The push in recent years has been to avoid placing kids into foster care. The idea has been to keep the kids home and provide whatever services they or their families might need in order to make it work.  It’s certainly working statistics wise: the number of kids in care is getting smaller and smaller by significant numbers. But there will always be kids who simply cannot remain at home.  Whatever number of kids that is, among them will be those kids that we call the 4% (see the previous posting). 

We live in a culture of attachment. We get attached to our people, our beliefs, our feelings, our things. And then we use the word “love” to describe those attachments: I love my neighborhood; I love veal parmesan; I love my car; I love how you make me feel.  The kids that have so much difficulty in the foster care system have an apparent inability to attach: thus the diagnosis of RAD – reactive attachment disorder.  These kids haven’t had the same experiences of attachment that most folks do. The constant moving from home to home, school district to school district, family to family has given them the experience of the shallowness of attachments, which are, by definition  – if you think about it, all conditional. Our culture, by mixing up the concepts and experiences of attachment and love, allow too many of us to con ourselves into accepting these conditional attachments as being all there is.  That con does not work for RAD kids. And that’s a healthy thing for them. They demand real: real nurturance, real commitment, real respect, real trust, and real love.  They don’t often know what those real things are, but they sure as heck know what they aren’t.  They need folks who believe in real and recognize the superficiality of attachments. 

The movie “Possum Trot” demonstrates real, both when it’s missing and when it’s there. 

I am, sadly, to the point of no longer believing that any family is better than no family, at least for RAD kids.