Creating Family Through Foster Care

Queer youth are overrepresented in the foster care system, meaning that the percentage of youth in foster care who are LGBTQ is significantly larger than the percentage of LGBTQ youth in the general population. Choosing to become a resource in the foster care system may seem overwhelming or complicated, but it can be an important lifeline for these kids. This week, Celeste Carolin guest hosts In the Den, and special guest Dr. Gwen Bass joins us again to discuss some of the important aspects of foster care and how to get involved. 

Special Guest: Gwen Bass

Dr. Gwen Bass is the author of Immaculate Misconception: A Story of Biology and Belonging, in which she tells her story of growing up one of the first children of lesbians conceived through artificial insemination.  She is a teacher, advocate, parent mentor, researcher, and collaborative consultant. With a decade of experience each in K-12 classroom teaching and teacher education, plus years of research and program development, Gwen supports kids and adults whose needs and voices aren’t honored by conventional systems. Her team provides consultation and training to help nonprofits, educators, government agencies, and caregivers foster positive outcomes for young people — especially those with disabilities and learning differences, LGBTQ+ youth and families, and youth in foster care and unique family situations. Gwen is also a foster and adoptive parent in a queer blended family. They travel often, work like a team, and live by three rules: Have fun, be safe, be kind.

Links from the Show:

• Gwen’s website: www.drgwenbass.com 
• Gwen on Queer Family Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3gqsGeQifnrx26W6taN3X1 
• Gwen on This Queer Book Saved My Life: https://thisqueerbook.com/immaculate-misconception/ 
• Gwen on First Person Plural: https://www.keystepmedia.com/podcast/sister-act/  
• Join Mama Dragons here: www.mamadragons.org 

In the Den is made possible by generous donors like you. Help us continue to deliver quality content by becoming a donor today at mamadragons.org. 

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Transcript

JEN: Hello and welcome to In The Den with Mama Dragons. This podcast was created to walk and talk with you through the journey of raising happy, healthy, and productive LGBTQ humans. Thanks for listening. We’re glad you’re here.

CELESTE: Hello. Today, things are a little different. Jen is out. I’m your host today, Celeste Carolin and I’m jumping in to help. We were talking to Gwen in episode 64 and she shared a fascinating personal story and helped us understand many different things and meanings of family. Dr. Gwen Bass is the author of Immaculate Misconception: A Story of Biology and Belonging, in which she tells her story of growing up one of the first children of lesbians conceived through artificial insemination. She is a teacher, advocate, parent mentor, researcher, and collaborative consultant. With a decade of experience teaching K-12 classroom teaching and teacher education, plus years of research and program development, Gwen supports kids and adults whose needs and voices aren’t honored by conventional systems. Gwen is also a foster and adoptive parent in a queer blended family. They travel often, work like a team, and live by three rules: Have fun, be safe, be kind. Welcome, Gwen. We really appreciate you coming back.

GWEN: Thanks for having me.

CELESTE: Gwen, if you don’t mind doing just kind of a quick recap about your story. If we could put it in a little nutshell of how you got to where you’re at.

GWEN: Sure. It’s funny. I was on a podcast a while ago where they asked me to do a 30 second summary and I was like, “Ah, that’s really hard.” So I’ll do my best because it’s kind of a complicated story. I was born in 1982. My parents were two of the first lesbians among the first sort of wave of folks who were using artificial insemination to create a family. So I grew up in the northeast with my family. My parents separated when I was young. One moved abroad, so I went back and forth between Massachusetts and Switzerland for the early part of my life between my two parents. Ended up becoming a foster parent in my early 20s, simultaneously became a teacher and school counselor. So that’s work life, home life. I ended up, sort – not sort of, definitely – adopting three kids through foster care. I had gotten married during that time. Got divorced. Now live with my partner and her biological daughter, my three adopted kids and work has sort of led me through, I’ve worked for a long time with emotional behavior disorders, became really interested in how schools are challenging for kids who’ve experienced trauma, was also a foster parent myself, did a lot of my graduate work in school counseling and special education looking specifically at how can we help parents better support kids in the areas that we know also help them do well in school, if that makes sense.

CELESTE: Totally.

GWEN: So that’s the best nutshell I can give you. But I’m happy to fill in any blanks that I might’ve missed.

CELESTE: That’s great. I love that recap. And just for folks to know, go grab Gwen’s book and really learn her story because it’s phenomenal and it will fill in those extra parts. 

So today I want to talk to you a little bit about things that you’re kind of an expert on. And one of them is around fostering. I know a little bit about the social problem around fostering and specifically placing LGBTQ children. That is a difficult placement, especially in states that are more conservative. Can you tell me what you know a little bit about the social problem?

GWEN: Yeah. For sure. So, I think one of the things, and it feels relevant to the conversation, that I was particularly interested in when I became a foster parent and was working in education, was the fact that almost half of the kids in foster care, also receive special education services. Now, it’s not necessarily something that people talk about when they’re recruiting foster parents. In part, because I think there’s this hope that when you take in a kid – and I’ve talked to plenty of foster parents who have this initial experience or goal at the outset – “I’m going to love this kid and they're going to be fine because I have that much love.” And I think what can sometimes happen when people are also having to navigate special education systems or figuring out how to get kids early intervention is that it can get really confusing and overwhelming. And some of the behaviors that people see are kind of out of step with what they anticipated their lives would be like as foster parents. It felt like community service work. “This is what I’m going into. It’s going to be dreamy and lovely and love is going to solve all the problems.” And we need to keep some of that. I think that that’s important for folks to kind of enter into the field as foster parents with really open hearts and a lot of patience. But one of the things that got me really interested in the work is the fact that I was seeing so many of these kids need special education support and be really misunderstood because we don’t, still, totally understand the impact, sort of how trauma presents in kids at school verses how certain learning disabilities or neurodivergence might present in schools, which feels related to your question about fostering LGBTQ youth because a lot of states have really been trying to push towards educating foster parents around how to do that. I think it’s something like 30% of kids in foster care identify as LGBTQ. Yeah. 30% of kids in foster care, which is HUGE, right? And when we talk about 30% of the kids identifying as LGBTQ and almost 50% presenting with some kind of disability, that to me seems really significant. And I think it also speaks to sort of the overlap we see between neurodivergence and gender expansive expression which is an emerging area that people are starting to look at more. But it makes those kids really difficult to place because a lot of people have preconceived notions or prejudices or just feel like, “Oh gosh. I have no idea how to handle that,” especially when we’re talking about teens, which is when a lot of kids are coming out.

CELESTE: So, start us off from the basics. Can you tell me about what does a foster parent even do? What does that even look like?

GWEN: So, every state has some kind of requirement for what you have to do to become a foster parent. It generally involves health assessments, home assessments, things like that. Just making sure that you have a safe place to bring kids and you’re in good health to be able to do that and that you have resources that you would need to care for a child. So those are very basic screening tools that they have in place. And then there’s some kind of training program. Which, most of the states adopt training programs that really are equal parts, “We're going to give you some information about what it’s like to be a foster parent and what children may have experienced. And we’re trying to make sure that you’re a good fit for being a foster parent.” So once you go through one of those programs, and then you also have to write your life story. So at least in Massachusetts, which has one version, there are about three programs people use nationwide to prepare foster parents. In Massachusetts we use one called MAPP. Model Approaches to Partnership and Parenting. And basically the idea is, they give you a little bit of background kind of what kids present with .They tell you a little bit about the system. and then they ask you to talk about your own experiences growing up, who you are, what you bring to the table so that you’re aware of your own potential to be like, “Oh, I had this hard experience as a kid. How might that play out in my parenting.” Just sort of like to cue people towards thinking about what parenting might be like for them.

CELESTE: So, after recalling back because I know it’s been a couple decades, probably, since you did that, do you feel like it gave you the tools you needed to kind of understand what you were getting into?

GWEN: No. But I think, I started a lucrative babysitting business when I was 12. I was always really into and good at being with kids, camp counselor, basketball coach. That was my thing. So for me, I felt like any information they gave me was going to be useful and I was probably going to figure out on the ground what I needed to know about each individual kid who came through my home to make it work in whatever way.

CELESTE: And so your personality adapted to it really well?

GWEN: Yeah. So what I find, though, is that people who have that skill set, who come at teachers, physicians, people I know who come in with a lot of training on how to support kids, be with kids, feel the most frustrated at the system because the system is really difficult and it’s really bureaucratic and it doesn’t always feel child-centered. And that can be hard. So, to answer your question, I don’t think that that really prepares parents. And I’ve gone back and forth over the course of my career being like, ‘Do we need to do more at the outset to get people ready to foster or do we need to just give people more support while they’re fostering?” And I’ve started to lean towards the second, or towards the latter, to say: there’s only so many things that they can tell you about what it might be like when you have a kid that you could even begin to wrap your head around until there’s a kid in front of you. And then you’re like, “Oh. I think there was a note on this in that class that I totally didn’t pay attention to because I didn’t think it would apply to me.” And then you’re like, “Now I need more help figuring this out.” So I’ve actually spent the last, I don't know, five or six years of my career just doing a lot of work with preservice foster parents, and inservice foster parents to say like, “Okay. I’ve been on all sides of the table. I ‘ve been a trainer for folks. I’ve been a classroom teacher. I am a parent of foster and adoptive. And I really get a lot of the things folks are dealing with, especially when it comes to how trauma presents at home and stuff like that. And from that place, I’ve been able to talk to folks about, “What do you actually need to know now to deal with the kid in front of you who’s refusing to do whatever it is you’re asking them to do or struggling with hiding food or whatever.”

CELESTE: So you do all this training which takes about how much time?

GWEN: Before you become a foster parent? Most states require 30 hours.

CELESTE: OK. So you do 30 hours of training to prepare you for this experience.

GWEN: Yep.

CELESTE: And then you pass.

GWEN: Yep. You pass. They say your house has enough smoke detectors and you have the right number of exits you need and square footage for kids. And then they send you a kid.

CELESTE: And then they send you a kid? And then what? What does that look like day to day?

GWEN: It’s really wild. And you just don’t know. And people will often talk to me before they start fostering and they’ll say, “OK. I just know that I want five-year-olds.” Right? “Or somebody who’s under the age of 6” or whatever. “And we told our social worker that that’s what we want. Is that what we’re going to get? Are we going to get a lot of calls about other stuff?” I get calls about health needs that I don’t have the ability in my house to accommodate. You’re going to get calls because we need placements for kids.

CELESTE: Right.

GWEN: So it’s difficult. And you just get a kid and they come with their story. So the first kid that I got was a two-year-old who had been in something like 13 homes in those two years.

CELESTE: Why do you think that was?

GWEN: She had some mild health issues. She had some pretty significant behaviors. I mean, let’s just put this in perspective because she’s two, right? Whatever significant behaviors you have at one, to me there’s really no good reason why a kid needs to bounce 11 times in two years. She had been in the system for six or nine months and then went to the birth family and then came back out. So that was part of the bouncing. And then, when a kid comes out on an emergency basis, so that’s why I do what I do now. I only do emergency foster care in my home. Meaning, there was a domestic violence dispute in the middle of the night, a kid comes to you, and the next day they say, “Oh, wait. We found that Grandma can take her.” And they go with Grandma or they're looking for a longer term placement kind of thing.

CELESTE: So that two-year-old you got, kind of backing up, you get this two year old. You know they’ve been bouncing around in the system.

GWEN: And she’s accumulated quite a story by the time she got to me. Like, “She’s a biter.” Like all this language that we’re using to describe this kid who’s been super traumatized. And she presented with a lot of difficult attachment stuff. So there were certain moments in my life where I'm like, “The first time I did that thing, I got the really hard version of that thing.” This is one of those times, right. This kid is a tough cookie. It was not always easy. I really needed to pull on my skills as an educator and all my years of child care experience to be like, “How am I going to make this work for this kid?” And it ultimately was really sweet and great. And she landed in a long-term placement and that was a really profound learning experience. But in that process, I think I was 23 at the time that I started fostering. I was like a baby. And I was like, “Wow, this is a lot of work. This two-year-old is a handful.” And you think you know how to do all these things and then you’re in it and the kid is yours. And you’re like, “This is the time when the babysitting gig would ordinarily end…” and I’d be like, “Okay great. I’ll go hang out with friends and go be a 20-something year old.”

CELESTE: Right.

GWEN: But that didn’t happen. But it was a really good experience to have as my first experience because it was really hard and I had to pull in a lot of resources. I consulted with clinicians and my wife and I really had to do a lot to figure out how do we build a community around this kid who’s really struggling and who’s really little. There’s a lot of opportunity here and she was like a super sweet kid who had a lot of needs.

CELESTE: So how do you think all that movement and all this labeling affected this little kid?

GWEN: Something I think about a lot and I’ve had many experiences similar to that over time. I was actually just doing a professional development, like, leading a faculty meeting for a group of middle school teachers and we were talking about trauma. And I was talking about when I first became a foster parent, I think that I probably did a lot more processing of my reaction to the stories that I’d heard about the kids who are in my care in front of their educators. So I’d be in the preschool like, “Hey, this is this kid you’re about to get.” And I would share more information than that educator probably needed to successfully take care of this kid. And that balance is something that I think about all the time now. And even having sat in the teacher’s lounge at school and knowing stories about kids who were never even in my classroom that I shouldn’t know. There’s no reason for me to know that story. But the adults who were around me were like, “Oh my gosh, this story is so tragic and profound, I have to tell someone.” But we forget in that context that it’s connected to a person and we all make assumptions based on what we hear about that kid. And those assumptions are really not healthy, often. So I didn’t find this kid to be a biter. She definitely had some issues. And we definitely got some support for her. But the picture that had been painted was there’s no way this kid can stay in one place because she’s been so difficult. And it worked that we were two people and she was the only kid we had at the time. but all of that to say, I’m really cautious of sharing anything about kids that is not in language that I would use to talk to them about their own experience.

CELESTE: I think that makes sense. We know that narrative therapy or other forms that the stories we tell ourselves and others subconsciously we treat ourselves and we treat others differently because of these stories. And if these kids get locked in that identity of the story, how can they change if we hold them to that?

GWEN: Right.

CELESTE: It’s really interesting. So we kind of get an idea that you, like, you get this foster kid and you kind of don’t know what you’re getting. You have some basic knowledge from the paperwork of, like, this is the story. But then you get them and what is your goal of being that foster parent in that journey with this unique kid and unique stuff?

GWEN: I think about it as being like a gas station. I’m like, “We’ll fill you up. We’ll send you on your way.” We can give you some fuel. We can give you some snacks. The goal in my mind is to think about, “How am I setting this kid up for whatever’s next?” when I’m fostering. It gets really complicated when – my daughter came home at 9 weeks and was just supposed to stay for 45 days. And then it was like 45 more days, and 45 more days, and then it was like, actually forever. Are you guys into it? And we said yes and that process, the process from, “I agree to adopt this child” to “They’re actually free for adoption” is really fraught, right? So like, there’s these two pieces, there’s the foster piece where you’ve got the kids in your home and you’re thinking about, “How can I set them up to be successful when they return to their birth families?” Or “How can I set them up to be successful when they move into a long-term foster placement or an adoptive placement?” And that’s one type of engaging with kids. In the process ,we’re all humans, right. So some of those kids you just fall in love with. And you’re like, “Oh my gosh, it’s going to feel really hard when this kid is reunified.” Or “It’s going to feel really hard when this kid moves on even though I know that that’s the right thing for them.” There are other times when it feels really clear like, “Yep. My job is to really be your gas station. I’m here to feel you up and give you what you need and then I’m going to send you on your way in the best way that I possibly can.” But some of those things don’t always happen. That’s the ideal, but it’s not always that cut-and-dry.

CELESTE: That makes sense. So tell me a little bit more about some of these kids, at least the ones you’re taking now, come from emergencies. Where do these other kids come from?

GWEN: In general, into foster care?

CELESTE: In general.

GWEN: So usually you’re talking about instances of either ongoing or prolonged, or acute abuse and neglect. So schools tend to be like – you see a lot more filings in two times per year. But particularly in the fall because kids are back in school and there are more mandated reporters. So any educator is required to report anything related to abuse and neglect that they observe or hear a child report to them. So that’s one of the times when we see upticks in referrals to DCF and those processes of kids coming into care. But it really ranges. I’ve had kids who were living in a car. I’ve had kids who came in because there was a major domestic dispute and DCFS had already attempted to provide certain services to support a family and that wasn’t working. Or parents are incarcerated or there’s not enough food, or kids aren’t attending school, or different kinds of substance abuse issues.

CELESTE: And my guess is every state is different, but tell me a little bit about cost or resources that you need to actually do this?

GWEN: So I think about the resources in two different ways. It’s such a complicated role because you’re being asked to – you have this child in your home. Most of the legal pieces around that child really are your responsibility. So all the day-to-day kid stuff, like getting the kid out the door, getting them to school, you know, health care. All those things are your responsibility to manage. There are people who make decisions about aspects of that child’s life that you have no control over. So, if the kid is sick, you take the day off of work. The kid needs to go to an appointment that’s really far away. The kid has a visit. All of these things -- a visit with their biological families. All of these things are things that you’re required to facilitate and it gets really – it’s a lot. Because then you’re also feeling all of their attachment stuff because they’ve had this major traumatic disruption. So you’re working really hard to be like, “I’m here for you. We got this. I’m listening to you. I’m going to be a secure adult for you.” All of these pieces around rebuilding trust in relationship are happening while – and again and I said before, some of the folks who are the best with kids struggle the most with the system because simultaneously, sometimes decisions are made about different kinds of things that affect the child and affect the foster parent but neither of those two folks gets to be a part of making those choices. So maybe you have a kid who’s been in foster care for 3 months and every time they have a visit with their biological family, they really struggle when they come back. So a lot of families have once or twice a week visitation. So the kid will go either to a visitation center or an office and have an hour with their birth parent or extended family. Those are really important and they’re really hard. The come-down from those can be really, really difficult for kids who are returning into care after those visits. So a lot of the foster parents I work with talk about, “How are we going to handle visit days?” because after a visit things get really, really disruptive. So you have situations where foster parents are seeing kids struggle to kind of recover or come back after visits. And somebody decides that the visits need to be increased. And so, even if we know in our heart of hearts that that is what that child needs to be successful in reunification, we’re creating a really hard situation for that kid at home. And then the foster parents have to sort of manage that and also manage this, “I know that I’m having to get called out of work because they’re having a ton of behavior at school after this visit. And I am their person but this feels really stressful and it’s being put upon me.” That’s just one example. There are lots of other sorts of decisions that get made or the department will decide to reunify a family. So, I’ve definitely had kids in my care where I’ve observed things in visitation with bio families or I’ve heard things or I’ve known things where I’m like, “This kid is being reunified and sent back home, and I really don’t think it’s safe.” And it’s not my decision to make.

CELESTE: Right. How do you cope with that? I’m assuming that that’s one of the harder things.

GWEN: Yep. Yeah, it’s really hard. One of the situations that still feels like the most heart-wrenching. I think I talked about it in the last episode. Is this kid who we took who we wanted to facilitate . . . We knew we were only going to be able to have him for a certain amount of time. And our goal was to facilitate a smooth transition to a new placement for him. And we had our training before we became foster parents. “This is how things can work. It can be beautiful.” And, honestly, with that two-year-old, who we had that I was talking about before, we did have this storybook transition to this couple who took her and then we became very close friends. It was just exactly what you’d want. But it doesn’t always work out that way. And it really depends on who the kid is and sort of what’s available in terms of placement and what’s happening for them. But I feel like there’s definitely – it’s really hard. And I think all you can do is know that you – back to the gas station analogy, right. I filled you. I did everything I could while you were here and I feel like, too, about how we can become resources for the next placement that kids go to regardless of what that is. But just that continuity is often missing and not every parent is open to it. Not every adoptive parent is open to it for a variety of reasons that often make good sense. But, as much as we can to kind of be, how can I maintain some level of continuity with this person.

CELESTE: So, if we kind of think about your experiences with the foster system. What are some of the lessons learned that you wish you would have known through this process?

GWEN: For me, part of this is being young when I started. And I remember I had a colleague who said to me years ago when I was very early in my career and I actually had a couple of students in my classroom that were placed in foster care. And I remember being like, “I’m going to go visit them.” Like really being invested in supporting them through that experience. Which was important and great. And also she said to me, “Your arms are only so long. You can only do what you can do.” And I thought about that for the last 20 years. Just being like, “Wow that was a really good point.” And so I feel like you have to be in your own integrity. And it’s really hard work. And so one of the things that for me is just: what do I need to do to, by the end of the day, to feel like I did a good job by this kid. And then I’m right with myself around how I handled the day or how I’m thinking about what’s best for this child or how I’m supporting them. I’m like, am I in my own integrity? Am I doing my best job? And best job doesn’t mean that I’m doing it perfectly.

And the second thing I would say is, when I talk to foster parents, one of their biggest concerns is these kids have been through so much trauma and now here I am in a power struggle with this four-year-old about putting on their shoes and I’m totally losing my cool and I’ve ruined them because I’m retraumatizing them with my response to this behavior. And I think it can feel like the bar is really high, like we can’t make any mistakes. Everything has to be gentle parenting and nobody’s allowed to be escalated because that would mean that we’re retraumatizing kids. And that’s just not reality. Anyone who’s a parent knows, we all have moments when we lose our cool or we say something that we didn’t mean to say or we get pulled into the dumbest power struggle. It just happens. And so I always talk to people about – and parenting kids that have experienced trauma is a lot. It’s different from parenting kids who have secure attachments. It’s really, really, really different. And most of the strategies that were used with us or that we’ve seen in the public or people are recommending, don’t always work for kids who’ve experienced trauma and have that disrupted attachment. And so I always just try to suggest to folks that you remember that you can only do your best. And you don’t have to be perfect. And you're not ruining anybody by trying. The power is always in the repair. You can always come back from a hard moment and have a good conversation about it. It doesn’t mean you have to be perfect. But I think those are the two pieces for me that are – because many decisions are out of your hands and you can only do what you can do. You’ve got to stay in your lane, you know.

CELESTE: One of my good friends, Neca Allgood has a great quote which I abide by is that kids don’t need perfect parents. They just need good enough parents. And I think that some of your lessons learned apply beyond just the foster world where there’s a lot of pressure that you have to do it the right way, the perfect way, or you’re breaking these kids, which they don’t need perfect parents.

GWEN: Yeah.

CELESTE: So, if someone wants to foster or adopt, what are some of the things you would have them consider first?

GWEN: I would think about what your goals are. So some people foster to adopt. So a lot of people will say “I’m seeking a placement because I want to be a long term parent.” And so I think if you’re going in with that mentality of –I guess I’ll back up. Any time you take a placement through the state, if you use a state adoption agency and you do what’s called public child welfare work, as opposed to working with a private adoption agency. Any time you work through a public entity, there is some level of risk involved that’s a little bit different than when you’re working with a private agency. So my daughter’s, or my son’s a really good example. He came home at two days. Every child is assigned with a goal. So my son from the time was born, his goal was adoption. The department’s responsibility was to find him a permanent home. So, on some level as a parent who was ready to adopt, I was like, great, cool, this is going to work out because his goal is adoption. But there can be family members that come forward. Maybe they have an uncle who really wants to adopt them and they didn’t think to ask that uncle before. Now they’re asking even though he’s been placed with me. Or maybe you have really homophobic parents, biological parents, who are like, I do not want my child to grow up with that family. Those kinds of things can sometimes affect the way that placements stay or don’t stay, remain or don’t remain. And so those are things to kind of keep in mind. I think there’s a level of risk associated with the adoption process if you go through the foster system. So that’s one of the things I would be thinking about, is how comfortable are you with that risk? And we had a very ambiguous situation with my youngest child. It looked for a long time like – there was a real question for several months about whether they were going to be able to stay with us or they were going to be sent to live somewhere else. And in that process, I really had to get right with this idea that, even if they move on and their brother is still my son. I had their older brother. Their older brother is my son, adopted. And then they came home. And there was some real ambiguity because the case was different. It’s just the logistics of the way that case was. So there’s a long period of time of just having to be okay in myself of like, I’m going to give my kid this everything I can while they’re here and if they leave that’s going to be devastating and we’re going to have to deal with that as a family and I have to give myself over to this process and be vulnerable and put myself at emotional risk to make sure this kids gets what they need in terms of a bonding experience in early childhood. And, ultimately, it worked out well and they’re my kid. But that’s something you have to negotiate.

I think the other piece is just an awareness that kids who’ve experienced trauma – all of my kids came home in infancy. Two of them came home at two days. I say that, acknowledging that it was very clear that they had in utero trauma experiences that have affected their development and that there’s intergenerational trauma patterns that play out in how they negotiate the world. And those, I think, taking some time to educate yourself and understand those things is really important before you enter into the process because I feel like I have great relationships with my kids. I think they’re lovely people. I feel like our family is great. I’m happy we’re doing well, everybody’s thriving in their ways. And it’s not easy and it’s not without a lot of work. And it never is for anyone, right? There’s no guarantee you’re having your own biological kids that kids are going to go exactly how you foresee that they might. But I do think that there’s a layer of education around: What am I really getting into? How does trauma affect development? What might I want to be thinking about? That’s a really important pre-placement conversation or kind of learning experience to have.

CELESTE: Would you have any different advice for fostering or adopting LGBTQ kids?

GWEN: No. I think from my perspective, what I feel is that there are, certainly there are pieces that you’re going to want to understand about development and kind of understanding aspects of what happens for gender expansive youth and what some of the health considerations you might want to be thinking about are. And I’ve also worked with a number of families who have kids who identify as LGBTQ+ or gender expansive and have biological families who are really, really not accepting. And not just teens, but young kids. And it’s hard to say what you need to learn ahead of time. But I do think you have to think ahead of time about. . . So some really common hypothetical situations, how am I going to handle being supportive of this kid's identity if their biological family isn’t? How am I going to help them to develop a positive narrative of who they are and also maintain a positive relationship to whatever extent that they can with their bio families? Or what education might I want to be able to provide? What kind of resources exist in my community? I think I’d also be wanting to think about, we know so much about how powerful schools can be for kids, you know, in a positive sense or a negative sense around their identities. So checking in with wherever the child’s going to be going to school to say, “Hey. How can we be gender affirming? How can we be affirming to this kid's identity?” But we know those kids come in with a lot more trauma and trauma because just the trauma of being in the foster system, but also the micro-traumas and the general traumas of being a kid who lives outside of the societal expectations of what they should look like due to their other identities.

CELESTE: One thing I thought was unique in your first podcast of listening to your story was that most queer people grow up in heterosexual families. And we think about minority stress. Most minorities learn coping skills in their family of origin, where queer people often don’t have that asset. Do you feel like, one, that that was an asset in the family that you grew up in? And, two, is that something that you feel like you offer these kids?

GWEN: I do think so. It’s interesting I haven’t reflected on it in quite that way. But I think it was really powerful to grow up with some models and a community and language and identity, like a sense of belonging. All of those things were really valuable and probably imperative to my well being as an adult. And I’m sure that I carry forward that sort of mentality into my parenting or into the way I think about supporting kids in general. I do feel like there’s this interesting – I was just, again, talking to a group recently about how little we tend to talk to kids about their actual experiences. There are so many things that happen, either in parenting where a kid’s had a difficult behavior or we’ve had a difficult moment. We’re like, “Well, that’s over. Let’s move on and not talk about it.” Or we’re talking about kids who have complex identities or learning disabilities or any kind of number of factors that make them feel “other.” So when you talk about minority status, I feel like there are these big categories that we tend to speak in. And then there are all these little ways where we’re like, ‘Nobody’s like me. Nobody likes that like I do. Nobody’s sensitive to that in the way that I am.” And I do feel like one of the pieces that is the most sort of integral or important to the way I think about be with kids around that stuff is having those conversations because I think the less we have those conversations the more hesitant we are to talk about the elephant in the room, the more our kids feel shame. So I was just talking in a school yesterday about kids who feel other in a particular way. And I was saying, just name it. We all know that they’re blowing out of class every day. So let’s just talk about, “Hey you’ve had really big issues being able to stay in class. What’s going on for you?” Instead of like, “I’m going to try to be really careful so I don’t upset this kid and they leave.” Similarly, I feel like when it comes to stuff around identity. One of my kids identifies as nonbinary. And I’ve said, “Hey, I’ve noticed certain things about how different clothes fit you. How is this feeling for you? Do we need to have a conversation about what you want to wear so you feel more comfortable? How are you doing?” Just having those regular check-ins to say “What’s going on for you and how can we include you in the process?”

CELESTE: That’s awesome. I love that. So we know that you started super young with this whole process in your early twenties, very unique in that. If you could go back to the beginning, what would be some of the things that you would kind of tell yourself to kind of prep for this journey?

GWEN: That’s funny. Part of me was like, it was probably good that I didn’t know what I was doing on some level. I was like, “Go for it. Go for it.” I probably would’ve been like, “I don't know.” Maybe it’s my personality to pick the fire and run into it. I’m also someone who doesn’t like to hold onto a lot of regret. I’m like, “I did the best I could at that time and I might’ve made a lot of different choices right now. And those worked at the time or I made it through.” So I don’t know. But I do feel like, I guess the piece for me that has been really eye opening in the last probably two years of work that I’ve been doing, I’ve focused much more of my, sort of like my own learning and my own scholarly pursuits in terms of better understanding the impact of intergenerational trauma and patterns that are playing out across generations within our families and within the families of origin that our kids come from. It gets really complicated when you talk about layering and dynamics. So the things that affect me as a parent come through my lineage, right? And the things that affect my kids may come through theirs. And we also have this sort of shared experience which will undoubtedly impact the next generation. So it gets really complicated. But I think a lot about that. And I’m asking myself the question a lot as a parent, and partly because my kids are no adolescents, so it’s less about put your shoes on and more about I don’t know how we’re going to wrap our head around whether or not you’re allowed to do that. I think you’re responsible enough, but I’m not sure. Let’s talk about these decisions. It’s a very different kind of parenting that really calls you to reflect on your values in a different way. And so I think I’ve had to do some work to say: Do I actually care about this? or Do I care about this because my parents cared about this? or Societally we’re told to care about this? What really matters? And I think that’s particularly relevant for kids who express their gender differently or for kids who have identities outside of the norm, in part because we have all these expectations and we see that as a reflection on ourselves as parents. If my kid has a day at school where they’re really struggling, and their teacher reaches out to me, there’s no way that I’m not going to think, “Oh God. What did I do? What can I do to fix this problem because it’s partly mine?” Right. Did I cause this issue on some level? I think about that a lot when I talk to parents when I’m in my school counseling hat and I’m calling families to say this issue’s going on. It’s not your fault. Everyone’s doing the best they can. We’re going to figure it out. But I think it’s really hard. It can be hard as a parent not to personalize some of that stuff and see it as a reflection of your own parenting or your own, sort of, failures based on the systems that you grew up in and the message you were told about how you behave at school or what are you supposed to look like or what activities are you supposed to be into because of your gender, or any of those things. And when you fall outside of the norm, I think things just get challenging. And it puts us in a position of having to readvocate for ourselves and our kids.

CELESTE: I think this is actually a really great segue into kind of the second topic, which is around your parenting and coaching. So you started out teaching. Tell me a little bit about the path. Have you been choosing teaching? And how long have you been teaching and kind of where your journey went to?

GWEN: I didn’t want to be a teacher. I was super sure. And it was my senior year of college and one of my advisors was like, “Just get the license. If nothing else, you have a job prospect when you get out of school.” And I was kind of like, “I don’t want to be like someone’s second grade intern. I really want to do something interesting. I want to be challenged. I’ve been working with kids my whole life. I’m 22-years-old. I’ve been working with kids my whole life. I already know everything there is to know about that.” And so I got placed in this program for kids with severe behavioral and emotional issues. And it was in a school setting. And I was so sure that I didn't want to be a teacher that I set myself up so that I was going to finish my program early. I started my internship. I needed X number of hours. I was like I’m going to finish by April and then I’m going to hang out with my friends all spring and everybody else is going to be doing finals and I’m going to be like, “I’m already done.” And then I got hired to be a teacher in the school where I had done my internship. So I was employed before I even finished college as a special education teacher. So I did that. And then I got a Master’s degree in sport management because I’m going to go sort of a more – I’d been doing a lot with athletics. I thought I wanted to be an athletic director at a high school. So I got a degree in sport management. Did some coaching and then ended up back in the classroom. Worked for a number of years with kids who had severe behavioral and emotional issues. And talk about things that, what could I tell myself back then, I would look back on moments of being, I was 22. Right? Having my own classroom with kids with some of the most significant needs in the district. And there were literally times when people hung from the rafters. Somebody should have been, “Gwen can’t handle that. We definitely need to get someone else in there.” But I learned a lot about how to build relationships with kids. And a lot of my kids had experienced trauma and had involvement in various systems. So I sort of got familiar with those in the process of supporting them at a school. Then got a degree in school counseling. Became a foster parent sort of during that time, or maybe earlier. Anyway, I became interested in this whole foster piece and how do we support parents around fostering. And really, the short version of a long story, is that my dissertation was looking at – I was like, “The best predictor we have of life-long well-being is educational attainment.” So, if you graduate high school, we know that you are less likely to need social programs to survive and be well. And you are more likely to be able to hold a job and stable housing and whatnot. So, to me, school – although I don’t think about that in terms of grades, I don’t need every kid to get A’s – the things that you need to be able to get through high school are the things you need to be able to do life successfully in adulthood. So I was really interested in that and ended up sort of looking at that from the lens of “Foster parent training is somewhat subpar in terms of preparing people actually for the role of what they’re going to be having to do. So how can we help foster parents parent in ways that are going to ease the transition to school and help kids to develop the skills? When we talk about those skills, we’re talking about things like having positive social skills, being able to stick with things that are hard, being able to stay regulated in upsetting situations. Those are things that you don’t just learn at school. You learn them at home. But if you come from a traumatic experience, you probably don’t have a lot of great modeling or a lot of great patterning around how to do that stuff. But so much of it can be learned at home. So that was really what sprung me into that was to say, “If we can help foster parents do better by kids, they’re going to feel more effective, the foster parents are. They’re more likely to kind of stick with the role.” Because we often see is when people don’t feel like they’re doing it well, they’re like, “I can’t handle it. I’m out. I’m quitting.” And foster parent retention is a huge issue because a lot of people don’t stay with it. So, for me that sort of sprung board into this work that I started to do with parents: “Now you’re in the role, here’s what we know would be helpful in terms of these high impact practices for kids. This is what’s going to help you manage your day at home and feel more effective and your kids are more likely to be sort of successful in the broader sense.”

CELESTE: So it seems like it was kind of a natural path that you became a parent mentor. It fit in your entire, you may not have known you were going there, but once you got there, you were like, “Oh, that makes sense.”

GWEN: Totally, yeah.

CELESTE: So what do you do as a parent mentor?

GWEN: Sometimes I work with families to, like in the last week or so I’ve had some folks who are like, “Hey, my kid’s really struggling with this particular aspect of school or I need help figuring out how to advocate for them in this particular system because there’s a decision that’s about to be made. Help us think about what my kid might need.” And sometimes I’m having conversations with other families I work with who are trying to think about “What would be appropriate birth family contact for this particular kid who’s kind of exploring their identity and wanting to be able to have some independence but we want to keep them connected to their birth family, but how do we do that?” I also work a lot with grandparents who are raising their grandchildren which is really interesting in terms of that intergenerational trauma lens because a lot of the grandparents have kids who gave birth to kids who they’re now raising. And their own children have had some pretty significant issues to result in them raising their grandkids. And so as that happens, there’s a major disruption. Grandparents are like, “I’m supposed to be the person you visit on the weekends and have a good time with. I didn’t expect to be a day-to-day care giver.” So that stuff is all kind of within the familiar things that I do. But a lot of it is just kind of helping think about things through a kid lens. So a lot of folks will ask me, “How do I talk to my kid about this?” And kind of being able to have some conversations with them about strategies for communicating.

CELESTE: I guess this kind of relates to it. But we’ve seen a shift with kids the last few years throughout families, schools, and therapy offices. Things are different because of COVID and the impact on them. And our world is shifting overall of how they connect and how they relate. So how would you tell parents or how would you give advice on how to help kids build resilience?

GWEN: I’ve been focusing on this a lot because I feel like I’ll sometimes relay a conversation that I’ve had with my own kids and people will be like, “Wait. You talk to your kids like that?” And I’ll be like, “Well, yeah.” But it didn’t just happen overnight. We have rapport and I’ve figured out the strategies to be able to communicate with them. And I’ll give you a quick example. My daughter is an adolescent, is 15, right? So there are these moments where things come up and I’m like, “I’m trying to wear this hat of telling you what you need to do. Stop messing around. You’ve got to get that stuff done so that we can go do the fun stuff.” And I feel like that’s a very small example. But there are conversations that I’ve been able to have with her about, “Hey, I don’t know how to do this. I’ve never done this. I’ve never parented you when you were 15. And we’re in this together. So you want to have social media and I’m not sure, and I have a lot of philosophical concerns about how to set you up with that.” And I can say to her, “I know that if I set a hard limit on this, you’re going to go underground and you’re going to get a bunch of secret accounts and then we’re not going to have a trusting relationship. So, like, how do we figure this out?” And so there’ve been some conversations like that that I feel like I’ve been able to have with my kids. I have another kid who takes medication who is sort of ambivalent about switching the medication. And some of it feels like it’s coming from a place of him wanting to have some independence and control. And I was like, “I know how to have a conversation with you that honors your need for that and also gives you the information you have, like from the doctor’s perspective. So, when we try something new, here’s how we’re doing an experiment. Here are the things we need to look for. Part if it is that you’re feeling good. Part of it is that your symptoms are controlled, right?” and he was able to be like, ‘I get that. That makes sense to me. I can buy into the plan and be a part of the decision making process. The adults aren’t racing over my head.” But just being able to slow down and have those conversations and for them to be receptive to those conversations I think has been a lot of building of, “Okay. What’s going well for you? What are we struggling with? How can I be supportive to you?” And I think so much about resilience is teaching kids to access resources when they’re overwhelmed. So, for me as a parent, “OK, I don’t need to be all your resources, but I can be one.” And then helping them, have those moments with them where you can say, “Okay. Who else can help you with this? I think you might need to talk to your teacher about this.” or “Maybe you should talk to your therapist about it, or maybe you should talk to your friend.” Right? “How are you going to figure out what’s going to be the right choice for you?”

CELESTE: One thing I love that you’re doing is, not only are you modeling good communication, you’re creating appropriate boundaries which I see, even in our own support group of Mama Dragons, is something that’s really difficult for parents as they’re trying to affirm their behaviors and affirm their identity is they lose boundaries and essentially the child becomes the parent. And I guess I love in your scenario that you’re still the parent and you’re meeting them and you're meeting their needs. But you’re still doing it within boundaries and maintaining that you’re the parent.

GWEN: I say that all the time, I’m sure you say that all the time in your work too, of people who are like, “How did we paint ourselves into this corner? It got too far. We’ve gone too far trying to honor what they needed.” It happens all the time with foster families too because of the trauma piece. They’re like, “My kid can’t do X, Y, or Z.” And I’m like, “Okay. Then we’ve got to teach them. It’s not like they can’t. It’s like we need to give them skills.”

CELESTE: Right. and model those same skills. We talked a little bit about minority stress a minute ago. What advice would you give to families bringing in queer members and teaching about minority stress or even being aware of it? What would be tips and tricks for it?

GWEN: I think having conversations with kids. So, I ‘ve had moments with my own kids where I find that they’re like, “That was an awkward moment.” I didn’t have the language to deal with that kid's question in that moment. Right? And about our family or some aspect of their identities. And I think about finding ways to say to kids, some kids find it hard. And I think usually that centering things outside of the kid can be the most effective strategy. So instead of saying, “You look like you’re having a hard time.” Some kids do really well with that. I don’t know a lot of those kids. I mostly find the kids who you can say, “Other kids would probably be really upset about that.” And then they’re like, “I know. They would. Because this and then I’m also.” And then they can kind of have the entry into the conversation. But I feel like being able to say to a kid, “Hey, listen. Schools are really complicated.” And I think about it in school mostly because I feel like that’s one of the places our kids spend the most of their time. And so I’m always using that example. But, to be able to say, “What is it like for you to wear that outfit and walk through the class? Do people say anything to you? What happens? Are people comfortable? Do you feel comfortable?” One of my kids, it was a question of “How do we figure out which cabin you go into at summer camp because it’s boys and girls?” And then there’s one week of a gender expansive cabin for this particular camp that they go to. But there was one week that they went that there wasn’t. So it was like, “Okay. How do you want to handle this?” One year they did one. one year they did the other. And they were really clear. And so we had lots of conversations about “What’s that going to feel like? Are there particular times of day that you think you might need support?” But just having those active conversations about it, and it’s hard. It’s stressful to be in situations where you’re not sure how to you’re going to fit all the time or where people don’t look like you or they’re speaking in a language you don’t fully understand or they’re talking about families and your family isn’t like that or you’re in a puberty lesson and you’re wishing your body wasn’t that way. Those are moments that are going to feel really hard. And so creating the opening to say, “If that stuff is hard, let’s have a plan around it. Is there someone you want to talk to or do you just want to take space?” You know, just kind of having those proactive conversations and helping them think through different aspects of the day or different aspects of what they’re doing, or their community, where they feel less and more comfortable and kind of figuring out with them strategizing what’s going to work.

CELESTE: And then I think the interesting part now is that we’re throwing a neurodiverse lens on it and we’re learning more and more about it. And the system at school generally doesn’t work so well for that. Right? So there’s these social rules and these underlying things, these currents, that maybe are misunderstood. And I imagine that that’s the same language, the same framework you’re using for those.

GWEN: Yep. Yeah. And all of my kids are neurodivergent. And so that’s also interesting, you should see us trying to get out of the house in the morning. It’s really extra. But it’s a lot of conversations about how, I think, everybody needs something different and that’s hard in a family. And it can certainly be hard in a school where you have big groups of kids and not everybody needs the same thing or the strategy used doesn’t work for everybody. Those can be tough moments.

CELESTE: So I want to pause for a second and I’m assuming that we will put this wherever is best. We’ve used some terms in this conversation that I don’t think everybody is – maybe they’ve heard them but they don’t quite understand them. Or maybe they don’t understand them in this framework that we’re talking about. The first one to talk about is attachment. How would you explain attachment, specifically around the lens of children to a new parent?

GWEN: So the idea – and this is a really simplified version – is that in what we understand about how typical child development occurs, you have an adult who is the primary adult to a child, typically the mother but it could be another caregiver. The mom gives birth to the child. They become the secure base for the child. They’re available. The child cries. They pick them up. The child begins to develop this understanding that my needs are going to be taken care of by this person who’s responsible, who gave birth to me. And when there’s any variation to that, things get more complicated. And this isn’t to say, kids build attachment with adoptive parents. Kids build secondary attachments with their daycare providers. Those people are really secure adults to them. But there is something that inherently is experienced as trauma when there’s a rupture to that initial bond between the biological – I would argue – mother and the child. That shifts development. And it can happen for any host of reasons that that occurs. But that's what we’re talking about. We’re talking about secure attachment. The idea that a child grows up with a deep knowing within their physiology when they’re preverbal that no matter what, I will be taken care of by this grown up and I’m protected in the world.

CELESTE: I love that. Thank you for defining it in that way. The second was multigenerational trauma. How would you define that to someone that was new to that topic?

GWEN: So when I think about intergenerational trauma, I think about it in the ways that we relate to each other. But if you think about holocaust survivors, right? There are certain ways that that trauma affects the folks who were involved in that tragedy. It affects subsequent generations and the sorts of wounds of that trauma kind of carry down, come down the line. So if I had a parent who was the child of a Holocaust survivor, aspects of that sort of survival approach to mentality, the fear mentality. I could give lots of examples of the way that might play out. I feel like it’s important that I say this as a Jewish person. But there are lots of ways that that may play out in terms of the way Jewish culture is affected by the experience of that major traumatic event. And those play out in our relationships within our families. So that’s a big example. But then there are smaller examples. So if you think through the lineage of a particular family, some of us know a family where there’s a lot of estrangement, like every generation there’s some level of estrangement, like that aunt we don’t talk to anymore or those cousins. Those kinds of stories also live in our lineage. And so being aware of how that plays out, especially for kids whose family stories you might not know all the way, can be complicated. But you have usually at least one generation of information. You typically know, as a foster parent, what some of the issues are that might’ve been experienced by their biological parents. And you know what lives in your own lineage. And so those things tend to affect us. What lives in our own lineage tends to affect us as parents. So if I grew up with a really strict parent who for any number of reasons, who has certain expectations. Somehow those expectations are going to live in me. Whether or not I’ve rejected them or I’ve totally adopted the same mentality, that’s going to play out intergenerationally as I parent my kids. And then they’re going to grow up with that sort of imprint.

CELESTE: That’s great. Thank you for those definitions. I think they’ll be super helpful to kind of frame some of those conversations that we’ve had throughout this. So, to kind of close this up, what would be some of the skills and support that you would offer to parents that would come to you that said, “We don’t know how to do this all the way and we’re struggling. We need some skills to help us.” What would be some of the things you would say, here’s where you should focus.

GWEN: I usually like people to focus on what – it sounds really silly, but I don’t think we do it a lot – a parent to just say, “What do you want for your kid?” At the end of the day, when your kid’s looking back, however many years from now and saying, “Here’s what I feel like I got from you.” What do you want those words to be? What do you want them to say that they got from their experience of being parented by you? And also, what are your goals for them? How do you want them to show up in the world? And usually we can sometimes get mired in the, “Oh my gosh, I need to make sure my kid gets good grades or I need to make sure that they have this experience or that experience because those were the things that I’ve always thought were important.” But, if we whittle it down and we really ask ourselves the questions, at the end of the day, I want my kids to be happy. I want them to be healthy. I want them to feel like they have agency in their lives and they can make choices and that they feel good about who they are. So, if I can just focus on that, then all of the other decisions that I’m making as a parent and all of those micro moments that I can get stuck in where we might have a power struggle become much less important. It’s much more about, “I can see this situation and how I can support you in moving on your path towards being happy, being healthy, feeling good about yourself, and having control over your life,” if those are my goals. And so just kind of thinking about that is a nice place to start from a framework. Inevitably when people come to me it’s like, “Oh my god, this is this really difficult behavior I’m trying to deal with.” Or “We’re in this super difficult situation.” And if we can step back and say, “But what do you want at the end of the day?” then we can approach it from that lens of how can we help you develop the skills you need to ultimately get where you ultimately want to go as opposed to getting stuck in this power struggle about whatever it is.

CELESTE: I love that.

GWEN: I feel like my approach is very, I bring a lot of humor and things can feel really high-stakes and really serious in the moment and a lot of times if we can back up and just think about what we’re actually trying to accomplish or like saving a relationship, it’s usually not as high-stakes as we made it out to be.

CELESTE: Like in your example with the two-year-old, it was shoes.

GWEN: Yeah. Totally.

CELESTE: Absolutely. Well, Gwen, it was such a pleasure to get to know you both from your first podcast that you did with us and this podcast and the amazing journey you’ve been on. I admire your energy and I admire the work that you’re doing and just appreciate having you here.

GWEN: Thanks so much for having me. I appreciate it.

JEN: Thanks for joining us here In the Den. If you enjoyed this episode, please tell your friends, and take a minute to leave a positive rating and review wherever you listen. Good reviews make us more visible and help us reach more folks who could benefit from listening. And if you’d like to help Mama Dragons in our mission to support, educate, and empower the parents of LGBTQ children, please donate at mamadragons.org or click the donate link in the show notes. For more information on Mama Dragons and the podcast, you can follow us on Instagram or Facebook or visit our website at mamadragons.org.