The House Is Not A Home: How The Ambiguity of Foster Care Harms Children

Foster Care provides temporary care to children. The system serves half a million kids annually. Over half of children entering foster care display substantial behavioral problems and/or indications of significant mental illness, many having been abused. They face higher incarceration rates, a high risk of early pregnancies, and high rates of chronic depression.

The first limitation is age-specific communication challenges. Not only do children's cognitive development and limited education hinder their ability to fully communicate their experience, but so does their legal status as minors unable to consent to interviews.

Second, there is a stigma against discussing abuse and trauma. This limits honest and negative narratives. Inversely, it introduces the possibility that interviews conducted with foster children were conducted with those who had unusually positive experiences.

Third, accounts from former foster children who are incarcerated or have died from deaths of despair are unavailable. The high number of former foster children are incarcerated makes them difficult to recruit for interviews. High rates of mental illness among this group also make them difficult to access due to the often isolating nature of mental illness.

Fourth, foster parents' accounts may be dishonest about their treatment of foster children. Foster parents who abuse their placements are unlikely to publicly admit to mistreatment. There is likely an overrepresentation of neutral/positive behavior in foster parents’ accounts of their fostering, and an under-representation of negative behaviors.

I have not been in foster care, nor have I fostered a child. I was once acquainted with a caustic person whose child had been removed from their care. They obtained information about their child's foster parents that painted them as great caretakers. As a result, I'm negatively biased against birth parents and positively biased towards foster parents.

My theory was constructed using GTM–a dynamic, iterative process of developing theory about phenomena through observations, comparisons, and interpretation. It involves approaching raw data without a prepared hypothesis, creating codes based on patterns in the data, and capturing insights and emerging connections in analytical memos.

Codes for this project were developed by reading through raw data and coding line by line, either by color-coding, or by copying and pasting quotes onto a separate document, titling them with their code, and adding to that code as more relevant quotes emerged. These processes allowed for unlimited codes that were organized and easily retrievable.

I often adapted my codes as I read. Some codes expanded, others were eclipsed by more salient ones, and some intertwined. After initial coding rounds, I revisited the data to reflect, and to consider alternative interpretations. This iterative process allowed for nuanced insights to emerge—for example, recognizing how levity serves as a vehicle for kindness in moments of stress. Impressions remaining at the end of this process formed my memos.

I tallied the instances of codes across the data and found that Ambiguity was noted most, followed by Boundary Violations and Trauma. Less frequent codes included Differences In Perspective, Emotional Generosity, Awareness/Memory, and God/Hope. In reviewing the entirety of my work, I formulated my theory that the ambiguity of foster homes can trigger foster children to experience stress related to past traumas, causing them to engage in maladaptive coping behaviors that violate foster parents’ boundaries.

The most pervasive theme I noticed in my analysis of raw data can be summarized as ambiguity. Beyond basic ambiguity, it’s a sense of uncertainty, in-betweenness, or lack of clarity that takes many forms.

The most obvious representation of ambiguity in foster care is the inherent ambiguity that comes with sharing the "home" concept. The foster “home” expands and destabilizes the child's understanding of the definition of a home. This definition becomes less defined with each additional placement. One former foster child said about entering the foster care system, “I was so grateful because I thought [my sister and I] would have a stable family and joyful life, but we were separated after our first home together. I resided in 12 different homes…” In addition to removing a stabilizing force (her sister) from her life, foster care did not offer her a continuous, stable home.

Understandably, foster children describe the home as an impersonal, liminal space. One former foster child spoke about a family housing arrangement in a detached way. She said, “I was supposed to go back and live with my aunt, maternal aunt in Argentina because my first mother is Argentinian. And it fell through the cracks.” The phrase “fell through the cracks” downplayed a serious event with casual, bureaucratic language. That event—being abandoned by a relative—directly led to her entry into foster care.

One former foster child described both her home of origin and her foster home in ways that denote ambiguity. She described being profoundly confused at the arrest of her mother on “just another not-normal day”, highlighting the inconsistency of her early home life and her lack of understanding of her environment. In foster care, she described her reaction when her birth sister was removed from the home. She stated, “I thought I was finally safe with my sister and then suddenly she had to leave. When she left, I remember watching her car drive away and I didn’t know if I’d see her again. I just completely blanked, there was nothing, there was not even sadness. It was just complete gray.” Here, ambiguity is at play in two ways: the fate of her relationship with her sister becomes another unknown and her relationship with her consciousness became ambiguous through dissociation.

Ambiguity from foster parents more often looked like confusion and disbelief about their foster child’s behavior—a mental liminal state that would, no doubt, be a mirror for the foster child. When asked what the hardest thing about being a foster parent was, one foster parent’s response was, “Not knowing, not having that plan?” This lack of clarity suggests foster homes are not run with confidence, direction, and stability.

Across these examples, ambiguity did not appear as a concrete and singular concept, but as a recurring emotional undercurrent tied to instability, unfamiliarity, and confusion. Ambiguity intertwined with the next two largest themes, trauma and boundary violations, to produce a variety of difficult emotional and behavioral challenges for foster youth.

The code “trauma” especially includes traumatic instances of grief and loss. One quote that combines ambiguity with trauma is, “I thought I was finally safe with my sister [in foster care] and then suddenly she had to leave. When she left, I remember watching her car drive away and I didn't know if I'd see her again. I just completely blanked, there was nothing, there was not even sadness. It was just complete gray.” The child’s description of her experience describes dissociation, a common symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder. The secondary trauma this child experienced when having her sister removed from her foster home was rooted in not knowing if she’d see her again, and then ambiguity reverberated throughout her body as her awareness became detached from her body. This event, directly caused by the foster care system, triggered what sounds like PTSD-induced dissociation.

Another helpful quote from a former foster child details a similarly embodied experience of ambiguity. She states, “...ambiguity for any child is very difficult to contain because there's a lot of questions. Especially if they've had the early implicit memories of trauma where they don't know what happened, but something happened to them.” The trauma of foster children's homes of origin is mirrored and amplified in the foster care system.

The code “boundary violations” denotes general boundary violations such as not following house rules, but also includes more serious offenses like gaslighting, violence, and criminal behavior. From the parent’s perspective, we have the example, “The teen we have does not really listen to boundaries. She doesn’t see my husband and I as adults at all and I don’t know why.” It’s possible that the impermanence of the foster parent, along with the looming, distant presence of a social worker as mediator creates ambiguous authority, which makes boundary-crossing easier for children. This is supported by the comment, from the same foster parent, “I tell her to knock it off but if you are serious with her she gets upset and pouts and says she’s gonna tell her social worker we’re sooo mean etc.” These boundary violations further undermine the child’s relationship with their caretaker, leading to more instability, leading to more destabilizing ambiguity.

This foster parent’s Reddit post also states that the child “keeps saying that I’m her wife and that the baby I’m pregnant with is her baby.” This boundary violation the child is engaging in is also notably detached from reality. Her connection to the world as it is is ambiguous and it’s unclear whether or not that’s intentional. A similar secondary report from another parent about the child reports that a foster child is “Lying about EVERYTHING.” The core of these boundary violations is a disconnect from reality. The ambiguous relationship between foster parent and foster child, and foster child and reality, leads to relationship-damaging boundary violations.

Through an iterative process of analysing raw data from interviews and Reddit posts, I uncovered themes in the lives of foster children. A sense of ambiguity permeated their childhoods before foster care and continued into foster care, where it was central to their experience. There was a sense of impermanence to their homes and relationships, and the children were not consistently grounded within reality or within their bodies. Reality, relationships, and consciousness were ever-shifting and fundamentally unstable. This instability was often paired with trauma or boundary violations in ways that harmed the short- and long-term interests of the child. Hundreds of thousands of children move through foster care annually and outcomes for them are profoundly unsettling. They enter into foster care with traumas that are compounded by the format of foster care. This study joins many others that question the emotional support provided by foster care. It may inform future efforts to create more stability and predictability within the system. In order to improve outcomes for foster youth, harm done by the foster care system needs to be addressed with the same urgency and seriousness as harms done in homes of origin.