guardians are. They claim that they maintain this information in order to insure that no child is ever picked up by an unauthorized person. One would think, therefore, that a student's official records would be updated with a degree of urgency whenever a change in this area has taken place.  We've discovered, however, that this isn't true.

Our 12-year-old daughter told us that nothing significant would be happening on the last day before the break, and asked if she could go with us to her 6-year-old brother's class Christmas party. The school, even though it was just a few days short of a month since she returned home and handed in her updated demographics sheet, phoned her foster parents to report her absence. They eventually called us, but only because her foster mother enlightened them. I asked about the fact that she'd handed in her updated information a few weeks before, and was told that it might be in that pile of sheets which haven't been processed yet.

A few days ago, I wanted to try to find out more about what went on in our 2-year-old son's foster home. I very gently asked him, therefore, just after he woke up (probably a poorly chosen time), if he could tell me what happened while he was away. He immediately became very quiet, hid his head under the sheet, and, after a few seconds, asked for a bottle. A little later, he started crying the way he did just after his return. Yet later, at breakfast, our 18-year-old daughter asked me why he was just sitting there, staring at nothing, instead of laughing like he usually does.

I went to the health card office, late last week, to try to get our children's health cards straightened out (but couldn't since our children aren't officially home yet). It was there that I finally discovered our precise, rather odd, state of affairs.  The eight older children are officially still in "care", but our 2-year-old son was officially returned home in November. This means that we've been declared capable of caring for the child who is the youngest and who has the most, by far, serious set of problems, but that we're officially not capable of caring for the others even though they're far less problematic.

I've been wondering why the CAS hasn't officially returned the older children, and can only come up with one explanation. While it was in the CAS's legal interests to get our 2-year-old son off their hands as soon as possible, it must be that they still need to hold hostages since we haven't yet signed a settlement agreement with them. They're trying to force us to sign a bunch of unacceptable conditions. Some of them insinuate that we're guilty of things which never happened. Others force some of our children to be followed up by the Child Protection Team at the Children's Hospital, i.e. the very group of "experts" who've made seriously wrong allegations about us already. One insists that I'm incapable of caring for our children without additional adult assistance.

Our next hearing (on January 9) will be another waste of time, not requiring our attendance, at which another postponement will be requested.  Our lawyer met with us, late last week, to discuss the CAS's latest set of supervision conditions. He then immediately sent a letter to the CAS with our response. The CAS's lawyer has since told him that she's so busy that she hasn't had time to look at our response yet, and that she'd also need to talk to our social worker (who won't be back from her vacation until the day before the hearing).

There's probably reasonably good news behind all of this. If the CAS is so busy that it doesn't have time to get to us, then we must now be fairly low on its priority list. The fact that our social worker, before her vacation, has been leaving us more or less alone, and the fact that no interim social worker was assigned to us during her vacation, would seem to indicate that, for the most part, the CAS no longer assumes that we're a high risk case.

There's another sign that our social worker seems to have changed her opinion of us. She went to talk to our 14-year-old daughter, on the last day of school before the break, to further investigate her claim that her 2-year-old brother had been abused in his foster home. Our daughter, during that conversation, told our social worker how poorly foster children tended to behave. Our social worker, in response to this, told her that foster children tend to come from messed up homes, but then added that she knew that our children did not come from a messed up home.

Our problem seems to be that the in-take supervisor has decided, and is unwilling to change her opinion, that I am an abusive person. She apparently thinks that my wife is okay, but that our family is not safe as long as I am around.