The federal budget is settled—at least for the moment. But when the battle begins anew, the political fortunes of the Obama administration and Congressional leaders John Boehner and Harry Reid are likely to dominate the news. With unfortunate predictability, politics distracts our attention from the very real human consequences of the activities on Capitol Hill. We are expecting unprecedented reductions in spending for programs that serve the most vulnerable of our citizens.

Some cuts are obvious and immediately evident—when there are fewer beds in homeless shelters, the lines of people waiting to get in are likely to be longer—at least for a while. But they may, over time, get shorter, because those in need of shelter no longer bother to wait in line, only to be turned away.

Loss of hope is hard to measure.

By Toni Heineman

This was the title of our very provocative conference in San Francisco last Saturday that focused on the psychodynamic treatment of children and young adults suffering from Asperger’s Syndrome. We repeatedly heard from the presenters about the complex reactions of both the patients and their families when they failed to find a way to connect to each other.

In introducing the panel, Katharine Gould, psychoanalyst and Clinical Director of A Home Within’s Chicago chapter, reminded the audience that foster children are among those that suffer most from being unfound. Many of them wait for weeks or months or years in the hope that someone will care enough to find them.

Do you remember playing hide-and-seek and how the excitement of waiting to be found was tinged with the anxiety of not being found? Being found too quickly made the game boring; waiting too long meant that anxiety overtook excitement.

For foster children, there is little excitement in waiting to be found—waiting for someone who will want to get to know them. Sometimes they emerge from hiding too quickly, attaching themselves to anyone who appears in their world, unable to take the time to get to know the person or form a real relationship. Sometimes they won’t come out of hiding at all, afraid to believe that there might be someone who really does want to know them. It takes courage to believe that someone will take the time to find out who they really are, hidden behind the barriers they have created to protect themselves.

For children suffering from Asperger’s Syndrome, the barriers to relationships have their beginnings in neurophysiology. For foster children the barriers to relationships have their beginnings in loss. Sometimes it’s not clear how these groups of unfound children experience their lack of relationships; for those working to find them, the pain can be almost palpable.

By Toni Heineman

When you stop to think about it, musical chairs is a curious activity for entertaining children.
In case you don’t remember—or never played it at a friend’s birthday party—a group of chairs, numbering one fewer than the number of players, is arranged in a circle, seats facing out. As the music starts, the children walk around the circle, often jockeying to keep as close as possible to a chair. When the music stops, everyone rushes to grab a seat. If two children land on the same chair, only one can ultimately claim it; the loser might be physically weaker, or less tenacious, or more polite, or more timid. For whatever reason, a child without a seat is removed from the game along with one chair, thereby insuring that when the music begins and then again stops, one more child will be eliminated from the game. Eventually, one child is left with the sole remaining chair.

One does wonder for whom, exactly, this game is supposed to be fun.
Is it fun for the child, sitting alone on the only available chair? Is it fun for the children who weren’t quick or clever or strong enough to stay in the game? (We might imagine that those eliminated early began to play among themselves, perhaps enticing others to “lose” in order to join in less anxiety-provoking activities.) Nicholas Kristof writes about trying to introduce musical chairs to a group of Japanese school children at his son’s birthday party (NYT March 21, 2011).
“Disaster. The children, especially the girls were traumatized by having to push aside others to gain a seat for themselves.”  The children at that party changed the game into one of collaboration and cooperation. No doubt something that those among us with a competitive streak wouldn’t even classify as a game.

Unfortunately, as Kristof points out Americans can be pushy. “We sometimes treat life, and budget negotiations, as a contest in which the weakest (such as children) are to be gleefully pushed aside when the music stops.” When the music finally stops at the end of current fiscal negotiations at the federal, state, and local levels, we are likely to find that, foster children are among those most profoundly affected by budgetary musical chairs. They may find that, not only their chairs have been eliminated, but that there are fewer seats for those charged with their care. Budget cuts often mean that the seats once occupied by foster parents, caseworkers, and supervisors are eliminated. When these people lose their jobs, who will care for the 500,000 children in foster care?

By Toni Heineman

Times of scarcity can make people afraid—fearful that their meager resources will disappear with no chance of replenishing them. In response, some people hoard what they have and keep things far beyond their useful life (Strings Too Short to be of Use). Others find it too painful to share—feeling that there just isn’t enough to go around. If hard times persist the discomfort can grow to a conviction that–always and forever–resources will only be depleted, never replenished. In a culture of scarcity, the temptation is to shut down–to do whatever possible to minimize the possibility of loss. In this kind of atmosphere, it can be very hard to maintain a sense of creativity and openness—to cherish and nurture what is good.

By Toni Heineman

Many of those who lived through the Great Depression developed uncanny uses for all sorts of things that those who never knew that kind of scarcity would toss without a thought. Although he was not much of a handyman, I believe that my father saved every nail or screw that ever came into our home. He reused rubber bands and prided himself on never having bought one. Following in his footsteps, without much thought, I, too, saved rubber bands—until I discovered that they dry out and break and, at some point, are of no use. There is really little point in saving them.

Around the time that I was reading Lorrie Moore’s (brilliant) novel, Anagrams I had been thinking about writing a blog, hoping to start a conversation about the emotional needs of kids in the foster care system. One of Moore’s characters, in the process of clearing her deceased aunt’s attic, comes across a box labeled “strings too short to use,” filled with matted bits of string. It struck me that this is, far too often, just like the relationships that we offer foster youth—they are just too short to be of use. Too many foster children leave care with a life stuffed full of relationships that came and went too quickly to be helpful. A culture of scarcity demands that we discard nothing, even when we suspect or know that what we’re doing isn’t necessary or reasonable. Often times this does no harm—bits of string, twine, and yarn just gather, tangled in a box or carefully stored nails and screws line workshop shelves “just in case” they might be needed one day. Relationships that come and go too quickly are different. They don’t help build the trust or sense of safety and security that children need. In fact, they do the opposite—undermine trust and create a sense that the world is unpredictable and chaotic. We know this. Parents know that their children will be unhappy if a favorite caregiver or teacher is out ill. Employers know that staff turnover leads to low morale and decreased productivity. The statistics on the emotional well-being and productivity of adults raised in the foster care system merely confirm what we know—as adults, former foster children are, by and large, neither happy nor productive. I wonder why we find it so hard to act on what we know? It’s easy to point to a broken system or fluctuations in funding streams or changing regulations that interfere with continuity in care and relationships. There are thousands of people trying their best to help foster children, and yet we continue to give too many of them relationships that don’t last long enough to be of use. Do we think that something—anything—is better than nothing at all? What do you think? I would love to hear your ideas.

By Toni Heineman