Nearly a month ago a church attendee had his two girls (age 10 and 3) taken away due to neglect, and thanks to something called kinship, my wife and I became their foster parents for nearly a month. The girls have been returned to their father, who hopefully gets his act together.
This situation is a bit unique as my wife and I do not have any children of our own, although we want them, and have suffered through two miscarriages. So, this was the first time we have been guardians to kids, and taking care of them days at a time. We put them to bed at night, woke them up in the morning, took them where they needed to go, fed them clothed them, taught them, and were kind to them. In many ways we were the parents (and if you are offended by me saying we parented these two children for a month let me know).
Before my wife and I had these girls brought to us we had given parenting a lot of thought, and when we found out my wife was pregnant we did some things to prepare for our future child before the miscarriages so we were not completely unprepared for children.
The ten and three year old were very different so I will give my view on both separately
The ten year old was fairly well behaved. When she disobeyed we had her write a page of lines. We only had to do this four times over the month.
When they first arrived a lot of her play with her sister involved a considerable amount of yelling, but over the month, after seeing my wife and I interact she stopped most of her yelling. One of the things that was reinforced in my thinking is that kids often mirror their parents. When she was in a household with a lot of yelling, she did a lot of yelling. When she went to a household with practically no yelling she stopped. It was fascinating to see how her play changed to mimic my wife and I in just a few weeks.
One of the biggest problems she had was that she, at ten years old, is illiterate. She has been taught whole word or site word. One of the most devious things in this teaching method is that they teach children to guess a word based on the picture near it. She can go through a children’s book, and based on the first letter of the word and the picture guess with high accuracy what the word is. The problem with this is that phonics flash cards often have a picture of the word with them, and most simple books have a lot of pictures, so once a child knows whole word/site word, it makes it significantly more difficult to teach phonics, because the best tools to teach phonics with are undermined by the guessing the child has already learned to do.
I am convinced that in five years colleges are going to be teaching phonics to new students. Especially since both these kids HAD access to tablet/phones before they came to our house. Tablet/phones can be used by illiterate people. Fortunately for us we had already long ago made the decision that our children would not have unrestricted access to the internet, and for children so young they wouldn’t have access to the internet at all. Even so for this ten year old she doesn’t see a need to read because everything she wants is on a tablet where the icons tell her what she does and does not want.
Note by the time she left, with adult help, she was able to finish reading a book. It was by no means easy, and it took far more time than it should, but we did get her through a simple book.
With that said I understand that some words are not phonetically pronounced, like ONE or TWO. I get that there are words you just have to memorize, but most words are phonetical.
We found that with the ten year old any more than 2 hours of screen time brought out a bad attitude.
I also discovered that the ten year old often had a worse attitude when she had free time than when we gave her age appropriate chores.
As for the three year old.
When she came she was feral. She didn’t know how to sit at the table, she didn’t know many words, she wasn’t potty trained, if she did something wrong and you asked her if she wanted to go to time out she said, yes.
First of all making her sit at the table to eat with everyone did wonders for her table manners. All those years hearing on the Christian radio station james dobson talking about having the kids at the table makes sense now. Kids learn from the adults they see. If they don’t see the adults doing stuff they won't learn. Up to this point the three year old had no table manners, and its likely because she rarely sat at a table to eat. When she sat with my wife, me, and her sister at the table she learned a lot, and her behavior improved very quickly. She just needed someone to SHOW her how to do stuff. I imagine all these kids who don’t know how to behave at a resteraunt don’t know how to behave because they have never or rarely ever eat at the kitchen table with their parents.
For the three year olds behavior problems the only option we had was time out. At first the little defiant thing did not fear time out at all. In fact once when I put her in time out for hitting her sister I had to put her back in time out twice for refusing to apologies. One day we put her in time out thirty five times. The last four days before she left she was finally listening. It took weeks of consistently putting her in time out for her to become obedient. Consistency is key.
As for potty training, she didn’t get it at all. So that was a failure.
Unlike the older child the three year old did not care for tv shows or movies. If they were on she ignored them and played with her toys. With the exception of Cinderella. I didn’t put that movie on for two weeks, and as soon as it was on she sat down and watched that movie quietly. It was freaking magic.
One of the things that both girls cared deeply about was their “babies”. Whether the ‘baby’ was a dall or a stuffed animal they constantly had to have them and take care of them. It was surprising to me how hard wired into them taking care of a baby was. After seeing that I am convinced that any woman who supports, much less has, abortion is broken and mentally ill. I never would have realized how much of a girls character is wrapped around the care of babies. No wonder why the powers that be spend so much money through the public school system, college, and media to demonize motherhood. The desire to take care of babies is a core part of a girl. If they can break that part of her, they break her and she is easier to control.
When it comes to dad I seriously doubt he will keep his girls. At no time during this process or after has he ever admitted fault. And by the way he is at fault. If I had a thirty year old son that left his daughters in the condition he left them I would injure him to get the point across. I think things would be better if when he lost his girls he was arrested to bring home the point that yes he did wrong, because losing his girls has not waken him up. If he loses his girls again, and I suspect he will, I hope my wife and I will be allowed to take them in.
