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Welcome to The Foster Friendly Podcast. We’re bringing foster care closer to home by sharing stories from the front lines. We're talking with former foster youth, foster parents and others who are finding unique and powerful ways to dramatically improve the experiences and outcomes for kids in foster care.
The Foster Friendly podcast is brought to you by America’s Kids Belong, a nonprofit that helps kids in foster care find belonging in both family and community.
speaker-2 (00:02.936)
Hello and welcome to the Foster Friendly Podcast. I'm your co-host Brian Mavis with my other co-host Courtney Williams. Hi Courtney.
speaker-0 (00:11.042)
Good morning.
speaker-2 (00:12.91)
Your voice sounds a little froggy.
speaker-0 (00:14.998)
Yeah, I don't know what's up. Got a little cold or something. I feel great, but I just lost my voice.
speaker-1 (00:20.238)
Alright.
speaker-2 (00:20.526)
All right, well, I have confidence that you can power through. We have our special guest today is Paula Yost. And I'm gonna introduce Paula here formally and then we'll get rolling. Paula is both an attorney and a licensed clinical medical health clinician, blending legal advocacy with therapeutic support for children in foster care and those with special needs. She's a fierce advocate, it says.
who spent her career elevating the voices of children who most needed and empowering parents facing overwhelming systems. Paula is known for saying what professionals think, but rarely say out loud. Well, what are you going to say today, Paula?
speaker-1 (01:06.894)
My husband would probably be like God only knows
speaker-0 (01:07.212)
that line.
speaker-2 (01:13.326)
All right, here we go. What are people thinking and not saying? That's what we're gonna, that's the theme of today's call.
speaker-1 (01:15.768)
Yeah.
speaker-0 (01:22.774)
Butterfistiness, that was good.
speaker-2 (01:24.29)
Yeah, yeah.
speaker-0 (01:27.22)
Okay, well, your experience with preeclampsia changed you and kind of led you down this path. I think of speaking up maybe a little differently. Can you share about that experience and what it changed in you?
speaker-1 (01:39.864)
Time.
speaker-2 (01:40.418)
out for the men who are listening to the podcast can we define what preeclampsia is? The unmarried man.
speaker-1 (01:46.35)
Yeah, yeah, we sure can. So it's good kind of to give you a little bit of like slice information with my kids. So I have four of them. So my oldest one is my daughter who was legally adopted from foster care. My oldest biological child.
was born with a complete bilateral cleft lip and palate and has had a ridiculous number of surgeries. My third baby was the preeclampsia baby. And so what happened with Pearson and I is that with my other two children, I was doing a tremendous amount of advocacy for them. With Pearson, I had to do advocacy for both of us. So preeclampsia is the number one killer of pregnant women in the United States.
It's basically a condition that attacks the mother's blood pressure. No one really knows what causes it. It can happen to a 22 year old marathon runner, or it can happen to a 42 year old mother. No one knows. But essentially, your blood pressure becomes dangerously high. You essentially, you can have a stroke and you can die. So preeclampsia becomes eeclampsia. And so when I was admitted to the hospital, I was still in my second trimester.
my blood pressure was stroke level high. I probably would have died, but for the fact that I married to a nurse anesthetist who recognized the symptoms and took me to the hospital. And, you know, I've never really faced my own mortality before. But, you know, when you're sitting here, not really understanding what's going on and people are trying to not tell me what's going on because they don't want me to get more upset to them, make my blood pressure go higher.
It winds up being a very delicate situation. Like I'm calling my office saying, want to make sure you know where my will is. That was not something I had expected. And so the confrontation of your own mortality definitely makes you look at things differently. And also there's baby number four, who was my third biological child, who was completely normal, totally healthy, completely unplanned. And I don't know where that kid came from, but he came out perfect.
speaker-1 (03:59.862)
And yes, I got the easy one after all of the shenanigans.
speaker-2 (04:00.258)
that was an easy one after.
speaker-2 (04:05.56)
Okay, I'm still, so help us connect the dots still between your health and advocacy and then how that led to what you're doing now.
speaker-1 (04:18.968)
So I think that I've always very much been an advocate for children. So I'm a naturally trained advocate. I went to law school right after I got out of undergrad. And so in law school, I worked for a nonprofit organization called CASA. So in some states, they're called Guardian Ad Litems. But I worked for CASA for three full years, the whole time I was in school. I graduated, got my daughter's case.
so I don't know how much the preeclampsia influenced the overall picture of my advocacy work. It changed the way that I view my own health and maternal health though. So it definitely made me a stronger advocate for parents advocating for their own medical needs and mothers advocating for their own medical needs. But in truth, I've been an advocate from way back.
speaker-2 (05:09.496)
Yeah. Born that way. Sounds like, yeah. Especially, yeah, especially doing it in college too.
speaker-1 (05:11.606)
Happy.
speaker-1 (05:16.494)
Yeah, well teaching me about the First Amendment helped a lot too because then once I really understood what my freedom of speech was, I started to realize, you know, no one's going to sue me for slander or defamation for telling the truth. You know, as long as you're telling the truth, you're not going to get in trouble. And so I got a lot more willing to speak up about things that I thought were wrong once I got a healthy dose of constitutional law. Okay.
speaker-0 (05:43.075)
Yeah.
speaker-2 (05:44.302)
So that helps your temperament, feed your temperament that you're already like, I'm going to say what people are thinking, but not saying. Okay. So I, I'm curious, you, wrote a book recently or it got just published recently. And, I really curious about the title, but it's called tumbleweeds and then subtitles, how to be an advocate for your children and yourself in a failing system. okay. So tell me about the title and then tell me about the book.
speaker-1 (06:14.634)
Well, the story of the tumbleweed is a fun one. So I was actually told after baby number one that I could not have any more children, that I had a low ovarian reserve and had a 0.018 % chance of being able to successfully get pregnant. And that my ovarian reserve was so low that there was no way I could even do IVF because I did not have enough eggs to harvest. And so...
Okay, cool. I got pregnant naturally two times after that. But I wound up in the doctor's office because I was pregnant with Pearson. And this was when our pregnancy was going well, because our pregnancy went really, really well until it didn't. We were doing great until about week 25 when weird stuff started to happen that I didn't realize was a sign I was dying.
But prior to then we were doing great and the ultrasound technician was looking at the baby because we were trying to make sure he didn't have cleft palate like his brother and we were just kind of assessing him. And the doctor came in and she said, I don't know how you got pregnant with this child. He was literally like the tumbleweed rolling through the barrenness of your. And I was like.
I didn't know whether to think that was absolutely hilarious or whether to be completely insulted. So, Pearson was my little tumbleweed, not supposed to be. But then the rest of it, the rest of all that, you know, word vomit that went in there was just that really ever since I've had my kids, I feel like I've always had to be doing some sort of advocacy. With my daughter, I've been in
IEP meetings, 504 meetings, even advocating for her as an adult, why does she experience the world and the planet differently than other people do? Because of the trauma lens that she has. And then with my oldest child, it's been a constant fight about, yes, he needs speech therapy. Just because he's smart doesn't mean he...
speaker-1 (08:15.458)
You know, he was born without a roof in his mouth and half of his nose and upper lip were missing. So he does in fact need a significant amount of therapy and speech assistance. Pearson had 54 doctor's appointments the first year that he was alive because he was a micro-premie who came out of the NICU on a heart monitor. So I just sort of felt like I had all this knowledge. And part of it was, you know, I'm an, yeah, I mean, I get that I'm an attorney, but nobody really teaches lawyers education law.
Like education law is not something that we get in law school. And if it is, it's a rare elective that not every law school is going to offer. So I had to kind of teach myself what the legal system meant because I didn't know. And so I just wanted to try to help other parents in similar situations. And I see so many parents who I feel like their situations are similar to what my children experienced.
but in many cases worse. And I wanted to try to help those people as much as I possibly could with the information that I learned. I just didn't want it to all be in my head and not be something that someone else could use. And I also don't want people to have to like hire me or pay a consult fee. I just wanted to try to help as much as I could. I don't think that any mother should ever have to leave a child's IEP meeting in tears.
or feel like they're having a panic attack about something that's going on with their kids.
speaker-0 (09:47.758)
Yeah. And we do see that so often, right? And I know you have experienced the foster care realm too, but in foster care where, we don't have educational rights so that it's, it's like as foster parents. So there's like this weird balance of how can we advocate, but yet we don't have the rights to fully advocate. it's, it's a weird balance.
speaker-1 (10:08.8)
It is a weird balance. And that's one of the things that I find the most frustrating about our foster care system as well, because we're trusting our foster parents to literally care for these children. Like they are living in your homes and we don't give them the right to really do the advocacy work. I I would say your casa or your guardian ad litem probably needs to be your best friend because they can get into some of those doors.
And if they make the social worker angry, that's kind of between them and the social worker. That doesn't always come down on you, your placement, or the child. But I'm a really big fan of foster parents being better informed. There are states all across the country right now where social worker can roll up at your house with a child and not tell you anything about that child's background. And that, to me, creates a dangerous situation.
I mean, depending on what that child has experienced and where they're coming from, you as foster mom and foster dad really need to know what's coming into your house so that you can help. You know, it's not, it shouldn't be viewed as a violation of confidentiality when you are going to be taking a child into your home and trying to help fix this traumatic mess that they've just experienced. If no one is more of a solution than the foster parents.
But you can't really be part of that solution when you're flying with blinders on or when you don't know the whole story.
speaker-0 (11:31.648)
Yeah. Amen. Okay. Well, going back to the book a little bit and systems like systems are all around us. And ultimately, the systems are created to help solve problems. That's the point behind them. But we know that they often fail or there's often things that like said, like the red tape or things within the systems that just aren't doing the children or the parents serve good service. And your book examines what happens when systems fail.
Let's dive into this a bit more, especially with thinking about foster parents and foster care, thinking about the foster care system and policies and how that all interacts and intersects with trauma and family stability. So what are some other things in the foster care system? And again, we can't solve all these things today. Different states have different mandates, different laws, but there are some things I think we can, like even giving foster parents a voice. If these are some things you could speak up and maybe suggest, or let's just dive down this topic a little bit of ways that we can.
Intercept the system maybe in a legal way. That makes sense.
speaker-1 (12:32.696)
think one of the most important things that I see, so I chair my county's child protection and fatality team. So I review every autopsy of children who died in our county. And then I also put together teams that are supposed to focus on protection. And of course, we're always focused on our foster kids because those are the most high risk kids in the entire community. And so when we're looking at them, some of the time what I see is we have people who are very well meaning.
but they make one of two mistakes. The first mistake is that they seem to lose sight of the why. And the why is the kid. What is going to be the best thing that we can do for this kid? This kid is already not having a good statistical trajectory because they're in foster care to begin with. So what are the things that we can do that are going to help this child? Some of the time what I see is professionals
who take those conversations very personally or like they are some sort of a personal attack. And that is not what that conversation is intended to be, nor should it be viewed as that. No one should be being attacked or feeling attacked because we are trying to advocate for the best interests of a child. The other thing that I see is sometimes I have an agency who for whatever reason truly has hit a wall. There is nothing else that this organization has the legal or
the financial ability to give. And when we hit that wall, what else can we do? Because that is one of the things that frustrates me the most is when I sit in a meeting with 30 professionals and someone says, well, we can't do that. That's outside. We can't do that. Okay, well, you can't do it, but you know it's in the best interest of a child to have it happen. How are we going to get around that? What are the choices that we have?
And if it's a funding issue, well, how can we get the funding? What nonprofits do we have to fill in those gaps? What ways can we do it? So I think that it's, when you're dealing with a disadvantaged child, you should never be sitting there going, well, we've hit a wall, what are we gonna do now? You need to figure it out. Because there's always a way. You just have to figure out what the way is.
speaker-0 (14:49.016)
Yeah.
speaker-2 (14:51.82)
So your book, I'll confess I have not read it. But I'm also right now feeling really convicted by it. It seems like a profoundly important book for our listeners to consider. So let's camp out there a little bit more. I'll say, what is your hope for outcome if somebody reads your book?
speaker-1 (15:21.08)
Hope, that would be my number one thing. I hope that the people who read my book are inspired and feel hopeful. So let's talk about my fabulous daughter. I met my daughter when she was 14 years old. Her mother had a low IQ, but her mother was also an opioid addict. And I believe that my daughter's biological mother loved her as much as she was capable of loving her.
But the drugs were a huge barrier to every part of her life, not just her motherhood. My daughter's father had been incarcerated from the time she was four. And he was just always in jail. He's only recently gotten out of jail. I mean, he served like a 30 year prison sentence. My daughter is now 32. She was able to finish high school on time, which was a miracle because she was academically delayed two full years.
But we got her a 504 and we got her into an educational environment with a principal who, heaven bless that man, saw what I saw and was able to help the teachers advocate for her and work with her. She graduated from high school on time. She went to UNC Charlotte. She got a four-year degree. The state of North Carolina, and many states do this, but I don't think enough people know this.
Many states will pay for a child to go to college for all, for eight semesters, as long as you go to a state supported school, if you've been in foster care for more than a year and a half. And so she qualified for that benefit. So she had all of her education paid for because of her being in foster care. She graduated from UNC Charlotte with a criminal justice degree, and she now has a responsible, taxpaying, age-appropriate job.
She has not gotten in trouble with the law. She's never done drugs. She has a six year old, a seven year old of her own now. And she is living a healthy, normal life. Now, does she have trauma? Yes. Do we still have to have some conversations occasionally about your ACE score and your long-term health and making sure you're keeping inflammation in your body down? Absolutely. But she is a healthy, beautiful,
speaker-1 (17:42.086)
wonderful adult. And I believe that that is the trajectory that every single foster child in the United States is capable of having. These are not lost children. They are not lost souls. They are not people that we just need to write off. And I see them getting written off all the time. I see people who I feel like should know better and should do better who write them off. And I get it. Some of the time these kids are rough. I mean,
Tanya spit in a social worker's face once. She was a runner for a while. She and I have even had some throw downs when she was a teenager. You've got to understand that is the trauma. That is not that child. That is the trauma. That is the fear. That is also in many cases all that they know because that's all their parents have been able to show them. And it's up to us to love them through that.
And you really do have to put on your unconditional love hat and just let that child learn to realize over time, there's nothing you can say or do that's going to make me stop caring about you. And you really do just have to push through with them. But you can impact these kids and you can change their whole life and you can change the generations of that entire family. So that's really what I want people to understand is hope.
I never give up on foster kids that I see in our county, no matter how awful they might be. Because I know I have my daughter who I look at and talk to every day. And I have her and I know what they can become.
speaker-2 (19:20.566)
So, Paul, first of all, thanks for sharing that story and man what. Just God bless you for being such a great advocate for your daughter. So let's, if you don't mind, I'm put my own definition to hope and then see how it works for your book. And you might dismiss my premise, but let's say if hope is someone's sees a preferred future.
And they see the path to get there. Let's just call it that. Sound good? Yeah. So what does your book give when it comes to the pathways to a preferred future?
speaker-1 (20:03.704)
So it tells you steps. It talks to you about, you need to go to 504 meeting, you need to go to an IEP meeting. What is that? What do you get out of that? What are the things that help you there? It also gets into things like what you should expect, right? If you've got a person who should be in the ninth grade, but they're in the seventh grade, but they're not testing for any learning disabilities, there's no identifiable learning problems, they're just neglect.
How do you fix neglect? What does that look like? So I'm trying to give parents tangible steps along the pathway. So if you know where you want to go, how do we get there?
speaker-2 (20:46.859)
Okay.
speaker-1 (20:47.662)
Yeah, his foster mom's not going to be able to do that by herself. Yeah, I don't mom's not going to be able to do it by herself. No one is going to be able to do this by themselves. Hillary Clinton promised us a village and sometimes that village shows up and sometimes it doesn't. And so I'm trying to give you the tools and the questions that you need when the village isn't showing up.
speaker-0 (21:10.638)
Paula, I'm also just curious, it sounds like our daughters are somewhat similar. My daughter came to us at age 15 and she's now 24. But sometimes I, and I talk to foster parents, adoptive parents all the time with how do we advocate for our kids once they're out of the house? So I heard you talk about that a little bit, but can you speak into that just a little bit of what that looked like for you and your relationship with her, you know, speaking to an adult child and advocating for them once they're adults.
speaker-1 (21:34.434)
Yeah. So first all, I think you have to have that really good foundation before they turn 18. And so, you know, I've worked pretty hard on that one. I'm not going to tell you that it's always been sunshine and unicorns. It hasn't been. Tanya and I have definitely had our issues. But as a general rule, what I've told her is I will support her in whatever she chooses to do with her life, which is what I would tell any of my children. You know, I will support her in whatever she's choosing to do with her life, provided that it is legal.
and that it is safe. As long as it is legal and it is safe, I will support her in whatever she chooses to do. And so, you know, if she decides whatever dream it is that she has, I do whatever I can do to help with that. But one of the things that I think is very important to understand about adult children who have been in foster care is those trauma wounds are always there. As much as I wish the trauma wounds were not there, they are always there in the background.
and they hurt a lot and they come up in unexpected ways. So I think the best example of that that I have is I was randomly at Christmas dinner last year and we're all sitting around on the table and somebody gave my husband a brand new pair of socks. So my husband immediately stood up and went to the washing machine to wash his socks. And then that...
caused a family conversation to ensue about, you really need to wash new clothes, right? Some people believe, yes, you must. That is a must do. And other people are like, no, they're already clean. They're brand new. My daughter pipes in and says, well, we used to wear clothes from homeless people. So I'm pretty desensitized to stuff like that. And the whole family just sort of paused and looked at her. And she was serious as a heart attack.
Like she was completely serious about that statement. That was not something she was saying to be joking with us. She was absolutely serious. And so even now years out, she can still catch me with something that still shocks me. And so, and it's never what you would think it is. It's always something like totally in left field. But the important thing to understand is that those moments that shocked me also shock her friends. You know, she's a dance mom now. So when Tanya goes and is around other dance moms,
speaker-1 (23:53.26)
You know, their life perspective is completely different than hers. And even how she introduces her family is very different. You know, when I show up, you know, I'm 14 years older than her. So when I show up and she's like, this is my mom, we get some weird looks, right? Like, like, is it your mom? And so just being able to help them navigate through that stuff, those triggers and those traumas are always there. They're always going to arise. And I just remind her that they're normal.
And I really wish they weren't there, but they're always gonna be there. But what can we do to help them be minimized? And how do we know when they're coming up and what can we do? So some of it is also long-term therapy support, know, whatever. If her insurance can't afford it, I try to help out as much as I can financially to help with things like that, because you have to, that's your kid. I would do it for my biological children, so I'm gonna do it for her.
but also just really having that good awareness of adverse childhood experiences, scores, and understanding that those long-term ramifications are real, but they can be mitigated. So we talk a lot about long-term health, both of us do. I'm sorry, Courtney, I think I went around, but I hope I gave you what you saying.
speaker-0 (25:09.902)
No, for sure. And I've said it on the podcast before, but there was a point in my daughter's life after she turned 18, when I explained to her like your different ages, cognitively and physically and emotionally and ACEs. And it was like this light bulb went off in her head of understanding her trauma. And I wish I had had those conversations even before 18, but you know, she'd only been in her house a couple of years. It was kind of that balance. But I do feel like it helps when we can have those open conversations and having the relationship first to have them.
but let them understand that there is hope for your future, but there's reality in your past that we need to work through.
speaker-1 (25:45.016)
Yes. Well, and it's also been interesting to watching my daughter get pregnant and have her daughter. You know, I was not really thinking about being an adult. You know, it makes you really think about what is the job of a mother because most women go to their mother when they are pregnant or having a difficult pregnancy. so I've very much enjoyed being able to do
those types of things for her. And I very much enjoy being able now, if there's something going on with her child and she has a question, like, I don't know what to do about this. I very much enjoy fulfilling that grandmother role for her and being able to give her because mentorship doesn't stop. know, foster children need our guidance even more when they're adults. Like you don't stop needing guidance. Like think about how many times in your life you would call a parent or
an adult, an older adult who you admire and ask them how to do something like they need that. That goes on. That does not stop just because they age out of care because they're legal adults now. They're still going to need us just like we need our ancestors and they don't have that from their family of origin. Again, you Tanya's father was incarcerated until just recently and her mother actually her mother died of natural causes when she was 57.
And I talk to Tanya all the time about that does not have to be your trajectory. Your mother's health was impacted dramatically by the opioids and by smoking and by a long list of other things. That does not have to be you. That also brings up this conversation we had once about dental health. Her dental care was pretty neglected. She's good now, but she occasionally has the random dental issue that crops up as a result of all that.
And one day her teeth were looking really nice. I was like, honey, your teeth look really good. And she said, you know, I was thinking about the other day when my mom was 31, her teeth had started to fall out. But I've got my teeth and I'm like, exactly. And you just need to remember that when those fears about I'm going to die young crop up, we don't have any reason to believe that. But foster children just come with a completely different background list of concerns.
speaker-1 (28:08.332)
than children who grow up in safe, normal houses. And they really do have to have that deep foundational relationship with us because they need to feel like they can tell you what's going on. And they're not gonna tell you if you're gonna get mad and freak out about everything they say.
speaker-0 (28:26.914)
So true.
speaker-1 (28:28.598)
or be judgmental of what they say. You just kind of have to let a lot of stuff ride.
speaker-0 (28:33.004)
Yeah.
speaker-2 (28:36.864)
Yeah, just hitting me that this book presumably is for the adults to give them hope and steps towards having seen a preferred future. But that's so that they can be that for their kids, that they can give them hope, steps towards a preferred future and break this idea. So many kids do come in and think,
Well, my history is my destiny. What my parents did, I am. And to be able to say, like you said, mean, just what a simple but profound example of dental health and how that just that's one example, but that kind of thing can apply to every sector of your life.
speaker-1 (29:18.594)
Yes. And I also think we should never underestimate the power of being able to tell those kids they can be more. So one in my daughter's family of origin finished high school. Neither parent graduated from high school. Older sibling did not graduate from high school. And so when I said to her, have the chance to be the first person in your family to finish high school, she was on it. She was like, I'm going to do it.
I'm going to prove that I can do it. And there were moments, I'll be honest with you, I didn't know if she could do it or not. I had no idea whether she could do it or not, but I wasn't going to tell her that. I told her every time, I'm sure that if you study and you try, you can do this. I believe in you. I know you can do this. And every single time I told her she could do it, she did.
speaker-2 (30:11.98)
How much of your book has some of this autobiographical component to it? think it's just very powerful. I'm sure along the way, then you say, here's what you can do, and here's some of the steps and legal hurdles and some of the resources.
speaker-1 (30:31.918)
It's a story. It's largely about what we saw, how we handled it. For those of you who are foster parents, if you want to cheat in my book and you don't want to read the whole thing, just go to the section on Tanya, which is essentially chapter four. I have the whole surprise. I also have a daughter. So skip to her section if you don't want to. The earlier sections are about cleft palate and advocating for.
and surviving your own medical challenges with preeclampsia. But if you want to zero in on the foster care experience, that's chapter four.
speaker-2 (31:09.09)
You know i wanna pause here cuz we i think we brought up some things that i'm sure is a decent segment of our listeners gonna be like i know all those things but some newbies may not know what i.e.p. they may not know what aces is they we according to you referenced you know different ages based on different dimensions of life so let's unpack
All three of these. So can we take a moment to say what is IEP, what is ACEs, and what's the concept of being different ages in different parts of your life?
speaker-1 (31:48.152)
Sure. So an IEP is just an individualized education plan, but it is a legal document that follows children all the way through school and it can even help them in college with doing things like giving them extra time on tests. Most of the time you get an IEP if you have an identifiable learning disability, dyslexia, dysgraphia, something like that. But you can also get it if you have some sort of a special need like speech therapy, OT, PT, pretty much everyone in a public school system with Down syndrome
autism has or should have an IEP. Also IEPs have a sibling called 504s. Those are what we typically see more in trauma children who do not have a diagnosable learning disability. So Tanya never had a learning disability. She was just neglected educationally. And so she had a 504, which was kind of a plan if she got triggered in high school, because we didn't want her to get triggered by something stupid and flip.
and then the principal's calling me and she's having to go home. So a 504 is more of a trauma management plan that gives kids a time out to help them manage those explosions that foster children are so often likely to have. Those are federal documents, but again, they are legal documents and they're very, very helpful for children to have in a school setting to help them thrive. So if you've got those kids that fit into those two categories,
You can read more about them online. There's tons of resources available, but those are things you might want to make sure those kids have or can get. adverse childhood experiences. So Dr. Vincent Felletti was a famous researcher who studied ACEs in the 1990s, and he was actually conducting an obesity study. And so he was helping people lose hundreds of pounds and then they would leave his study and they would gain it all back. And he couldn't figure out why.
So he hired a team of social workers to interview them and figure out, know, why are you, why is your weight doing this yo-yo action? What's going on? And one of the questions that they asked was how old were you when you had your first sexual experience? And many of these people were saying four or five, six years old. And so he realized that there was a dramatic connection between child abuse in various forms, not just sex abuse, but in various forms of childhood trauma.
speaker-1 (34:10.144)
and long-term health trajectory. So you can actually download and take an A score test off the internet, they're free. There's a one page PDF and then based on how high your A score is, that gives you insight into your long-term healthcare. And so again, free on the internet, readily available. If you don't know what it is, definitely learn it. And then last is just the concept of basic developmental psychology, which is that essentially,
We all experience different things at different times of our lives. And also that can depend on your gender. Like I'm a 46 year old woman who has completed perimenopause. So that's gonna have me in a completely different phase of my life than somebody who is actively trying to become a mother or someone who's 22 and trying to go to college.
And then for men, the same thing. You know, go through different phases of your life at different cycles and your needs are going to change. You are not going to be the same person at 32 than you are at 22. And quite frankly, you shouldn't want to be.
speaker-2 (35:17.87)
Yeah, and with foster kids, sometimes the things are they're introduced to things that only adults should be introduced to. And then they're not introduced to things that they were meant to be introduced to as children. And so they can be, you know, a 10 year old can have a 30 year old's experience sexually and a five year old's experience educationally.
speaker-1 (35:45.838)
Correct. They can be all over the place. you know, I think one of the things too that we just have to radically accept is that we are not going to be able to fix the past. We cannot change the trauma and the abuse that was done to them. We can't. We don't have that magic ball. But what we can do is meet them where they are, work with them where they are, and give them the tools that they need to hopefully go somewhere better because they can.
They just need to have somebody who believes in them, who they trust. And that's the hard part. Getting them to trust you is the hard part. But once you get them to trust you, you're usually pretty solid.
speaker-0 (36:29.154)
Yeah, thanks for sharing all that. It gives a lot of great insight, even stuff that we know about. I know about all those things, but just hearing it again is good to hear and ponder and think about individual kids or kids who I'm advocating for.
speaker-1 (36:43.042)
It's also harder in the day when they're acting up.
speaker-0 (36:45.806)
For sure. I've also heard you reference the hidden trauma of foster care. What do you say is the hidden trauma of foster care?
speaker-1 (36:57.884)
gosh, all the stuff that we've just talked about, you know, the instability, the exposure to stuff you shouldn't be. And then also it is a trauma to be taken from your family of origin and put in a stranger's home. That's very scary. You don't know those people. You don't know if they're going to be helpful or if they're going to hurt you worse than where you came from. You know, we all hope that we put them in good placements, but you just don't know how it's going to work out that in and of itself as a trauma.
I will add though, I do not want that statement to wind up being used to advocate for the overhaul or the complete, like, let's do away with the foster care system. I'm hearing more and more chatter about that, that because the system is broken, let's just get rid of it. That is not going to work. There are so many of these parents who are just ill equipped to parent. Usually in my experience, it's because of addiction.
But there are some people who they are not going to be able to parent their children and they just cannot get it together. And that is why we have to have foster care. We are always going to have to have foster care. The idea that we can just get rid of it because sometimes it fails is preposterous because there are absolutely scenarios where leaving a child with their family of origin is worse.
speaker-2 (38:16.109)
Mm-hmm.
speaker-0 (38:17.74)
So we're gonna end with two closing questions. I'll ask you one and then Brian's gonna ask you one, but based on what you just said, Paula, if you could change one thing about the foster care system, what would it be?
speaker-1 (38:30.37)
Just have everybody focus on that why. Don't stop going down those rabbit holes and don't start making it personal or about you. What are we doing? We're focusing on this kid and what this kid needs and what's best for them. And just be like a dog to a bone with that. Don't take no. What can we do? Okay, you can't help me, who can?
speaker-2 (38:50.446)
Yeah, mean, you are an advocate. You wrote the right book. And it really is. I'm seeing it clearer than ever that it's synonymous with foster care, being an advocate. OK, so my question is, and this is something we ask a lot of our guests, is finish this sentence. What kids in foster care really need is
speaker-1 (39:15.416)
Love, unconditional love.
speaker-2 (39:18.786)
And that kind of ties back to your why as well. It's like, it's keep focus on that child, what's best for them.
speaker-1 (39:24.226)
Yes, unconditional love.
Yeah, that's what most of them have never gotten because in so many circumstances, again, it's like I said with my daughter, I believe very much that her mother loved her. Her mother was an addict. You grow up feeling like my mom loves me, but she loves drugs more. That is a horrible reality that no one should have to face. And so the only way that we can fix that wound is to show those children what unconditional love looks like.
Yeah. And if you cannot do that, you probably need to move on and do something else.
speaker-2 (40:02.818)
Yeah, there's other ways you can help.
speaker-1 (40:05.122)
That's right. But you've got to be able to show unconditional love.
speaker-2 (40:08.428)
Yeah. Well, Paula, where can people find your book?
speaker-1 (40:12.558)
Pretty much everywhere. Amazon, BarnesandNoble.com. Okay. Bookshop.com. Pretty much everywhere.
speaker-2 (40:23.566)
Great. Well, like I said, just said to our listeners, think a great synonymous word for foster parents is advocate parents. And it's way better than what the child welfare system usually calls us is resource families, because resources are people that get used up. So see yourself as an advocate and check out Paula's book.
speaker-1 (40:49.23)
Thanks guys. Thank you.
speaker-2 (40:51.406)
Thank you, Paula.
speaker-1 (40:52.974)
Thanks for having me.