One of the most common misconceptions I hear as a foster parent isn’t about foster parenting at all – it’s about birth parents. From the conversations I’ve had, it seems like people think that all birth parents are awful human beings, selfish people who care more about themselves than their babies, and people who should never be allowed near a child again, let alone get their own child back.
These opinions, judgments, and criticisms – they just aren’t true. Birth parents are not the enemy in foster care, despite what everyone would like to think.
Let me say that again, in case you missed it. Birth parents are not the enemy in foster care!
The enemy in foster care is trauma. And yes, the babies in my care experience trauma by the time they enter my home, but they are usually not the first person in their life who has experienced trauma.
Trauma is often a cycle – these birth parents have experienced trauma in their life growing up, and if they do not get the tools or community to help them get out of their traumatic situation and heal after they leave, then the cycle of trauma continues and they won’t know how to do anything other than what they experienced themselves.
The thing about trauma is that it takes away our choices. From the outside, it can be easy to say, “Well, if they just didn’t do drugs or just were able to handle their anger or just had a safe place to live, then their kids wouldn’t be in foster care.” But the lived reality of the birth parents I have met is that when they are trying to cope with the pressures they’re facing, it doesn’t seem possible (or sometimes it isn’t possible) to make the same choices that others would make if they weren’t living in a constant trauma response. (Seriously, trauma physically rewires our brain and bodies – check out anything by Karyn Purvis, David Cross, or Nadine Burke Harris on trauma if you want to learn more.)
Are there bad people in the world who intentionally set out to harm others? Yes, absolutely. It is not my goal to minimize or ignore that very real horror. However, those people are far from the majority.
So I when I meet birth parents, I make a conscious effort to see them as people who are doing the best they can with the tools they know how to use. Ideally, that is the purpose of foster care – to place children in a safe temporary home and allow birth parents time to heal their own wounds, learn new coping mechanisms, and gain effective parenting strategies. The goal is to break the cycle of trauma – which is only possible in the context of community.
If at this point you’re reading and beating yourself up for thinking poorly of birth parents, give yourself some grace for past thoughts. It is natural to make birth parents worse in our heads than they are in reality because it is hard to justify taking away someone’s own child. So rather than looking at any sort of deeper issue (i.e. the trauma birth parents may have gone through themselves), we assign blame and moral judgment to the birth parents, making them “less than” foster parents or “less than” parents who haven’t had their children placed in foster care. Because once we can put someone in a “less than” category, it is easier to justify doing something to them that we would never want to happen to ourselves.
As humans, we also tend to focus on the potential bad rather than potential good. This is so common, it even has a name – negative or negativity bias. Not only do we recognize when bad things happen more often, but we tend to think about them more as well. So it should come as no surprise that it can be so easy to think negatively about birth parents.
The answer to this phenomenon isn’t to shrug it off and give up on ever changing things, but to recognize what is going on, educate yourself, and then practice new patterns of thought. So make the commitment today – even if you are not a foster or adoptive parent – to start thinking well of birth parents, rather than poorly. Make the commitment to try to empathize with them, rather than judge.
As an ESH mom, there is nothing I love more than being with people who see birth parents as friends rather than enemies. Every time it happens, I think, “These are my people. These are the ones I want to spend more time with and who are safe for my babies to spend time with.” So challenge yourself to go against status quo and start assuming positive intention, rather than negative. Be willing to put yourselves in the shoes of birth parents and realize they are human, just like you and me.
ESH Mom Life 