Foster Parents

Do you know that there is a fostering scheme in Singapore?

The fostering scheme works such that a child gets fostered if his own family is unable to take of him, if he is abused or abandoned. When his family is able to take him back, he leaves the foster family and returns. It is something like a temporary family home-stay for these children. Depending on the situation for each individual case, some children stay with their foster familiies for more than 10 years.

It is not adoption, although the two are often mixed-up.

A few days, I learned something new about the foster parents.

They are not encouraged to keep in touch with their foster child after he or she leaves them. That is, when they leave their foster family and return to their real family.

To put it crudely, they have to try to “break ties” at that point of time.

But why? A fellow reporter popped this question during a recent MCYS fostering scheme event.

Frankly speaking, I have no idea how strictly this is implemented (although I reckon the authorities cannot really do much if the foster child insists in keeping in touch, but then again, it seems that many children are fostered when they are really young, so it would probably be difficult for them to maintain contact even if they want to), but what I cannot understand is why this has to be so.

The fact that something by choice has to be insisted upon by the authorities, make people appear all the more in a sorry state.

I can understand that there may be sensitivities involved at this time. The “break contact measure” is perhaps to allow a smooth transition for the child to return and adapt to his true family. It is probably to prevent the foster family or the child from holding on.

But to what? To the past? It is a fact that the child was fostered, and that the foster family took in the child and looked after him as family for a period of time. If there was genuine family love nurtured between strangers, it should be something beautiful. Why forcefully destroy something beautiful?

Why can’t love from and towards both sides co-exist?

Perhaps, there are psychological factors involved to be considered for the child, which people outside the circle like me, do not know.

But something that a foster mother said lingered in my ear. She said that she feels sad whenever it is time for the foster child to leave. Perhaps it is because she knows that that may be the last time she hears from him.

I think foster families are great, especially the one that I know of taking in a teenager who suffered from cerebral palsy for four years.

Although the foster families do get allowances for taking care of the child, what they do is quite different from being a nanny. To take care of someone is one thing, to live with him and accept his everything is another.

And the heartache that they have to endure in this process pricks me.