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We know from theory, research, and common sense that stability and consistency in relationships promote children's healthy development. Unfortunately, the foster care system often fails to provide reliable, sustaining relationships. The propensity of the system to look to the external world for explanations and solutions to problems too often overlooks the child's internal distress. When we suggest to unhappy or anxious children that their feelings can be relieved by a change in the environment, we insidiously undermine and disavow the fundamental importance of the child's internal world as a source of pleasure, pain, upheaval, and regulation. Moving children from one “placement” to another when problems arise is a primary response of the foster care system. In the following, I will explore the potential impact of this philosophy on identity formation.
We marvel as we watch children grow from tiny, helpless beings to young adults who carry within them a sense of self that is cohesive and reflects the multi-faceted nature of personality. We watch and wonder as they move through the days and nights of eighteen or twenty-odd years of interactions with parents, siblings, aunts and uncles, grandparents, neighbors, teachers, playmates, friends and enemies, emerging with a sense-of-self-in-relation-to-people-and-community. The question of how and why this happens fascinates us — we look backward through analysis or biography or memoir for events and interactions that explain the fabric of a person's life. We look to longitudinal studies to describe patterns as they unfold. Whether through carefully controlled studies that consider the effects of different variables or by sifting through anecdotal evidence, we try to understand the influence of heredity, the effects of the minutiae of daily life, and the importance of organizing events in shaping character.
Even as we discover patterns, we know that some of those we see aren't real — that sometimes we impose order on an incoh