Job Description of a Social Worker in Foster Care

Notes from the Underground: Job Description for Social Worker

foster (fôs’tər) v. cherish, nurse, nourish, raise

      I remember the first day of graduate school when the professor asked how many of us had children. Very few hands went up and mine wasn’t one of them. Then, in a foreboding tone he prophesied that we would most likely not become parents because this career path would realize our motherly needs.

     He was right. Of the 23 years that I have worked in social services, I have only been a mother the last four. My maternal needs were, in fact, met by my clients. Good social workers nurture their clients, of any age.

     My mentors have all been childless, all work horses: two rock solid women and one wise-as-a-library gentleman. All three had the real-deal look of a social worker, that mystical combination of fatigue and enthusiasm – flyaway hair, comfortable clothes, tired faces - always racing towards their feeble vehicles loaded with boxes and files.

     Today, I am the dinosaur in the system: pencil, clipboard, common sense, big heart.     It’s a draining job and the rewards must come from within - one’s own internal dialogue about making a difference and how the world is better and all that smart self-talk.

     But, the real reason I put off bringing a child into this world for so many years was because I rarely experienced a happy kid. The only children I knew were raging rivers, sad, and unable to attach - their psychic injuries manifested in a thousand different ways.

     It’s a bit like trying to re-weave a basket, with the reeds stiffly jutting out of shape, except they are tiny hearts and minds. TLC is necessary but no longer sufficient to meet the developmental needs of the kids in my care. Once a child’s folder has been handed to me, the child has not only been abused, but she has now abused others.

     Being pregnant was a chilling time for me. A social worker often becomes the central authority figure in a family’s life, and to the children involved, my pregnancy signaled one more inevitable abandonment. Angry adolescents assault and lash out, the most towards their consistent and safe adults.

     Children raised in foster care, crudely referred to as “system kids,” know how to find your vulnerable area, like bloodhounds, they seek out a soft spot and target it. Even the sweetest child who is happy to see me will wish a miscarriage upon me so I don’t leave her, for my new “real” family.

     They know every square inch of their environment - scan, study, memorize, know my world!  Abused kids are especially hyper vigilant, often their very life has depended upon it. When I wonder if a client’s mom has returned to drugs, the child always knows after “hello.” From a block away, transporting a boy for a short supervised visit with mom, he can tell by her walk if she is homeless again, given up the violent boyfriend or found a job. He will know instantly, yet do his best to hide his discovery from me (I may not be able to read her but I can most definitely read him).

     Raised without their rightful canopy of love, injured children learn to use these ex-ray vision survival skills as weapons. The front line counselors, “staff,” guide them through their days in shifts. Medical appointments (numerous), therapy appointments, hygiene (charted in detail), study hour, group, dinner, television time if earned.

     Counselors are usually in their early to mid twenties; they enter the field for all the right reasons but the long hours, weak pay, and harsh environment takes its toll quickly. If you are short your clients will dredge up words to repel you, only intended to hurt, and it will not be so kind as vertically challenged. Gay? Just imagine. Racial slurs are especially favored – each a hollow attempt to morph from the hunted to the hunter.

     The names of “clients” rattle around in my head – press in on my heart - and seem to be unforgettable, but they are, over time.  I try to recall the girl with the long hair and pretty teeth. She was quick…broke a staff’s nose during Phys. Ed. She later cut her hands on a window in my office during a therapy session with her pedophile father. Another client was found dead at the age of twenty in a nearby anonymous park, a beautiful park really, after “aging out” at 18 with nowhere to go. Never had a chance really.

    Or the 7-year old blond girl who had witnessed so much perversion that she would masturbate against bedposts, door knobs, and trees, with a maniacal energy – pitifully unable to manage her anxiety and over exposure.

     Still, there are a few names that I will carry to my grave, like Milo. He was an obese boy with an electric face.  He needed his second hip surgery and it fell upon me, alone, to be with him through that surgery. His mother came to visit each week. She started showing a pregnancy about the same time I noticed she was using drugs again. Mom made a long trek by bus, always punctual, soft-spoken and polite. I would bring her a dinner plate from the kitchen. It was sickening and surreal to witness; those slow gray lids as the baby inside her grew a little each week. All I could do was standby. The baby was born premature and blind.

     And another name - Rebecca, the oldest of seven children, was getting beat by her father when she got in the way of him beating up mom. Rebecca’s mom could hardly make eye contact, suffering with severe depression. Yet, she would bring her daughter complete meals - fresh salad! - accompanied by silverware and real plates: the family’s best to sit at our dirty picnic tables with some feeling of normal.

     Mom would bring her other six children when visiting, including a newborn. To this very day she was the most agile nurser I have ever seen.
     I remember her mentioning, doe-eyed and hazy, that this was to be her last baby - she had her “tubes tied” when the doctors declared one more pregnancy would kill her. I always wondered about that.

     The foster care child of today is usually hit in all major arteries. There are numerous reasons a child enters foster care but the cornerstone of all social services recipients are those evil twins known as economic and psychological hardship.

     Often times a child lands in a foster care setting when one or both parents are mentally ill. An otherwise marginally unstable family may become flooded with the needs of a “special” child. A child born with cognitive impairments or mental illness can exacerbate what an already stressed home can tolerate. The family system tilts sideways and is unable to right itself. Ultimately, the parents surrender him up.

     Or maybe a parent dies and no one else comes along. It is estimated that the United States has as many as 80,000 children orphaned by AIDS. With HIV infection, both parents are likely infected and the mother is often alone and without assistance.

     (The American Academy of Pediatrics predicted that social services would be ill equipped to preserve the children of these families and made a call to arms in 1999 for all health care and legal professionals to swiftly assist families with HIV in planning for their chronic illness and matters of guardianship).

     A grandparent may step up to the plate only to find the child’s needs outweigh the elderly’s limited resources.

     Occasionally a family excitedly adopts a high-needs child, only to learn that they are profoundly mismatched. The adopting parents had naively underestimated how labor intensive a special needs child would be, with all of her past trauma’s and difficulty in adjusting to a safe and secure environment. Or, maybe a mother adopts with deep psychological wounds from her own history and inflicts these upon her new child.

     Sometimes it’s just a poor fit and without the glue of biology to keep everyone moving through the system like a determined machine, each family member loses hope for harmony. It’s never done without tremendous anguish.

     The most familiar reason for foster home placement is drug involvement and/or incarceration of the parents. These families often blend and mix themselves so often that a child’s constitution becomes consommé…simply over strained.
      The epidemic of crystal methamphetamine in particular has exponentially increased this population. When children are born exposed to drugs in utero, their brains look like jumbled up Christmas lights - the synapses don’t connect properly, hence, more cases of learning disabilities. Even a statistics cynic will have to accept that increased cases of ADHD and consequently, the voluminous prescriptions to fix that problem, are directly tied to the cheap and filthy chemicals known as meth.

     These babies are now adolescents and the foster care gates are bursting; the ones that make it in are the most difficult to love. And, during the bloodletting that we call their childhood, they often prefer an institution for its safety and clear boundaries to an affectionate home, loaded with all of its intimacy and familial expectations. Intimacy and closeness often trigger feelings of pain and powerlessness if sexual abuse was part of a child’s past. Many of these thirsty children will seek physical touch through aggressive contact instead of a gentle hand.

     Physical touch and professional boundaries have become words with the single most weight these days. In the current climate, it’s best if I don’t make physical contact, but if necessary, maybe a quick hug, in broad daylight only, and after asking, of course.  My touch is authentic but feels dryly clinical.

     In Noelle Oxenhandler’s exquisite book, “The Eros of Parenthood,” Oxenhandler contends that the prevailing no-touch policy has inadvertently amplified the risk for inappropriate touch to occur. Our kids are hungrier than ever for physical affection.     

      For two years I ran a monthly “rap session” for mothers in maximum-security prison. It’s not hard to guess that the sentiment most echoed, wrenchingly so, was the void of their children. The inmate uniforms were identical, yet, each woman would tie yarn threads in such a way as to make it hers, individualized, mindful, conscious. The big stories and personal dramas don’t tug at me so much, it’s the dainty poetic human behaviors that capture my attention.

      I would come home from that morning visit and sleep for the rest of the day, limp from the full-body invasion.     

     Another facility gave me such a wallop - it was the “holding” center that was the child’s first stop once removed from a home. Their counselors were well trained and genuinely cared for the children, albeit temporarily. The plastic plants and blue wallpaper weren’t any worse than other facilities I visited but my visceral reaction was overwhelming. I never left there without a stomachache. My supervisor told me to visualize a mesh screen applied to my upper torso. This cellular exercise worked as well as butter on a burn.

     And when they move, so to speak, they carry their worldly possessions in a plastic garbage bag, unless someone was kind enough to give them a suitcase during a hand-off, maybe a sentimental photo or two, a dog-eared birth certificate, and inevitably clothes that don’t fit properly. I remember a colleague mentioning to me a brilliant idea about soliciting Samsonite for donations, to give a child at least a modicum of dignity while being uprooted, one more time. She worked too hard to make time for her idea but it’s still a brilliant one.            

     Huge volumes of research have recently gone into something called “the resiliency factor.” Resiliency refers to a person’s innate ability to not only survive, but also thrive, in spite of horrendous disadvantages. It’s quite remarkable. Holocaust survivors have been studied along this vein to better understand how two people can experience the same external world, yet their response is uniquely and powerfully different - some sort of internal reconciliation, “a making sense of it all.”

     Mark Katz, in “On Playing a Poor Hand Well” studied children and adolescents. A common denominator of those that prevail, those that have resiliency, seems to be simple, really. If at least one person has faith in you, expectations that you will make it, a certain hopefulness becomes the harbinger of strength and perseverance. Just one person, any ol’ person will do.

     Being able to receive love is a learned skill, requiring complex and intricate machinations early on, between infant and caregiver. The new enrichment programs, such as Zero to Three, wisely emphasize the critical window period of the first three years of life - developmentally, this is when children learn how to love and be loved.

     Years ago, I volunteered as a mentor for an at-risk youth program. I was asked to take on a brother and sister pair living with their disabled grandmother. Occasionally they would stay overnight with me in my small apartment near the beach. We would gather shells, bake cookies and attempt to wash my gigantic dog, until the laughter overcame us. Their grandmother made me tamales sabroso every holiday and her only condition was that I leave the neighborhood before dark set in. My best memory is an out of town drive we took to visit my family - they inhaled those two children and everyone was better for it. This could never occur today. 

     I ran into that little boy, now a gorgeous young man, while standing in line with my baby at the DMV. He had grown up well, strong and responsible. He had just come from seeing his mother hospitalized, one more time. His sister had followed his mother’s legacy into a life of prostitution and heroin addiction. We exchanged numbers but I never heard from him again. Oh, he also said that I had made a difference in his life.

     In recent years I have had two very close friends disclose their molest to me as young girls, as if trying to swallow a white-hot morsel (Contrary to popular belief, most abused children do not grow up to abuse their own offspring). The very fact of their molest is not slightly surprising, but the length of time they took to share this information with me was a reminder that the shame of having been abused is raw and real, even if young and innocent, even if only once, even if you are accomplished and decades in front of it.                          

     Working in a non-profit industry has taught me how to best utilize resources in my own backyard (I teach parenting classes but just as industriously attend them). Begging and arm-twisting become second nature. Recently, I twisted the arm of my neighbor, to share her story of survival with a group home that cares for teen girls. One spirit survivor inspiring another, for free and for fun. Their lives could not be more different, yet, more similar.

     Mai, as a young girl of 9, escaped Vietnam with her family three days before Saigon fell. A la Green Dragon, she was one of numerous refugees transplanted to Minnesota, where she later met and married another refugee, to have children of their own. Our kids play together every day and no one would know the difference. The only beauty in tragedy is that it is always an opportunity for someone or something to change.

     I had always assumed that becoming a mother would make me a better social worker… make me more sympathetic to the nuts and bolts of child rearing. The antidote for cynicism is the realization, at the finish, that everyone did not begin the race from the same line.

     When I become judgmental (an occupational hazard) I take inventory and remember that I am very, very lucky. I have a supportive partner who devotedly helps raise our child. I live in a safe neighborhood with family nearby. We have good health care and reliable transportation. I can usually afford the more nutritious food choice and am grateful for the luxury of time and health to breastfeed my son, sharing with him my great gifts – as James R. Lowell says it, “That best academy, a mother’s knee.”

      And, when I sometimes I wonder if these experiences have made me a better mom, I realize, yes, they have broadened my scope of human nature, with its terror as well as its victories. My radar is well developed and constantly scans. I trust my intuition and encourage others to pay close attention, be present at all times. I have been elbow-to-elbow with enough perpetrators…I look into their eyes, and say “I KNOW” and they look away.

     My father told me that he avoids this shadowy “other” existence, while I run directly towards it, and I know this is true. I defer to the wide and textured arc of humanity because darkness is true too, pulsating. They say an artist should pursue a career in art only if he cannot imagine doing anything else for a living. The same philosophy would apply for social work as well. Only do this if you cannot imagine doing anything else.