Nurturing Strangers

Strategies for Nonviolent Re-parenting of Children in Foster Care

Andrew Fitz-Gibbon, Jane Hall Fitz-Gibbon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351383219
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Sociologie

Nurturing Strangers focuses on loving nonviolent re-parenting of children in foster care. This book is a jargon-free mix of narrative and real-life case studies, together with the theory and practice of nonviolence. Nurturing Strangers and the authors' previous book, Welcoming Strangers, are the first books to apply philosophies of nonviolence directly to the care of children in the foster care system. One of their strengths is that the books are not merely theoretical, but rooted in the practice of nonviolence with children for over thirty years. Nurturing Strangers is for foster carers, caseworkers, case managers, social work students, and parents, as well as the general reader interested in children who have been victims of violence in and out of the foster care system.

1 Re-visiting Loving Nonviolent Re-parenting

In Welcoming Strangers, we told our story of how for over 34 years we opened our home to children who, for one reason or another, could not live with their birth families. Most of these children suffered trauma related to violence in its many forms—physical, psychological, sexual, and systemic. Welcoming these young strangers into our home was, for them, only the beginning of a long process toward healing and responsible adulthood. We realized early on that we needed to find ways to provide ongoing nurture that would help our children heal from their difficult start. Trauma takes time to heal, and violence induced trauma takes longer to heal than a few short months, or even several years. Sadly, some struggle with the ravages of abuse or neglect well into their adult lives. Some never completely get over it, and the effect of trauma marks their whole lives. Our loving nonviolent care of children is only a step on the journey toward their well-being. It has been a highlight of our years as foster carers to hear that some of the children we welcomed and nurtured have done well, some now in their thirties with families of their own.

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“I made the academic dean’s list for the third semester in a row,” Hannah proudly announced on social media. For Hannah, even to be in college was an amazing feat that had taken lots of perseverance, determination, and courage, as she overcame many obstacles.

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“I’m back in your town for the weekend. Can I come and see you?” Julianna arrived complete with pastry treats for the family. We spent the afternoon listening to the stories of her many successes and reminiscing about the past.

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“Will you come to my wedding? There is an invitation in the mail.” LeShaun texted us. “I really want you to be there.”

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Xavier’s Facebook comment made us smile. In response to a report of a local burglary he wrote sarcastically, “Geez, they need to start robbing job applications.” At least, we had instilled a work ethic in him!

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Placing the baby gingerly in Jane’s arms, Shelley said “You’re the only people the baby will call grandma and grandad.”

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Jonathon oozed pride as he told us on social media that just as we had taken him, and our other children strawberry picking each June, he now wanted take his own two children. “It was one of my highlights growing up,” he said.

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To parent children is the most natural of activities. Like the other mammals, the human animal throughout its evolution has continued the biological function of the care of the young. We know this is true because to raise successfully an infant to adulthood requires at least a modicum of care. Without care we fail to thrive, and the human animal has been one of the most successful species. Yet, for humans, life appears more complex than for the other mammals. Beside our natural instinct to reproduce and care for our young, our lives are complicated by issues such as values and choices. Our values tell us that some ways of doing things are better than others, and some ways worse than others. For example, we can imagine some ways of caring for the young that are better than others—better for society, better for the child herself, better for the care giver. We would likely say to train a child in good manners through repeated painful electric shocks, or through constant shouting and nagging, is worse than training the child through example and reward. We base our distinctions on our values—we value pleasure over pain, we value kindness over vindictiveness. Having such distinctions based on our values makes sense to us. The human penchant for valuing some things more than others is part and parcel of our meaning-making habit. When we speak of values, of some things being better (more valued) than other things, we enter the tricky world of morality (which we cover more fully in chapter four). We speak of good and bad, of right and wrong, and we make judgments. Human culture is full of value creation, evolution, and sometimes revolution, and that makes natural tasks, such as the care of the young, extraordinarily complex. Values change, and as they do so expectations of that which is socially appropriate, or approved, change with them. In some cultures, as was the case in most western countries until very recently, it was socially acceptable for parents, and teachers in loco parentis, to beat a child severely who was wayward or disobedient. Obedience was valued highly, and if in order to make a child obedient the child had to suffer physical pain, then so be it. Our culture valued obedience more highly than it valued freedom from pain for the young. Values change, and today in more and more countries and cultures, physically beating a child is more often than not frowned upon. Even so, in the United States, many still believe that violence works as an effective means of nurturing children. Seventy-six percent of males and 65 percent of females believe that a child needs a “good hard spanking” every now and then. Ninety-four percent of parents with children ages three to four had spanked their children in the course of a year.¹ In other words, most people reserve the “right” to use violence on children when other means have been exhausted. In reality, without internalizing the principles of nonviolence, parents often quickly exhaust “other means,” and adults cause pain to children in the mistaken belief that inflicting pain changes behavior. For most of us, our approach to childcare is compounded by the difficulties of dealing with our own inner violence. To differing degrees, all people have the potentiality for violence, and frustrations become anger that in turn becomes rage, resulting often in lashing out verbally, and on too many occasions using physical violence. In caring for children with loving nonviolence, each parent or re-parent, must face their own inner violence and tendency to hurt others.

We are in a cultural space where social practices of parenting are in flux. Parents are often unsure of the social and moral expectations placed upon them. Manuel might come to believe that he ought not to beat his son, but in his youth Manuel’s father had beaten him. Manuel internalized the role of “father as tough disciplinarian,” but he is conflicted now as social mores are changing.

As a society, too, we have changed perceptions of acceptable child care practice. Not many centuries ago, when all families, more or less, lived in poverty, often all shared a single bedroom—mother, father, seven children, and an unmarried aunt or two. Today, though children can share a bedroom, social services might step in and possibly remove the children as victims of neglect, as ten people in a single bedroom is considered unacceptable. Our understanding of neglect has changed dramatically over the last century, and the whole family sharing a single room would count as neglectful of the children. To be sure, we asked our daughter and daughter-in-law, one a senior caseworker and the other a children’s lawyer. They of course confirmed that what was once acceptable is no longer so. Values have changed, and so have expectations. The senior caseworker assured us that everything would be done to keep the family together, but some form of intervention would likely be necessary.

Issues are exacerbated when we consider child abuse. Though what we think of today as child abuse has most likely been the lot of many children in every age, it was not until the 1960s that, as a society, we began to think of certain practices as abusive, harmful to the health of children, and therefore morally wrong. According to the World Health Organization:

For a long time also there have existed charitable groups and others concerned with children’s well-being who have advocated the protection of children. Nevertheless, the issue did not receive widespread attention by the medical profession or the general public until 1962, with the publication of a seminal work, The Battered Child Syndrome, by Kempe et al.²

Since then, our collective awareness of child neglect has grown exponentially. Though reporting of child abuse has risen, it is likely that we are just becoming aware of what has always been there, and giving to it a different name. Rather than the plight of children getting worse, psychologist Steven Pinker argues that the lot of children in developed countries has never been better. In earlier cultures society accepted:

The sacrifice of children to gods; the sale of children into slavery, marriage, and religious servitude; the exploitation of children to clean chimneys and crawl through tunnels in coal mines; and the subjection of children to forms of corporal punishment that verge on or cross over into torture.³

That we no longer accept, but rather condemn, these practices we regard as progress, and cultural understanding of children and childhood has changed dramatically. Nevertheless, values with regard to children and violence are in a state of flux. Loving nonviolent re-parenting, for which we made the case in Welcoming Strangers, and in this book, reflects that cultural shift. Though society has made much progress, more can be done, and children who have suffered the trauma of violence in the home can begin to find healing through loving nonviolent care.

Even though the parental task is a natural one, our ability to make choices means that we are not necessarily bound to do “what comes naturally.” People can choose not to breed, and by all accounts many take this path. The data show that the fertility rate (that is, live births per female) dropped worldwide from 5.068 in 1964 to 2.453 in 2015.⁴ In many countries the fertility rate has dropped well below the 2.1 births required to keep a population stable by births alone. For example, Greece has a rate of 1.3; Iran 1.7; Korea 1.2; and North America 1.8. Not all people, then, take on the parenting role, but most do at some point in their lives. Beside natural births, people adopt children, care for the offspring of relatives, and look after children on behalf of the state when birth parents can no longer care, or care adequately, for their children. While different cultures conceive the parental roles between women and men differently—and changes happen over time in any culture—the fact that the helpless child of the human animal needs to be tended over a number of years makes parenting as natural an activity as we can imagine.

However, not all parenting is equal. To be a parent of a child requires hard work and the learning of a certain skill set. Some take to the parenting task more easily than others. All make mistakes. Yet, most do a reasonable job and the majority of children grow into socially adept adults, who, more or less, make a decent stab at adulthood. However, those of us who work in foster care see our share of those children who have been parented inadequately, and who carry the trauma of their chaotic and violent upbringing. If parenting children well is a difficult task, re-parenting children who have experienced violence is frustratingly challenging.

For these reasons, in Welcoming Strangers we focused mostly on the kinds of people we need to become in order to provide just such a loving nonviolent environment. To help work this through, we looked at the threefold process of conscientization (becoming aware of the violence children have suffered), internalization (reflecting on the needs of children and nonviolent strategies to meet those needs), and intentionalization (making the choice to become an intentionally nonviolent person). This process involves the psychological triumvirate of feeling, thinking and choosing—feeling, as the re-parent develops empathy for the child; thinking, as she develops strategies for intentional nonviolence; and acting, as he marshals thoughts and feelings in effective nonviolent, practical caring.

We found most help in an ancient strategy sometimes termed “virtue ethics,” shared by many in the ancient world in both the West and East. Virtue, an out-of-fashion word that mostly conjures images of Victorian prudery, is often associated with strict rules of sexual propriety. The virtuous person (usually the female), in this caricature, behaves in sexually appropriate ways. This image is unfortunate, for in the ancient world virtue signified the whole character of a person. The virtuous person was one who lived in a way that led toward well-being for themselves and those around them. In other words, a person of virtue lived a good and well-rounded life. In the West, the Greek philosopher Aristotle spoke of a life of eudaimonia, well-being, flourishing. Confucius spoke of ren, humaneness, as the goal of a virtuous life.

In Welcoming Strangers, we took this ancient wisdom and applied it to caring for children who have been traumatized through violence. This approach suggests that to act consistently in loving nonviolent ways, the carer has to become a loving nonviolent person, and becomes such by building small daily habits of loving nonviolence. Of course, no parent or re-parent has the luxury of waiting to care until she becomes such a virtuous person. In Confucian terms, you care for children “as-if” you are already a loving nonviolent person, and over time your character is shaped by your daily habits. We look at this further in chapter four below.

In Welcoming Strangers, we suggested that loving nonviolent habits included the following: doing good, not-harming, keeping faith, repairing wrongs and forgiving, treating fairly and equally, respecting with attentiveness, being thankful, caring, being courageous, acting kindly and gently, acting moderately, and not possessing. Our list was not meant to be exhaustive, but rather that intentionally loving nonviolent care looks “something like this.” Intentionally choosing to build habits such as these, on a day-to-day, mundane basis, over time produce...