Robert G. Lewis

Exploring and developing our promise of a permanent family for every child.

What Do You Think?

Fall 2003

Volume 4, Issue #8

Topic: Finding Families With Adolescents

Ideas: Do the research. Ask the questions. Involve the people you find. What could be simpler?

Discussion: Research can be both daunting and off putting. The thought of plowing through five years of case record for a young person, makes many of us cringe. But when it comes to recruiting families with teens, the case record is only one source. There are the people from the record who have been in the youth’s life to be contacted with questions. “Who cared about this young person?” “Who loves her?” The hardest research may be working with the young person who has given up. They don’t want to remember; they’ve been down that road and it hasn’t worked. Why should this time be any different? And how long are you going to be around anyway? Besides, they just want to “make it on my own”. We may be looking for parenting folks, but we don’t’ have to begin with the word family, perhaps just “Who do you want back in your life… and who else?”

Asking questions, we social workers know how to do this? But we can get so driven by forms and compliance that our questions narrow down to the forms we file. Since the forms haven’t found us families, we have to try different questions. And yet, we are such creatures of habit that we find it hard to do things differently. Even when we want to, we fall back into old habits. How hard is it to ask differently? “Who do you want to build a trusting relationship with?” When the questions turn over painful memories do we stop asking questions? When we’re looking through a painful past with a young person for the places of safety and joy, we cannot avoid the pain. Among our challenges is not knowing what we’ll find and sometimes not knowing what to do with the answers.

How then do we involve the folks we find and support their involvement? Most assuredly we don’t contact adults from a young person’s life and ask “So, do you want to adopt?” Involving other caring adults can be a major shift in our practice. Currently many of us stop with the very first “potential resource” we find instead of finding/building the network of supports for a child. When we engage adults at their strengths, we are in a very different position from the diagnostician or the investigator who identifies faults and failings. When we engage a group of caring adults we give up some of the meager control we feel we have over the situation. When we ask a group to take some responsibility for a young person, we surrender some of our authority. Do we have to change ourselves from caseworkers to group workers? How do we change the spokes of connections that every young person has from the present and past into a web of connections and a net of support?

What Do You Think?