This is a new blog. It is connected to my old blog (Jack Brennan Perspectives.com) but whereas the old one was my personal perspective, this one is from the agency perspective. The two are closely related but the purpose is different – after all, I have been with Family Focus since before their first day, almost forty years ago, and I have now been the Executive Director for going on 13 years. 

To wit:

We once figured out that it was about 80% of foster kids who eventually go home. Of the 20% that don’t go home, about 80% of those, get adopted by their current foster parents, or end up personally connected somehow to a committed adult.  That leaves 4% of the foster kids who have no one. (Though these numbers are approximations, they are close enough for our purposes.) These 4% are very difficult to find adoptive families for: they are older, and these are the kids who bounce from home to home and oftentimes end up in Residential Treatment Centers or even Psych hospitals. Eventually they age out of foster care, whether at 18 or 21, and end up nowhere.  Nowhere being the street, the jails, the shelters.

This blog is an attempt to attract the people who might be willing to take a chance on parenting these kids.   Historically, the characteristics that mark the success of those who have taken them on have little or nothing to do with the children, but everything to do with the adults.  The kids have terrible histories of trauma, and abuse, and abandonment, all leaving their mark on them.  The adults who’ve succeeded with parenting these multiply betrayed kids also have commonalities.  They are first and foremost emotionally adults.  They believe regarding the kids that “there but for the grace of God, go I.”  They believe that their kids are whole, as people, entitled to respect, dignity, trust, and love.  When they recognize the depths of suffering that our kids have endured and how it has impacted their thinking and behavior, they don’t blame the kids, nor do they run away.  They choose to change their own thinking, their own perspectives, and their own responses to their kids. They choose to be “bigger than” their kids.  

We live in a blaming culture. To find the people who have been able to transcend that culture is not easy.  Our kids – the 4% – have lived in many many foster and/or adoptive homes that couldn’t transcend the culture.  They gave the kids up, saying some version of this sentence, “this child has shown me by his/her behavior that he/she does not want to be part of my family.”  In truth – it was that the behavior has shown the families that they – the families – do not want such kids to be part of their family.  It is called, “Blaming the Victim” and there is a 55-year-old, and very intriguing, book with that title, by a man named William Ryan.

It is our hope that this blog – and our website – might reach those people who would step up for parenting our kids; who would step up for right.