Separation and Loss

1. Separation and Loss Loss & Grief Experienced by Foster Children

2. The Loss and Grief Dilemma • Few children in foster care receive adequate help in resolving the loss and grief they experience.  • Not many of us are highly trained in the area of grief counseling.  • We have problems dealing with our own losses and the grief we experience.  • Most professionals are not highly trained in grief counseling either. • Children don’t get over the grief of losing their parents or being placed out of home, they learn to live with it. 

3. Understanding From Their Viewpoint • As family teachers, we have to learn ways to live with these youth while they are going through intense feelings of loss and grief.  • Unfortunately many of us are of the opinion that our the youth are better off with us.  • Our logic points to that by comparing their previous homes to what we have to offer them. • We need to get ourselves into the mindsets of the youth. This will give us a better understanding of where they are coming from.

4. Teaching with Empathy • Children need to feel their pain and work through it.  • As family teachers, we often dwell on extinguishing undesirable behaviors in our children without a good understanding of what drives them.  • Our kids need the time and space to work out what has happened to them.  • They have the immense challenge of learning to live in new and scary environments while still carrying the burdens of their losses!

5. Imagine Leaving Everything You Know? • Children have attachments of some kind to their biological parents.  • Whether those attachments are healthy or unhealthy, the kids are still attached to some degree.  • When they leave their homes to enter treatment at Youth Quest, they leave their comfort zones behind.  • That is the world as they knew it.  • These youth have lost more than just the place they live. Some have lost their biological parents.

6. Complications to Grief • Some factors that complicate our children’s grief processes are “magical thinking” • how they view their removal from home (being given away vs. being taken away) • the suddenness of their departures from home and parents. • children often take on the blame themselves for what has happened in their families.  • In addition, they may view their parents as weak and unable to protect them, and the family teachers and/or the Youth Quest as being all powerful. 

7. 5 Stages of Grief • 1.  Shock/Denial • 2.  Bargaining • 3.  Anger • 4.  Depression/Sadness • 5.  Understanding and Acceptance

8. 5 Stages • There are ways to help the children deal with their losses during each stage.  • Remember that the stages of grief are just a guide line.  There is no normal progression or time line.  • Each child will work through loss and grief at his or her own speed in addition to going back and forth

9. Grieving and PTDS Complications • There are complications of children going through the grieving process and being affected with post-traumatic stress at the same time.  • PTSD is a topic that all Family Teachers need to better understand.  Most clients we serve suffer from it to some extent.

10. In Conclusion • Hopefully you’ve seen some new ways to look at the youth’s reactions and behaviors that are related to loss, separation, and grief, • Be patient.  • This process is long and difficult.  • Each client is adjusting to a new and scary world where adults do not seem trustworthy and there are no clear answers as to what will happen to his or her family in the future.  • Remember that each youth is experiencing losses and be there to teach him how to live with grief. 

11. T-E-A-R T = To accept the reality of their losses E = Experience the pain of their losses A = Adjust to the new environment without the lost person/comfort zones R = Reinvest themselves into their new realities