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Youth in Foster Care Want Connections to 'Lost' Siblings
by Martha Shirk
Oakland, Calif. -- When Eric Garris went into foster care at age 14, he lost contact with his three siblings. He met them again this fall only because of a chance encounter with a family-finding specialist. "I feel like I was robbed of the opportunity to be a big brother for these last 20 years," he says.
Wendy Piccus was placed in foster care when she was 16 and wasn't permitted to have contact with her five younger siblings for several years. When she was 24, she obtained custody of three of them, and for the last two years, the four sisters have been trying to make up for lost time. "My heart had been aching for eight years," she says. "When they moved in, it felt like a perfect completion of a puzzle."
As a result of their personal experiences, Eric and Wendy believe that one of the worst things that can happen to a child in foster care is to lose contact with his or her siblings. At the annual meeting of the California Permanency for Youth Project (CPYP) here on November 2, they issued a plea to social workers to try harder to keep siblings together.
Sibling Separations a Widespread Issue
"There are three different types of permanence - physical, legal and emotional," Wendy told about 130 social workers, program managers, and permanency specialists associated with CPYP, a three-year-old organization that works to ensure that no youth leaves foster care in California without a lifelong connection to a caring adult.
"Brothers and sisters provide each other with emotional permanence," she said. "I know that you guys know that. But it seems as though it sometimes falls off your radar screens."
Sibling separation has garnered increased attention recently as more youth in care and former foster youth have identified it as one of their chief complaints about foster care. Most foster care workers try to place siblings in the same foster home, but sometimes there are too many to be accommodated in any of the foster homes that are available. Sometimes, one of the siblings poses a risk to another, or requires residential treatment. And sometimes, the worker judges that it's not in one of the siblings' best interests to live together.
Eric Reunited with All Three Siblings
Eric doesn't know why he wasn't allowed to have contact with his three siblings after he went into foster care in Washington, D.C. It may have been because they didn't all have the same mothers and fathers, and the logistics were complicated. Or it may have been because of estrangement between relatives of his father and his deceased mother.
Apart from the separation from his siblings, Eric says he feels "very fortunate" to have been placed in foster care. He graduated from college in 2002, and has worked for the last four years for the California Senate. In March, he was elected to the board of directors of California Youth Connection, an advocacy organization of youth in and formerly in foster care.
A year and a half ago, Eric met Kevin Campbell, a social worker who uses electronic databases to find relatives of youth in care. Campbell provided Eric with information that led to a reunion with his siblings in September. He hadn't seen his oldest sister for 27 years or his younger brother, to whom he had been exceptionally close, for 20 years.
A few months later, the siblings are still struggling with what kind of relationships to have with each other after so many years apart. "We're talking on the phone once a week," Eric said. "Right now, I'm still going through the emotions of having just met them. Every time I think about it, I wonder how I dealt with it so long. Having my brother and sisters back in my life, it takes away that feeling of limbo I had around holidays and other important times in my life."
Eric has gained not only relationships, but also important facts about his heritage. From one of his sisters, Eric learned that an enzyme deficiency from which he suffers is inherited, a fact that is also germane to his 8-year-old son. "And I learned that I'm part Native American," he said. "Facts like these are things that people take for granted knowing all their lives. I'm happy to finally get answers. My life makes so much more sense now."
For Wendy, Reunion Leads to Guardianship
In Wendy's case, her social worker placed her in foster care by herself because she believed that Wendy had become "parentified" from having been the primary caregiver for her younger siblings. "I understand the concerns about parentified kids, " says Wendy, who is working on a master's in social work at the University of California at Berkeley. "But I don't think this was better for me. I could have benefited from some contact."
For a long time, Wendy believed that she was somehow responsible for the loss of contact with her siblings. She had been the one who called Child Protective Services to report her parents' maltreatment, and, as a result, she says, "I felt guilty about what I had done that was making them suffer."
With no knowledge of their whereabouts, she imagined the worst. "I was terrified about what might be going on in their lives," she says. "I was with a wonderful foster family, but in my mind, it was on the backs of my sisters. I was feeling miserable, wanting and wanting to be with them just to know that they were OK."
A therapist helped Wendy get over most of her guilt. But still, she yearned for contact. When she learned two years ago that three of her sisters were living with her parents in the cab of a pick-up truck, she obtained guardianship. (Another sister was adopted, and one is married and lives with her husband.)
While Wendy's story has a happy ending, she worries about the many other children in foster care in California who are separated from their siblings. "We're talking about a lot of kids - 55,000 kids with brothers and sisters in foster care, and one-third of them are not seeing each other on a daily basis," she says. Nationally, about 75 percent of the 530,000 children in foster care are believed to be separated from at least one sibling.
Wendy told the social workers in the audience: "Even if you can't place siblings together, find ways to bring them together." As an option, she cited Camp To Belong, which operates weekly summer camps for siblings separated by foster care.
Eric asked foster care workers to "be very diligent about following up if a child says he has siblings out there."
"I'm thinking now, 'Damn, maybe I could have really helped my brother if I had just reached him sooner,'" he said. "I lived two counties away from my brother and sisters for most of my life. If my social worker had followed up on that, I could have known him all my life."
