Foster Care Institute Dr. John DeGarmo
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What is your Normal?  A Former Foster Child Reflects

10/19/2020

2 Comments

 
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What is your normal? As a nine-year-old, emptiness and depression became my normal moving forward.

We escaped CPS to squat in an abandoned house. My sister was pregnant and my brother was preparing for a child at 14 years old. It gave us hope that my dad promised to restore the abandoned house we lived in. I dreamt of my dad fixing up our house and creating a resurgence within the neighborhood. Unfortunately, the bad influences of the community only worsened my mom’s drug use. My dad continued
selling drugs and addicts throughout the neighborhood regularly showed up at our house.

Michigan winter began and the Detroit winds became brutal. Without running water, we had to scoop snow off of the ground, carry it inside in buckets, and wait for it to melt to use as makeshift showers. Without a bed, we regularly piled up clothes to sleep on to avoid feeling the wood and sharp nails sticking out of the floor. To this day, the
smell of gasoline recalls those gasoline heaters we used to warm our dinner in abandoned housing.

My dad had been making excuses for months of why he couldn’t fix the house and
resorted to hiding from CPS. I began to lose faith in my parents. We did our best, but
my parents had no choice but to let us go.

One month later, I entered foster care as the youngest of five siblings. The feeling of
having my parents let me down was the beginning of my mental health issues. Filled
with anxiety I thought, “If I couldn’t trust my parents, I reasoned, who would I be able to trust?”
I entered into the system buried in emptiness. I was alone and afraid.

Though I had experienced homelessness, neglect, and living in abandoned housing in
my childhood, five years later my sense of loneliness would take a turn for the worse.
March 15th, 2011 would haunt me for many years to come.

I was in the seventh grade when I was walking home from school and brutally
attacked by three high school students, having a brick slammed into my teeth.

I ran into a random McDonald’s, asking anyone who would listen to call the
ambulance. People stared, covering their mouths in shock. I tried to remain calm.
Gasping, I dragged myself to the counter. All eyes were on me, but no one was
offering to help. People seemed paralyzed by shock, which only made me more
frightened of what had happened to me.

I vaguely noticed that blood was pouring out of my mouth, and that this made it hard
to speak. Finally, the cashier came from behind the counter and handed me a warm
wet rag. Once I looked down to grab it, I noticed the blood all over my coat, my
hands, and even the cashier.

In the ambulance, it was confirmed that I had lost six teeth, four of them partially
gone and the front two completely knocked out. Later on, I found out that a part of
the bone structure underneath my nose was damaged and partially gone as well.
Every day after school I was forced to walk to the bus stop, next to the McDonalds
where I lost my teeth. Every day after school I saw my blood sitting in the McDonalds
parking lot on my way to the bus stop. As I waited for the bus, I relived the incident,
every single day. Walking past the spot where I lost my teeth, I noticed pieces of
broken teeth in the parking lot that were probably mine. Walking home from school
was never the same.
​
Weeks later the Mcdonald’s cashier who comforted me during the incident came out
to the bus stop to check on me. She asked how I was doing and how I was handling
things. Sometimes the small things mean so much. She couldn’t have had any idea
what I was going through. The amount I was dealing with. She didn’t know that I felt
alone and was deeply depressed. In only a few minutes, she made my day and
made me feel loved. Something I had been unfamiliar with for most of my life.
Many Black communities have been deprived of information on positive ways to
maintain or improve mental health. Society has put a dollar value on mental health
and if you can’t afford a counselor, then you’re out of luck. Of course, mental health
support and the stability it offers help pull impoverished communities away from the
brink of destruction. Many impoverished Black communities have little if any access
to information about mental health.

Anxiety and depression are swept under the rug in Black communities, usually going
unnamed and unaddressed. Because I grew up in a household that lacked any
knowledge of how to resolve conflict healthily, I almost became a product of this
system. It wasn’t until I took advantage of the resource of counseling that I learned
how generational cycles could be reversed and how to disrupt the path of brokenness
set for Black communities.


-Justin Black

Learn more about how you too can redefine your normal in our new book Redefining Normal: How Two Foster Kids Beat The Odds and Discovered Healing, Happiness and Love available now at re-definingnormal.com and on Amazon beginning November 9th, 2020.

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2 Comments

How Today's Foster Parents are Role Models

10/1/2020

4 Comments

 
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​  You are it. A role model.

So am I. So are each one of us. Unfortunately, there aren’t many good ones these days. There are far too many poor role models for our kids to watch, and our kids to follow today.  We know it to be true.  All we need to do is turn on the TV or social media, and we quickly see that our children are being bombarded with negative role models. You and I need to step it up. You and I need to change that.

Yet, there is more to it than that.  As foster parents, we are a unique role model; a role model to many that we might not suspect. We need to take our role of being a good parent more seriously. We need to embrace the possibility that we might be the only positive role model other children might ever see.


 There is always someone who is watching us, listening to us, and perhaps even modeling after us. Somebody is watching what you do today. Someone is listening to what you say, this very day. Maybe it is your child. Perhaps it is a niece, nephew, or grandchild. It might be the child at the grocery store, watching you down the aisle, or packing up your items at the check-out line. As a role model, what kind of message are you sending? As a role model, what kind of lesson are you teaching?

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As foster parents, we need to not only understand this, but also embrace it.  We are role models not only for the children living in our homes and as our family members, but also for the birth parents and biological children that we are caring for.

For people like 22-year-old mother Mireya Alejandra Lopez, who drowned two of her twin infants in a bathtub, she lacked love in her life. When questioned by investigators, she stated that nobody loved her children and nobody loved her. For people like Dylann Roof, the alleged shooter of nine people in Charleston, South Carolina, there were few good role models in his life, or in his home. An absent mother, a father who beat his step mother, and by age 15, Dylann began skipping classes, eventually quit school, and ended up unemployed and taking drugs. For 15-year old Alyssa Bustamante, who brutally stabbed a nine year old girl, simply because she “wanted to know what it was like to kill people,” she also suffered from lack of healthy parenting. Abandoned by her mother and, and a father who was in prison for most of her childhood, the troubled teen battled thoughts of suicide, and was on medication for depression. For the children who were rioting in Ferguson and in Baltimore, where are their positive role models? Who was telling them that their actions were wrong?


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As a parent, you will be a role model for countless people, as many eyes will be upon you. Not only will you be a role model for your children, but for the public, as a whole. For your neighbor who is having a difficult time as a parent, you are their role model. For the expectant mother at your work, you are her role model. For your child’s friend, who comes from a home of abuse, you are his role model for his future children. After all, not many in our society know what good parenting is really about these days. Your actions today might show other parents, and other children, how to act, how to behave, how to be compassionate, and how to be kind. People are watching you, today. People are learning from you, today. I am an adoptive and foster parent, taking care of 60 plus children in my home and in my family. My family, my work mates, close friends, those at my church; all will discover what foster care is all about, and what good parenting is about, just by watching what I do each and every day. The same applies to you!

Now, you might not be a foster parent, yet you are an example of what good parenting is all about.  If you are a foster parent, everything you do will send signals to the biological parents on how a parent should act, as well as how to treat their own children. Everything you say will speak volumes to the child’s birth family members.Therefore, as a parent, it is important that you embrace this role, as it will surely affect the child in your own home, as well as others around you. You are planting seeds in the lives of both your children and those around you; seeds which will hopefully blossom into something better.

-Dr. John

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    AUTHOR
    Dr. John DeGarmo is the founder and director of The Foster Care Institute, and is recognized as a leading expert in foster care. Dr. John is an TEDX Talk speaker, international trainer and speaker, consultant, author, and most importantly, a father.  He has been a foster parent  with over 60 children who have come to live in his home from adoption and foster care. He is the author of many books, including the  book  
    The Foster Care Survival Guide: The Essential Book for Today's Foster Parents.

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