Having directed both foster care and adoption programs that place teenagers into permanent families and then having founded an agency that places them into permanent families, I often get asked the question, "What kind of people will offer their home permanently to a teenager? "My answer is always the same. "Any and all kinds of people who, after a good preparation experience, are willing to unconditionally commit themselves to a child, no matter what behavior that child might ultimately exhibit. "Teenagers need, first and foremost, at least one adult who will permanently claim the teen as his or her own. Any thing less is an artificial relationship. Teenagers need unconditional commitment before anything else constructive can follow.

This country has tens of thousands of young adults, between the ages of 18 and 21, being discharged to no one but themselves. Half the homeless population is made up of these foster care discharges. This is in spite of the fact that teenagers, as a general rule, are easier to care for. And often, the rewards and gratification for caring for them come back a lot sooner than when a parent accepts younger children for permanent placement.

However, our child welfare culture seems to have an anti-permanency bias against caring for teenagers. Very few organizations even have the slightest expectation, of the prospective parents who offer their homes to teens, that the commitment made must be necessarily unconditional for the placement to succeed. Parenting strategies and a whole variety of other skills, taught to families in pre-placement preparation and training, are rendered essentially useless if unconditional commitment to a child is not imbedded in the preparation philosophy.

My working definition for "unconditional commitment" is, simply, that there is nothing a teenager can do to stop being someone's child. It means that we treat any child's behavior with the exact same commitment we would treat a biological child's behavior who might commit the very same act. If a bio-child commits a crime in the community, he might go to jail. But he does not lose his parents because he makes a mistake. If a bio-child becomes mentally ill, she might have to be hospitalized on a long-term basis. But she does not lose her parents because she has an illness that needs to be treated. If a bio-child becomes heavily involved in drugs, he might have to be placed in a residential treatment therapeutic community. But he does not lose his parents because he has the disease of addiction. Most importantly, if a bio-child has a nasty attitude, the parent develops ways to deal with it. The child does not stop being that parent's child because of the attitude.

This, of course, is not the case for teens living in traditionally prepared foster homes. But they need a place they can make mistakes and not have the equivalent of a child welfare capital punishment sentence imposed on them. So many teens in foster care lose their parents simply because they do what teens do. All parents who help children they did not give birth to must be prepared in the same permanency philosophy that most biological parents have in the care of their children.

I have had the privilege to orient about 2,000 prospective foster and adoptive parents over the past three years. I always ask them why they want to parent children not born to them. Generally, in a first session orientation, all the answers take the same form. Either they love children or they want to help them. My second question to them is, "Who is coming forward to be a foster or adoptive parent in order to hurt children? "The participants are usually baffled by the oddity of the question.

Then I ask six more similar questions to the rest of the group changing just one word, as follows:

"Who wants to abandon abandoned children?"

"Who wants to reject rejected children?"

I repeat the question substituting the words "traumatize," "victimize," "abuse," and "neglect."

No one raises their hand for any of the seven questions.

© Pat O'Brien, executive director of You Gotta Believe! The Older Child Adoption & Permanency Movement

Credits: Fostering Families Today Magazine