36 FOSTERING CARE
By Kendall Jarboe Siblings John and Monica hid behind their older brother Paul whenever adults entered a room. <strong>The</strong> children rarely spoke, but when they did their words littered the air with profanities. At just four years old, John and his siblings left their parents’ abuse, moved in with their grandmother and enrolled in the foster care system. John Garcia lived in Los Angeles with his two siblings and parents who often drank, cursed and abused them and each other. In 1994, his parents’ violent habits escalated, which provoked the kids to seek refuge at a neighbor’s house. After receiving a phone call from Paul, their grandmother drove to the house and deemed the parents unfit to raise their children. Garcia’s parents did not argue. His grandmother then contacted Child Protective Services. A social worker came to her house once a month to check the living conditions and help the kids learn how to mentally and emotionally transition into their new home. Although young when he left his parents, Garcia knew that his living situation differed from the ordinary. Garcia’s friends had parents; he only saw his once every few years. He had to cope with not being wanted, but the love of his grandmother morphed the initial uneasiness into normality. Garcia remained in the foster care system until the age of 18 and lived with his grandmother until he was 21. His grandmother opted to not adopt the Garcia children in hopes that their parents would transform their lives and regain custody. During their time in foster care, the Garcia kids had around 20 different social workers. One social worker in particular left a major impact on Garcia. 12-year-old Garcia wanted to attend a conference for kids in foster care but did not have the means to get there on his own. “Every day, for four days straight, he drove all the way out to where I was and picked me up, and he would buy me breakfast, and we would just kind of talk,” Garcia said. “I didn’t really talk much, being introverted, but just that he was there and just him asking questions, and just being willing to pick me up; I think that was really impactful.” As of July 1, 2017, 53,086 children were “in care” in the state of California. 18,637 of these children resided in Los Angeles County, as recorded by the California Child Welfare Indicators Project in partnership with the California Department of Social Services. At a pediatric hospital in Orange, California, clinical social worker Dennis Ho says that people in his profession often face having to do things that cannot be done and fixing things that cannot be fixed. Nevertheless, Ho enjoys his job because he has the opportunity to support families. “I get to learn a lot about families in a very short amount of time. Hospitals are one of the most stressful places that families enter into … I get to hear about the most intimate and personal parts of their families because my role is to support them,” Ho said. <strong>The</strong> majority of foster children the pediatric hospital admits are victims of physical abuse. Ho receives between one and six foster care children every day. Part of Ho’s job as a clinical social worker includes determining if he should file a Child Abuse Report, which notifies the county of potential mistreatment of a child. Ho witnesses the sorrow of parents losing their kids to the county system; this process is a dichotomy between children escaping an unsafe situation and losing the homes they have known. “I think the event of a child having to enter the foster care system is one of the most, sometimes relieving moments, but sometimes also the most heartbreaking,” Ho said. “I’ve had to sit with families as their children are, they call it, ‘detained to the county,’ when the parents’ ability to make decisions for their children are taken away and placed in the charge of the county.” <strong>The</strong> somber matter of separating children from their parents is only comforting to Ho when the child is removed from an abusive home. When Child Protective Services suspect child abuse, they come to the home, interview the parents and remove the child if they believe the home to be an unsuitable living situation. Until 37
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