Our Parenting Adventures in the 1980s

They had had little parenting until they came to us. They entered the foster care system because their father was in jail for molesting Sarah, and their mother could not afford to support them anymore so she took them to the county, telling the children she would come back for them later. She didn't.

Jason was put in a foster home next door to me, and I met him in my front yard one day. He was already pretty street-wise at four, since Sarah had been responsible for a lot of his care when they were still with their mother. He had often escaped her watchful eye and taken off on his own to explore his neighborhood. When my neighbor was driving around town with him in the car, he would often point out a place where the police had found him and taken him back home.

Sarah was living with a foster family in another town about 25 miles away from us. The social worker felt that Sarah should move in first, since she was the oldest and also because we'd known Jason for several months and we hardly knew Sarah at all. So Sarah moved in on a Thursday about a week before school started, in August. The plan was that Sarah would stay with us that first week alone so we could get acquainted. Then the social worker decided that Jason should visit for that first weekend. Then the social worker decided he should just stay. So we never had our week alone with Sarah. School started almost as soon as they moved in.

Jason was starting school for the first time. Sarah was beginning third grade, but she couldn't read. She had been in special education classes, and continued in them. Jason started kindergarten in our local school, whereas Sarah had to be bussed to a school a little farther away.

All of us were learning to adjust to each other. Sarah and Jason had been separated for several months. Kosta and I had never had any children. Sarah and Jason were vying for pecking order, and had very different foster homes, though both homes were good. For the first two months, it was as if there were no world outside our home, even though Kosta went to work, the children went to school, and all of us went to church on Sunday.

Then our world began to expand. We began to introduce the children to others their own age. Jason, of course, already fit right in, since he had lived with the five other children next door and knew all the other children in the neighborhood, as well. He was very sociable, unless you were a social worker. The social workers had him pegged as non-verbal, and that was a joke. I had met him in my front yard when he initiated the conversation by asking what I was doing. I think social workers were about the only people he didn't want to talk to.

Sarah found making friends harder. There was someone next door her age, but Kim was the only one for several months that she played with in the neighborhood who was her own age. When we invited friends over to play with Sarah, she didn't know quite what to do with them past the first 15 minutes. She would come in the house and leave the playmate outside. It was then we realized that she would need a lot of help in learning to play with others she didn't know well.

During these first few months, we began to make short trips to nearby places we had visited by ourselves before, and thought the children might enjoy. We also wanted to expand their world of experiences. Jason had been to a preschool in his previous foster home and that had given him some enriching experiences. He was full of curiosity and enjoyed learning. Sarah felt insecure in school because she was behind. She needed a lot of enriching experiences just to know where she fit into the world. One of the first places we took the children was to a living history day at La Purisima, a mission near Lompoc. We invited another family to join us. They had children who matched our children's ages. Their son actually shared Jason's birthday. This picture was taken at the mission.

The children still played best with each other and with us. This picture shows Sarah and Jason playing when we went to visit Kosta's parents in Carmel Valley. You can see they were quite imaginative with the materials they found at hand to make their "house."

Parenting is a good excuse to play. In this picture, the children decided to dress Kosta up in whatever they found at hand. This had been preceded by the children wearing some of what Kosta is now wearing and circling him after hiding behind his chair and chasing each other. They then decided to see how he would look after they passed some of their props onto him.

Another favorite with the children was when I would get down on the floor with them to play coyote, cat, and dog. Each of us would be one of the above. We would crawl on all fours making the appropriate noises at each other as coyote tried to catch the cat and dog. It was a very noisy game, but enjoyed by all.

Sarah liked to have Kosta carry her around like a sack of potatoes, slung over his shoulder. Jason preferred a regular piggy-back ride.