My husband and I became licensed foster parents with the intention of keeping siblings together. He comes from a big family, we were young and full of energy, had just bought a house and packed it with bunkbeds. It seemed totally doable. His mother raised 10 children, why couldn’t we foster seven? We would soon find out.
We were naive, inexperienced, and way too ambitious. But we have learned a lot of lessons along the way, including the fact that it is not always in the children’s best interest to be kept together with their siblings.
The seven siblings were in three different foster homes and the ‘team’ decided to gradually transition the seven siblings into our home – starting with the most unstable of the bunch. First came Emerald[i], two days later Manny moved in, and ten days later Hope and Rosa moved in. In two weeks we went from zero to four children, ages six to twelve – the transition did not feel slow. Along with the kids came a shattered bathroom mirror, a child running across the roof threatening to jump, episodes of self harm that ended in my husband and I covered in bruises, sleepless nights, and the desire to send them all back (fully aware of how horrible that sounds). And at that point we had to put the breaks on introducing any more siblings into our home.
Coming into the case, we were not fully briefed on the background of these children. The fact that Manny was in four foster homes in three months because of his behavior or that Emerald threatened her previous foster mom with a knife. The amount of trauma these kids had undergone was not fully known and the effects of it were far from understood.
The abuse had been severe: physical, emotional, and sexual. And the perpetrators many: parents, grandparents, aunts, and siblings. We heard stories of siblings being paired up to fight each other for their father’s amusement; older siblings parenting younger ones and beating them when they misbehaved; and siblings acting out sexually on one another. Complex trauma among siblings is a scary beast to tackle when they’re all living together under one roof. Anger, jealousy, and resentment take over.
But we persevered – on very little sleep and a lot of adrenaline. Six months in, the next youngest was court ordered out of his foster home because it was deemed unsafe, so we accepted him into our home – and then there were five. Five siblings together under one roof for the first time in six months. But that did not feel like an achievement or anything to celebrate. The reality was that the sibling on sibling abuse continued. They terrorized each other. Pushing every little button they could. Some nights we were all forced outside because one of them decided to scream non-stop for over 45 minutes as loud as she could. They would slap and kick each other. Cuss at each other and threaten to kill each other in their sleep.
For that first year we found every resource we could: therapy, psychiatry, IEPs, 504s, Court Appointed Special Advocates, elevated needs trainings. We tried so many different parenting techniques (behavior charts, attachment parenting, dividing and conquering, time-ins, time-outs, losing (and gaining) privileges) and it turned out that each of the five kids responded differently to each technique. They all had different needs, and their needs were endless. We often thought that each child needed two caregivers to themselves to meet all of their emotional, physical, social, and educational needs.
At the nine-month mark, the new technique we tried was separating Manny out from the siblings. He was taken to school separately, picked up separately, and one parent spent the evening with him at the library or the park until bedtime. He came home after the other four kids were in bed. This was the magic formulation for Manny: to be separate from his siblings. Soon after, he had a psychiatric evaluation that confirmed our findings. His siblings gave him extreme anxiety due to the complex trauma he experienced with them and the psychiatrist supported our conclusion that it was in Manny’s best interest to be separated from his siblings.
After 12 months of living with us – and his siblings – he moved into another foster home, without his siblings, and that is where he has been for the past 18 months, thriving, and visiting his siblings every Sunday. And his relationship with his siblings has improved since they’ve been separated. And the blanket statement that siblings should stay together in foster care is now mute to us.
[i] Giving our kiddos nicknames helps keep their identity confidential
YES!!!! We had a similar experience. The trauma sometimes creates and environment where siblings represent a threat to the child’s own survival. Extreme competition between the siblings was a sign of this for us. They could only let their defenses down and exit flight or fright mode when the siblings were removed. Thank you for validating my same experience, although I have never heard anyone verbalize this before!
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