Arizona recruits foster parents by telling them children need them. That part is true. What we do not tell them is what the first six months will actually feel like, and then we lose them.
I am a licensed counselor in Phoenix. I also aged out of Arizona's foster care system at eighteen. I have watched this from both chairs, and there is one thing I wish every new foster family in this state heard before the first placement, not after.
It usually starts quietly. The child arrives and is polite. Helpful, even. Eats what is offered, says thank you, causes no trouble. Families relax. This is going well, they think.
Then, somewhere around week six or week ten, it changes. The polite child starts raging over nothing. Food goes missing from the kitchen
and turns up under a bed. There are lies about things that did not need lying about. The child who accepted the hug last month now flinches from it, or asks for it and then bites.
Foster parents read this as failure. Theirs, usually. Sometimes the child's. They call the agency and ask whether this placement is the right fit.
Here is what is actually happening.
Being safe is a fact about a house. Feeling safe is a state of a body. Those are not the same thing, and they do not arrive together. A child can be objectively safe under your roof for weeks before their nervous system is willing to agree.
That polite child was not settled. That child was assessing. Watching your face, learning the rhythms of the house, running the same survival calculation that kept them alive somewhere else. And when the body finally concludes that the danger has passed, everything it postponed while it was busy surviving comes due at once.
The escalation is not the placement falling apart. It is a child's body deciding your house is safe enough to fall apart in.
That is the most hopeful moment in the whole placement, and we have trained families to read it as the worst one.
The cost is not abstract. Every disruption teaches a child that closeness has a shelf life. The next family meets a more guarded child, who takes longer to test them, and disrupts faster. Eventually the file says the child is the problem, and the child agrees.
None of this requires new money. It requires telling families the truth in advance that the hard weeks are predictable, that they are evidence of progress and that they will pass. It requires support concentrated in the window where families actually break, somewhere between month two and month four, instead of front-loaded at licensing and thin after. And it requires a caseworker who can say this is what we expected rather than do you want us to look at other options.
If you have thought about fostering and stopped because you were not sure you could handle it, the weeks you are picturing are usually the weeks something is going right.
Somebody should tell you that before you begin.
Kristi M. Estrada, LPC, NCC, ACS, SEP, is a licensed professional counselor and Board-approved clinical supervisor in Phoenix. She aged out of Arizona's foster care system at 18.
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: The hardest weeks in foster care may be the most hopeful | Opinion
