Why is this kid talking about the 'bad guys'? Ask the little guy what happened too him. He's going to want to tell someone. It should be someone who gives a damn about his tiny world. I'm not surprised you guys were left in the cold by the social workers and the courts. The best interests of the child is with a woman, according to the system. It's biased as all hell and you guys being gay men makes no difference. Because you're still men you're still devalued as parents. It's like this in every court, divorce, custody, it's all about what the mother wants and not what's actually good for the kid. He needs stability, not being traumatized by the 'bad guys', whoever they are. He sounds terrified. That's no life for a helpless little kid who's mother puts him in those situations.
i grew up in foster care back in the 70s and emancipated in the early 80s. I was put in my first foster home just days after being born. i was in another 2 by the time i had my first memories. I was 2 and a half when i left that home to go live with by grandparents. My grandmother, who was a war bride had just spent 12 years in Napa State Hospitial then satellite half way houses before i went to live with them. One would have thought that would have disqualified her from being my guardian but it wasn't. She was abusive but overall she was way better than my mom. To the point of what the fellow was talking about in the video , the court then was not focused on my welfare but rather on getting me to live with my bio family which was actually unrealistic. My mom was diagnosed with paranoid schitzophrenia so when i went into her custody at 6 life turned into a hellish nightmare for me until I was finally removed from her care 6 years later. i dont want to go into all the different ways that she abused me but let's put it this way. In the 70s the police were very reluctant to do anything about the way that parents punished their children. When the old lady or the neighbors in the flat upstairs called the cops as my mother was beating me with a belt,when they did finally show up to the house they usually just said that the neighbors were complaining about the noise and asked her to keep it down. No welfare checks or anything. So its kind of miraculous that i was funally removed from my mother's custody and put back into the foster care system back then. in the ensuing 6 years i was placed another 10 times. i had one foster father tell me, when i was 15 that I already had what he called an institutionalized personality. He was raised in foster care and orphanages himself and had spent over 10 years as a foster parent and group home councilor and he pretty much said i was a lost cause. That by the time i went to live with him and their family I was so far gone into the bureaucracy of the system, and drug use and all the other things that go with it like petty crime, promiscuity, truancy etc that i really was just doomed for prison. At the time i just brushed him off but im actually very grateful for his candidness. He was right As soon as I was emancipated I was able to hold it together for about a year until I was laid off from my job at a microfilm company. Of course then it was a terrible economy. A lot of blue collar jobs were going over seas and i had no prospects and no one to turn to for help and wound up pretty much homeless and in a short amount of time addicted to drugs and doing things I should not have done . Anyway it was a struggle to pick myself up again. i spent years and years struggling with alcoholism, addiction, anger issues etc and it really took it's toll. I've managed to stay out of jail just to prove my foster fater wrong but in the end the chip I had in my shoulder, the rage I had, all my failures etc only solidified his original analysis. I do have that instutionalized personality. i cant shake it even into my 50s. Counseling got so convoluted for me even when i was still a kid that i never really benefited from it. The drug treatment programs I tried never worked out. i had to pretty much destroy my insides before i finally stopped drinking. the resentment I feel towards my mother and to the system that let me down etc has haunted me and will probably be with me the rest of my life. Me personally, I dont really believe that there are any solutions. I dont think that once you break a child he can be repaired. I mean there were times in my life where if were interviewed at that moment in time one might say I was finally successful and was on the road to recovery but inevitably something would happen and my world would collapse once again because I never was able to build enough stability in my life that i could withstand the next unexpected calamity that for most people would be something they could over come but for me would make me homeless again. I might not have been in a facility or a ward of the court since emancipation but my Foster Father was right, i was and am institutionalized and i cant seem to shake it even all these decades later.
Thanks for sharing. You have had a rough one, but you honestly sound like a survivor, not a victim of all the trauma you endured. Your step dad spoke what he might have thought was truth over you, but he cursed you with his thought or it wouldnt still be hanging over your head. It was not your truth. I hope you can let it go. Peace and best wishes for the New Year.
@@pamelajensen1774 Thanks. i have tried to take responsibility for my own life etc and i try not to live my life as though I'm a victim but my point is that it's still very difficult to overcome. When i grew up in the system it was actually rarre that someone would have gone through 13 homes. Most people spent a couple of years in the system and were usually either sent back home or adopted. Now days 13 placements is actually a nice norm . Many kids are shuffled in and out of 20 or 30 homes sometimes out of state and lots of other horrible scenarios. i know there are more resources for kids now days when they age out like extended housing etc so that now days kids aren't just told Happy (18th) birthday, time to pack your shit. i left my last home while I was still 17 and already found a job and a place to live but i had a foster brother that this happened to. He was told you gotta leave. Not even a bus ticket or you know 5 dollars. But the difference them was I could get a job as a bus boy or dishwasher which is what I did . It's pretty hard to do now days. One job I got was working at a hot dog stand at fisherman's wharf. i also worked at a hardware store not as a sales person but as an overall grunt. For both those jobs today I would need a college degree . Not because it was necessary for the job but rather because people with college degrees apply for these jobs when they cant get jobs they got their degree for so employers will hire them over someone who can barely fill out an application and believe me when i was 17 or 18 I could barely fill out an application myself. I CRINGE when i think about filling out an application then. i didnt even know the difference between then and than or know when to use an apostrophe but it didnt matter so much because no one wanted those jobs then but desperate people like me so the employers looking for help weren't as picky. When one got a job like that back then they had to work full time. No flex time. i meet people now days who can only get 16 or 20 hours a week if they're lucky. Sometimes they work for 3 employers and have no idea what their schedule will be the following week. If I had to endure that right after emancipation there is no way i could have coped. So they actually keep these kids as wards of the state even longer. Luckily for me when i finally started getting my life together I could count on a pretty reliable shift at work, i only had 1 place of employment and i could find a SRO hotel in the Tenderloin to rent for 75 dollars a week . Those same hotels go for almost 500 a week now because we have housing shortage so just like college graduates are applying for Starbucks jobs, you got people making 50 or 75 k a year living in Tenderloin hotels driving the rents up so that people with a background like mine couldn't possibly afford to live in them. Allowing adult foster children to remain wards of the court into their mid 20s is not going to help them in the long run. It just makes them even more dependant. My foster father was actually right. When one grows up in the system they cant help but get institutionalized unless maybe they find family type connections. In California after prop 13 I was placed under the supervision of the court and my guardian was a Probation Officer as opposed to a social worker which I had prior to prop 13. Everything turns institutionalized with these kinds of relationships and power dynamics. You always have to consider what the court or your P.O. is going to do whenever anything happens in your life. You are treated different. i lived in one place with a family that also had their own kids. They had a family dentist that they took their kids to but when they tried to send me to their dentist he didn't take Medi-Cal which is what I had for insurance. The dentist was reluctant to treat me and it was such a humiliating experience for me that i refused to go back for a follow up. They treated me like garbage because they had a policy if not taking Med-Cal and couldn't even maintain their professionalism even for a family that had taken their own kids there all their lives. These kinds of slights happen to kids all through their experience in foster care. It gets to a point where , like me , they feel like garbage, like they should just jump off a bridge which I can remember one night , during el Nino , sleeping out in the rain and feeling so awful about my life , i hurriedly and angrily walked to the Golden Gate bridge because I was determined to finally end it all and even though i did get to the bridge it took me long enough to walk there from the Mission that by the time i got there i managed to talk myself out of it.
i dont want to appear like I have somehow gotten my act together. You know there is a phenomenon whereby people experience hardship then others come along and will praise the person as though they got all their problems fixed and moved past their hardships. I don't believe these stories. I do think that in rare exceptions there may be people who can move past childhood trauma etc and even possibly get to a point where they are no longer triggered, but i dont think ive ever met anyone like that. I remember when i first found out that Dr. Wayne Dyer had been in foster care. To me it explained a lot. I always thought he was kind of dark even though he projected hope and optimism. And I believe it's due to a sort of restlessness about his belief in his own legitimacy as a human being that set him on his journey to justify his own existence. Of course these are philosophical and spiritual questions that people have had for millennia but in his case I have to wonder what kind of abandonment and legitimacy issues he had that made him OBSESS over it all his life that he turned it into a career. And to be honest , even with all his success and optimism, his huge family and successful marriage etc I dont think he ever really got over the abandonment and legitimacy issues he had. i think he went to his grave still feeling some of that trauma that led him to foster care in the fist place. I got this not from his books or anything else i learned about him but just by watching him on TV and especially his voice. i think in spite of earning a PhD, being a successful author and being a fater to 7 beautiful children and having a successful marriage that he still died with unresolved pain even though he chased a cure for that pain all his life and wrote books and no doubt helped probably millions of people. One can do the best they can but that trauma is hard to let go of. I have my own business now but its not successful. it looks successful on Yelp. It's a 5 star business and people write lots of nice reviews but im bankrupt and my house is about to be foreclosed on. i am married and we truely love each other but we have lots of problems. One day about 5 years ago i was called to do a service call at this place. When i drove up it looked kinda like an SF mansion. Victorian. Huge. When i stepped inside I realized it was an adult care facility. They were getting ready for dinner so the clients were all downstairs sitting in a kind of a day room or rec room and i had to cross through it so i got to see the clients. I swear it felt like 2 of them at least were people I had been in homes with when i was a kid. i was probably placed with about 300 kids in total in all the different places i lived and the clients were all roughly my age and San Francisco is my home town so it wouldn't be unreasonable that i had at one time lived with at least one of the people there. I couldn't remember their names or what facility it might have been but was an intuitive sense that i had. Anyway as i left I was thinking I dodged a huge bullit because it could have been me sitting there waiting for other people to prepare my food for me and basically tell me what to do for the rest of my life. When i was 12 i was sent to a mental hospitial for 6 weeks for evaluation to determine how I was going to continue to be classified and placed etc. i had done a kind of a fake suicide run. i took a bunch of aspirin then spit it out on the floor in this group home I was living in. It was particularly a bad thing to do because the person who lived in that same room before the person that lived in it befor me had hung himself in that same room. Before he committed suicide he even drew this island themed mural on the walls and wrote his suicide note on the closet wall and the person that had the room before me never painted it over. When i live there i didn't even know about the guy that committed suicide and most of the kids that were there at the time had moved on but the councilor that was there that night freaked out because she was the one that found him hanging in the closet. After sending me to the hospital to get my stomach pumped I had to hear the rest of the kids tell me what an asshole I was for doing that, even though it was all for attention and it was fake. This was during a transition in funding etc and the bureaucrats were trying to figure out how fund kids when tax monies were going to be cut due to prop 13. Their solution was to use funds from juvinile hall so i got absorbed by probation but there was only so much in that fund and when i got placed in the hospitial it seemed like they were willing to put in thst system , mental health, so they could use my funding for someone else. Luckily for me my evaluation kept me under the jurisdiction of a probation officer instead of the scary doctor at the hospital. He was actually talking about placing me in Napa whete my grandmother had placed for 12 years. . When i was still living at home with biological family we were at my Grand Parents sad apartment . it was my grandmothers birthday and my grandfather hadn't shown up for hours and when he finally did he was being a passive aggressive jerk. My grandmother got so mad that she pulled a knife on him. As we were trying to calm her down she was yelling not 1 , not 2, not 5 not 7, 12 years! 12 years in Napa!! So when that doctor threatened me with Napa I wised up fast. I was like a boy scout for remainder of my evaluation. I did not want to go to Napa. If I had I probably would have wound up in a place similar to the one i did the call at that day.
OK, I'm done.
Anyone who says that gay, lesbian, bi, etc. parents can never be brilliant parents is on the MOOOOOON
Why is this kid talking about the 'bad guys'? Ask the little guy what happened too him. He's going to want to tell someone. It should be someone who gives a damn about his tiny world.
I'm not surprised you guys were left in the cold by the social workers and the courts. The best interests of the child is with a woman, according to the system. It's biased as all hell and you guys being gay men makes no difference. Because you're still men you're still devalued as parents. It's like this in every court, divorce, custody, it's all about what the mother wants and not what's actually good for the kid. He needs stability, not being traumatized by the 'bad guys', whoever they are. He sounds terrified. That's no life for a helpless little kid who's mother puts him in those situations.
i grew up in foster care back in the 70s and emancipated in the early 80s.
I was put in my first foster home just days after being born. i was in another 2 by the time i had my first memories.
I was 2 and a half when i left that home to go live with by grandparents. My grandmother, who was a war bride had just spent 12 years in Napa State Hospitial then satellite half way houses before i went to live with them.
One would have thought that would have disqualified her from being my guardian but it wasn't. She was abusive but overall she was way better than my mom.
To the point of what the fellow was talking about in the video , the court then was not focused on my welfare but rather on getting me to live with my bio family which was actually unrealistic. My mom was diagnosed with paranoid schitzophrenia so when i went into her custody at 6 life turned into a hellish nightmare for me until I was finally removed from her care 6 years later.
i dont want to go into all the different ways that she abused me but let's put it this way. In the 70s the police were very reluctant to do anything about the way that parents punished their children. When the old lady or the neighbors in the flat upstairs called the cops as my mother was beating me with a belt,when they did finally show up to the house they usually just said that the neighbors were complaining about the noise and asked her to keep it down. No welfare checks or anything.
So its kind of miraculous that i was funally removed from my mother's custody and put back into the foster care system back then.
in the ensuing 6 years i was placed another 10 times.
i had one foster father tell me, when i was 15 that I already had what he called an institutionalized personality.
He was raised in foster care and orphanages himself and had spent over 10 years as a foster parent and group home councilor and he pretty much said i was a lost cause.
That by the time i went to live with him and their family I was so far gone into the bureaucracy of the system, and drug use and all the other things that go with it like petty crime, promiscuity, truancy etc that i really was just doomed for prison. At the time i just brushed him off but im actually very grateful for his candidness.
He was right As soon as I was emancipated I was able to hold it together for about a year until I was laid off from my job at a microfilm company. Of course then it was a terrible economy. A lot of blue collar jobs were going over seas and i had no prospects and no one to turn to for help and wound up pretty much homeless and in a short amount of time addicted to drugs and doing things I should not have done .
Anyway it was a struggle to pick myself up again. i spent years and years struggling with alcoholism, addiction, anger issues etc and it really took it's toll.
I've managed to stay out of jail just to prove my foster fater wrong but in the end the chip I had in my shoulder, the rage I had, all my failures etc only solidified his original analysis. I do have that instutionalized personality. i cant shake it even into my 50s. Counseling got so convoluted for me even when i was still a kid that i never really benefited from it. The drug treatment programs I tried never worked out. i had to pretty much destroy my insides before i finally stopped drinking.
the resentment I feel towards my mother and to the system that let me down etc has haunted me and will probably be with me the rest of my life.
Me personally, I dont really believe that there are any solutions. I dont think that once you break a child he can be repaired. I mean there were times in my life where if were interviewed at that moment in time one might say I was finally successful and was on the road to recovery but inevitably something would happen and my world would collapse once again because I never was able to build enough stability in my life that i could withstand the next unexpected calamity that for most people would be something they could over come but for me would make me homeless again. I might not have been in a facility or a ward of the court since emancipation but my Foster Father was right, i was and am institutionalized and i cant seem to shake it even all these decades later.
Thanks for sharing. You have had a rough one, but you honestly sound like a survivor, not a victim of all the trauma you endured. Your step dad spoke what he might have thought was truth over you, but he cursed you with his thought or it wouldnt still be hanging over your head. It was not your truth. I hope you can let it go. Peace and best wishes for the New Year.
@@pamelajensen1774 Thanks. i have tried to take responsibility for my own life etc and i try not to live my life as though I'm a victim but my point is that it's still very difficult to overcome.
When i grew up in the system it was actually rarre that someone would have gone through 13 homes. Most people spent a couple of years in the system and were usually either sent back home or adopted.
Now days 13 placements is actually a nice norm . Many kids are shuffled in and out of 20 or 30 homes sometimes out of state and lots of other horrible scenarios. i know there are more resources for kids now days when they age out like extended housing etc so that now days kids aren't just told Happy (18th) birthday, time to pack your shit.
i left my last home while I was still 17 and already found a job and a place to live but i had a foster brother that this happened to. He was told you gotta leave. Not even a bus ticket or you know 5 dollars. But the difference them was I could get a job as a bus boy or dishwasher which is what I did . It's pretty hard to do now days. One job I got was working at a hot dog stand at fisherman's wharf. i also worked at a hardware store not as a sales person but as an overall grunt. For both those jobs today I would need a college degree . Not because it was necessary for the job but rather because people with college degrees apply for these jobs when they cant get jobs they got their degree for so employers will hire them over someone who can barely fill out an application and believe me when i was 17 or 18 I could barely fill out an application myself. I CRINGE when i think about filling out an application then. i didnt even know the difference between then and than or know when to use an apostrophe but it didnt matter so much because no one wanted those jobs then but desperate people like me so the employers looking for help weren't as picky. When one got a job like that back then they had to work full time. No flex time. i meet people now days who can only get 16 or 20 hours a week if they're lucky. Sometimes they work for 3 employers and have no idea what their schedule will be the following week. If I had to endure that right after emancipation there is no way i could have coped.
So they actually keep these kids as wards of the state even longer. Luckily for me when i finally started getting my life together I could count on a pretty reliable shift at work, i only had 1 place of employment and i could find a SRO hotel in the Tenderloin to rent for 75 dollars a week . Those same hotels go for almost 500 a week now because we have housing shortage so just like college graduates are applying for Starbucks jobs, you got people making 50 or 75 k a year living in Tenderloin hotels driving the rents up so that people with a background like mine couldn't possibly afford to live in them.
Allowing adult foster children to remain wards of the court into their mid 20s is not going to help them in the long run. It just makes them even more dependant. My foster father was actually right. When one grows up in the system they cant help but get institutionalized unless maybe they find family type connections. In California after prop 13 I was placed under the supervision of the court and my guardian was a Probation Officer as opposed to a social worker which I had prior to prop 13. Everything turns institutionalized with these kinds of relationships and power dynamics. You always have to consider what the court or your P.O. is going to do whenever anything happens in your life. You are treated different. i lived in one place with a family that also had their own kids. They had a family dentist that they took their kids to but when they tried to send me to their dentist he didn't take Medi-Cal which is what I had for insurance. The dentist was reluctant to treat me and it was such a humiliating experience for me that i refused to go back for a follow up. They treated me like garbage because they had a policy if not taking Med-Cal and couldn't even maintain their professionalism even for a family that had taken their own kids there all their lives. These kinds of slights happen to kids all through their experience in foster care. It gets to a point where , like me , they feel like garbage, like they should just jump off a bridge which I can remember one night , during el Nino , sleeping out in the rain and feeling so awful about my life , i hurriedly and angrily walked to the Golden Gate bridge because I was determined to finally end it all and even though i did get to the bridge it took me long enough to walk there from the Mission that by the time i got there i managed to talk myself out of it.
i dont want to appear like I have somehow gotten my act together. You know there is a phenomenon whereby people experience hardship then others come along and will praise the person as though they got all their problems fixed and moved past their hardships.
I don't believe these stories.
I do think that in rare exceptions there may be people who can move past childhood trauma etc and even possibly get to a point where they are no longer triggered, but i dont think ive ever met anyone like that.
I remember when i first found out that Dr. Wayne Dyer had been in foster care.
To me it explained a lot.
I always thought he was kind of dark even though he projected hope and optimism. And I believe it's due to a sort of restlessness about his belief in his own legitimacy as a human being that set him on his journey to justify his own existence.
Of course these are philosophical and spiritual questions that people have had for millennia but in his case I have to wonder what kind of abandonment and legitimacy issues he had that made him OBSESS over it all his life that he turned it into a career.
And to be honest , even with all his success and optimism, his huge family and successful marriage etc I dont think he ever really got over the abandonment and legitimacy issues he had.
i think he went to his grave still feeling some of that trauma that led him to foster care in the fist place.
I got this not from his books or anything else i learned about him but just by watching him on TV and especially his voice.
i think in spite of earning a PhD, being a successful author and being a fater to 7 beautiful children and having a successful marriage that he still died with unresolved pain even though he chased a cure for that pain all his life and wrote books and no doubt helped probably millions of people.
One can do the best they can but that trauma is hard to let go of.
I have my own business now but its not successful. it looks successful on Yelp. It's a 5 star business and people write lots of nice reviews but im bankrupt and my house is about to be foreclosed on. i am married and we truely love each other but we have lots of problems.
One day about 5 years ago i was called to do a service call at this place. When i drove up it looked kinda like an SF mansion. Victorian. Huge. When i stepped inside I realized it was an adult care facility.
They were getting ready for dinner so the clients were all downstairs sitting in a kind of a day room or rec room and i had to cross through it so i got to see the clients.
I swear it felt like 2 of them at least were people I had been in homes with when i was a kid. i was probably placed with about 300 kids in total in all the different places i lived and the clients were all roughly my age and San Francisco is my home town so it wouldn't be unreasonable that i had at one time lived with at least one of the people there. I couldn't remember their names or what facility it might have been but was an intuitive sense that i had. Anyway as i left I was thinking I dodged a huge bullit because it could have been me sitting there waiting for other people to prepare my food for me and basically tell me what to do for the rest of my life.
When i was 12 i was sent to a mental hospitial for 6 weeks for evaluation to determine how I was going to continue to be classified and placed etc. i had done a kind of a fake suicide run. i took a bunch of aspirin then spit it out on the floor in this group home I was living in. It was particularly a bad thing to do because the person who lived in that same room before the person that lived in it befor me had hung himself in that same room. Before he committed suicide he even drew this island themed mural on the walls and wrote his suicide note on the closet wall and the person that had the room before me never painted it over. When i live there i didn't even know about the guy that committed suicide and most of the kids that were there at the time had moved on but the councilor that was there that night freaked out because she was the one that found him hanging in the closet. After sending me to the hospital to get my stomach pumped I had to hear the rest of the kids tell me what an asshole I was for doing that, even though it was all for attention and it was fake.
This was during a transition in funding etc and the bureaucrats were trying to figure out how fund kids when tax monies were going to be cut due to prop 13. Their solution was to use funds from juvinile hall so i got absorbed by probation but there was only so much in that fund and when i got placed in the hospitial it seemed like they were willing to put in thst system , mental health, so they could use my funding for someone else. Luckily for me my evaluation kept me under the jurisdiction of a probation officer instead of the scary doctor at the hospital. He was actually talking about placing me in Napa whete my grandmother had placed for 12 years. . When i was still living at home with biological family we were at my Grand Parents sad apartment . it was my grandmothers birthday and my grandfather hadn't shown up for hours and when he finally did he was being a passive aggressive jerk. My grandmother got so mad that she pulled a knife on him. As we were trying to calm her down she was yelling not 1 , not 2, not 5 not 7, 12 years! 12 years in Napa!! So when that doctor threatened me with Napa I wised up fast. I was like a boy scout for remainder of my evaluation. I did not want to go to Napa. If I had I probably would have wound up in a place similar to the one i did the call at that day.
It's much worse in Australia. There are about 2 adoptions per year... in the whole country.