VFA Guest Blogs for the Adoption Exchange: "Saving Grace and Stolen Resilience"
By Schylar Baber, VFA Executive Director
At the age of six, I entered the Montana foster care system with my half-brother, after being removed from my physically and sexually abusive biological family. Thrust into a system that was intended to protect me, I experienced even more abuse and neglect. I went to eleven different foster homes, then group homes, residential treatment centers, and a flood of respite providers. I was separated from my brother and all contact with my biological family was cut off. I never achieved permanency in the system and aged out of care at eighteen without a transition plan or a known permanent connection; and yet, I not only survived – but also thrived.
I think the question I get asked most frequently is, “How did you become so resilient and so successful?” When I was younger the question frustrated me, because to me, it meant that people expected me to fail. There is a high amount of stigma that comes with being a foster kid. Many view foster kids as being troublemakers, and not just troublemakers, but bad enough that their own families wouldn’t want them. What many people don’t realize is that children in foster care aren’t bad kids. Rather, a lot of very bad things happen to children for them to wind up in care, such as abuse and neglect, and death. Children don’t earn foster care, it is thrust upon them. Foster care is intended to be a temporary safe-haven, but for orphans like me, we grow up and age out of foster care......
