Helping Your Child’s Teacher Understand Foster & Adopted Children’s Needs
By Deborah Dentler, Attorney
Sometimes, for the most well-intentioned of reasons, teachers say and do things that exclude or hurt foster and adoptive children or hinder their learning. Teachers may have negative stereotypes or inaccurate information about foster children. They may not realize the impact of something they say. They may not realize a child simply cannot complete certain assignments. For example, many teachers assign projects like “family trees” or autobiographies, and ask students to bring photographs to class of themselves as infants. Many foster and adopted children have no early photographs. In addition, they may have unpleasant memories or little information about relatives. Foster and adopted children may react badly or oddly when lessons cover concepts such as family, ancestry, parents, crime, poverty, sexuality, and/or substance abuse. Teachers often wonder why an adopted child does not seem “on track” cognitively, or why the child is unable to “attach.” Teachers can be confused when a child does not respond to affection and rejects offers of help. The opposite behavior is also typical: some foster children seem excessively sociable or even clingy. These children are overly friendly, a behavior that was a manipulative survival mechanism in their earlier lives. It is disappointing to the teacher when such a child fails to succeed or misbehaves.Sometimes, schools blame foster or adoptive parents for the child’s behaviors and may unconsciously undermine the adoptive family’s rules. A teacher may believe it is “kind” to lower expectations for a child who was once abused, suspecting the child is too damaged or disabled to achieve. All these well-meaning but uninformed reactions to foster and adopted children can wreak havoc at home and can hinder, rather than help, the child’s progress.
Teachers can be helped by foster and adoptive parents to familiarize themselves with the lives and experiences of foster youth, employing sensitive and inclusive teaching methods. Teachers should be encouraged not to lower standards. Foster children need opportunities to gain selfesteem through hard work. What they really need is consistency and not special breaks.
Teachers should be informed that a child’s development (cognitive, physical, and emotional) may not be “in sync” or be progressing on a normal timeline. Extra attention, tutoring, and patience are in order. A foster or adopted child may even be best served by being placed in a lower grade, one that suits his emotional - not chronological - age. Foster and adoptive families may need to remind schools that traditional methods of discipline involving physical restraint or isolation, humiliation, even reasoning and rewards (bribing) may not work with foster children. Remember, it is never acceptable or legal (in California) to use corporal punishment on a foster child.
Resources of interest to teachers of foster and adopted children are available from Tapestry Books (publisher of adoption books for both adult and child readers), Lakeshore Learning supplies at www.lakeshorelearning.com and the websites of adoption organizations such as the North American Council on Adoptable Children (www.nacac.org). The book Adoption & the Schools is available from www.fairfamilies.org.
Note: Legal opinions expressed are the columnist’s alone, not Child SHARE’s, and nothing in this column is intended to substitute for professional legal advice for a specific situation.
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