Bracketing Special Needs
Children who have experienced significant trauma at a young age, including
abandonment, physical and sexual abuse, often develop emotional, behavioral, or learning
problems that can result in labeling the child special needs. Placing children in foster care has
been found to leave devastating effects such as lasting mental health disorders like Post
Traumatic Stress Disorder, resulting in barriers to educational success where foster children
often do not graduate from high school. (Bruskas 2008). Often foster homes contain and promote
“excessive restrictiveness, a lack of individual consideration and respect, a focus on pathology
and deviance, and discontinuity in caregiving” further delaying the necessary tools of positive
identity development (Kools, 1997:266). If not attended to during adolescence, these problems
may often develop into different forms of oppressions in their adult life such as exploitation,
marginalization, and experiencing feelings of powerlessness (Bruskas 2008).
Due to the difficulties of creating a positive identity in foster care and because of the
continual movement and integration into new lifestyles and homes, the stigma associated with
being a foster child is immediately presented to the child with the understanding that harboring
this transitive identity of a foster child is not a status to be proud of (Kools 1997). Susan Kools
(1997), a professor and nurse who researches identity development among adolescents in foster
care, further argues that the conditions of the institutional structure of the foster care system and
the diminished status and stereotypical view of being a foster child contribute to a systemic
devaluation of one’s self in addition to the foster care system through depersonalization and
stigmatization. These experiences often extend outside of the foster care system where the child
may face intense scrutiny by others such as questioning the foster child’s difference, failure or
absence of biological parents, and other intrusive and personal questions about family and past
experiences along with struggling to be accepted amongst peers (Kools 1997). The difficulty of
forming an identity outside of foster care and the negative identity presented to the child by
being a part of the foster care system may lead to adverse views and treatments of the child
within and outside of the foster home. For example, adolescents in the foster care system that
have been perceived as negative or psychologically impaired due to stereotypes and from actual
negative experiences in the foster home were expected to behave and were treated in accordance
to these stereotypes (Kools 1997).
During conversation with Julia, a researcher of the intersectionalities of race, class, and
gender in the United States adoption and foster care system as well as an adoptive mother of a
herself, experiences reflecting the research presented were seen throughout her daughter’s
duration in the foster care system. Julia’s daughter Olivia carried previous years of neglect,
emotional, and physical trauma from living in the foster care system which led to a delayed sense
of identity development along with difficulty in establishing social relationships throughout her
adolescent years. Factors such as older age at the time of adoption, being a minority, and mainly
the trauma related emotional and behavioral problems that developed from her experiences in
foster care are what characterized Olivia as special needs or a child who was hard to place. Early
on Olivia received signals that discouraged self worth deriving from the stigmatization of being a
foster care child and living in multiple foster homes. Continued depersonalization resulted from
the neglect of her foster parents along with the physical and emotional abuse that occurred
during Olivia’s early childhood.
While Julia’s adoption of Olivia provided a safe space where Olivia’s behavioral
problems and trauma could be carefully attended to, the stigmatization of being labeled as a
special needs child was revealed in institutions outside of the adoption and foster care system.
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