Family Matters : O.C. Foster Parents Are Struggling to Keep Siblings, Who’ve Endured Enough Trauma, in One Home

Barbara Harris recalls feeling lost in the system when she began her search 3 1/2 years ago for the brothers and sisters of Destiny, a little girl she brought into her Stanton home for foster care.

She tried to solicit the aid of private and county social workers, but, she said, no one would help her.

“Everyone told me that it was a real noble thing I was doing but that I would never find them,” Harris said.

Today, the Harris family has doubled in size, with children ranging in age from 2 months to 13 years. The four children who join the Harrises’ two natural sons are all brothers and sisters from the same drug-dependent mother, and Barbara and Smitty Harris are relentless in their quest to keep the children in one home.

The Alexanders of Huntington Beach went through a similar battle when they brought three foster siblings into their home seven months ago.

“I think that the children get caught up in the system, and they get lost in it,” said Brenda Alexander, who also has two natural daughters, an adopted son and an unrelated “crack baby” she is fostering. “They lose their sense of family and heritage.”

These two Orange County families illustrate the frustrations of today’s foster parents as they try to make a difference in an overloaded and overworked system. While the goal of foster care is to keep siblings under one roof and ultimately return them to their natural parents, the Alexanders and Harrises have learned how difficult it is to keep these children together.

“In my heart, I want to adopt them because we’ve really bonded with these kids,” Alexander said. “But I have to remember that I’m a foster parent and that I have to give them back to their mother if she cleans up her act . . . that’s the hard part.”

The struggle to keep siblings together is one the many burdens taxing the foster care system in the United States, says Gordon Evans, spokesman for the National Foster Parent Assn. After all, how do you find room for a group of siblings when there aren’t enough homes available to foster a single child?

The state allows for a maximum of six children to be placed in foster family homes, but very few homes are qualified for that many because few couples have the room for so many troubled youngsters.

“These foster parents who take four siblings are angels, but there are just not enough of them,” Evans said.

Teri JoensWhite, director of Foster Family Network, a private Long Beach-based agency that places children into certified foster homes throughout Orange and Los Angeles counties, maintains that although it is preferable to put siblings in one foster home, it’s not always the best thing for the children.

“There are special situations where the children seem to deteriorate in the homes because of particular types of past abuse and how it affects them,” she said. “In those cases, it’s better if they are separated.”

In Orange County, private and county agencies are supposed to inform new foster parents of siblings within the system. But large caseloads make it difficult to track siblings, and few numbers are available regarding brothers and sisters in foster care.

Much of the burden then of finding a child’s siblings falls on social workers, who often must separate siblings to place them into immediate foster care because of abuse or neglect.

“It’s hard because it’s like you’re playing God,” said Nicole Waldroop, a social worker for Foster Family Network. “There’s quite a few nights when I come home and cry, but there are also times when I think I’m making a difference.”

Waldroop’s frustration seems to be warranted. According to a 1991 National Foster Parent Assn. survey, there are 447,000 foster children in the United States, and only 100,000 foster homes in which to place them. Crack and alcohol problems and child abuse are all being reported more often, dumping a staggering amount of damaged youths and “drug babies” into a system that can barely foster an only child--let alone clusters of siblings.

“It’s very hard for me to be optimistic,” Evans said. “It’s pretty scary.”

June statistics for Orange County showed 1,631 spots in group homes or foster family homes, with 1,485 of them filled. However, there were an additional 911 dependent children who were in relatives’ care, and many of them may return to the foster system.

“There are many more children available for placement than foster homes,” said Gene Howard, director of Children’s Services for the Orange County Social Services Agency. “We would rather have several homes to choose from.”

Barbara Harris found three of Destiny’s siblings through her own amateur detective work, and they have since been placed in her home after they tested positive for cocaine at birth. The natural mother, a Los Angeles woman, has had eight children to date--all of whom have been taken away because of their mother’s drug addiction.

“I feel it’s important to keep them together because they’re family,” Harris said. “They’re no different than my family, and I wouldn’t want someone to take my family and spread them all apart.”

Harris said she feels that the natural mother of her foster children doesn’t deserve to keep having children.

“Every year she keeps having another one, and every year I keep finding them and taking them in,” Harris said. “I feel (women) should no longer have any rights after two, three, four, five, six, seven and now eight babies born drug-addicted. . . . What about the rights of these babies?”

Harris is now concentrating on adopting the siblings amid stressful court dates, doctor’s appointments and countless calls to social workers. The half a dozen children now living in their modest north Orange County home include natural sons Brian, 13, and Rodney, 11, and foster siblings Destiny, 3 1/2, Isiah, 2 1/2, Taylor, 1 1/2, and Brandon, 2 months.

“We haven’t gone anywhere in three years,” Harris said with a smile. “With each one it’s, like, here I go again, another 20 years of parenting.”

The Alexanders maintain that adoption should not necessarily be the eventual solution to foster care. Although it would be heart-wrenching to give them up, the Alexanders say they would feel a sense of bittersweet accomplishment in returning the foster children to their mother if she changed her life to the court’s satisfaction.

“When Bill and I first considered foster care, it was not with the idea of adopting,” Brenda Alexander said. “It was with the idea of providing a loving home, a very positive childhood, and to teach them that there’s something better. . . . The system decides whether they will go back (to the natural mother) or not.”

As 6-year-old Billy wrote “I will always remember to do my homework” 50 times at the living room table, Vannessa, 5, and Taylor, 4, ran in with drawings and messages of “I love you, Mommy and Daddy.” Year-old Angelea napped upstairs.

“It’s extremely hard. They came with rotted teeth, with head lice,” Alexander said. “Billy, when he first got here, he said he was going to love it here because he had a pillow.”

Siblings in foster care often have survived with only each other to depend on, and parental neglect gives them a crash course in how to take care of one another.

“That’s all they have in these abusive homes,” Evans said. “In many of these situations, the oldest child is very mature . . . a parent figure to the others, and they’re desperate to stay together.”

Both Harris and Alexander added that their foster children came into their lives with no photographs.

“All of the children we have taken in come with no past,” Harris said. “I have no pictures of Destiny. Her first eight months of life--it’s like she didn’t exist until we got her.

Alexander is also saddened by the blank pictures in her baby books.

“I had no pictures. Now, I’m a photography buff,” she said.

The backgrounds of the Alexanders’ foster children are horrific, yet tragically common in a system designed to protect children from their own neglectful or abusive parents. Their natural father is in prison for trying to kill their mother, and the children have been taken from their mother twice because of her frequent bouts with cocaine and alcohol.

However, the Alexanders remain true to what they call their “mission” as foster parents, which is to reunify the siblings with their natural mother.

“I think that if she straightens her life out, then she deserves to get them back,” said Bill Alexander, a Los Angeles County deputy marshal. “That’s the whole point of it, to get the parents to wake up and straighten themselves out.”

Evans, himself a foster parent for 17 years, says he shares the Alexanders’ philosophy toward their jobs as “sacrificial volunteers” and maintains that foster care has gotten a bad rap over the years.

“We are considered ‘different’ or ‘coldblooded’ to be able to let go after a relationship has deepened and a child must leave. We don’t pretend that parting is easy, but we accept it as a natural event in doing our job. Society weeps at the tragedy of abused and/or neglected children but leaves it up to someone else to help them. We are the someone else.”

Lunging toward cries coming from different directions, Harris says she will see to it that her new family stays together.

“Being a parent takes a lot more than giving birth,” she said. “Our many hours spent cuddling these drug-addicted babies over three years of sleepless nights and always being there when they needed us entitles us to be Mom and Dad.

“I’ll never deny them the truth about their natural parents, but I’ll fight till the the end of time to keep these innocent children from ever having to be subjected to that lifestyle.”