Our Journey to Hope

Summarized Transcript of Episode

Dr. David Layton: Hello friends. I'm your host, Dr. Dave Layton, and thank you for joining me in Our Journey to Hope. It is my desire through this podcast to bring you information about how to discover, sustain, or perhaps regain hope.

In this episode, I'm speaking with a new friend, Sharon Dunlevy. Sharon has found an interesting niche to make a positive impact for generations to come, and I'm going to let her introduce herself and tell us about her area of focus. Hello, Sharon.

Sharon Dunlevy: Hi, Dave. It's great to be here. I really appreciate you having me on your show.

Dr. David Layton: The honor is mine. I'm trying to look at hope from a wide variety of spiritual and secular perspectives. I tell people, not everybody's ready for a spiritual situation. They've got an issue, and it's challenging their hope.

You are bringing about some information today that, even though I've been involved with foster care for a number of years, I was not aware that there was a challenge. From an education perspective. I would love for you to introduce yourself and then tell us about your focus.

Sharon Dunlevy: I actually come from a place of faith as well. I was in children's ministry for about 20 years and then decided I wanted to reach more vulnerable children. With my background in special education, I obtained a position as an educational advocate for children in foster care at a licensing agency in Indianapolis. I served about 200 kids under a grant, where I would go in and make sure that their educational needs were being met by making sure that they had individualized education plans, IEPs, if they needed them, that they were getting transportation like they should, all of those things.

Although I have a background in special education, I had not specifically worked with children in foster care. We all know foster kids exist, but we don't always talk about them. They're in that background, and even for me, coming into the child welfare, there were many things I didn't know.

I did some digging and I learned more about the laws. I even got a graduate certificate from Indiana University in Education Law. It was really fascinating, but it was also really sad to learn that right now, about a quarter of our kids, when they age out of foster care, are not doing well. They're homeless, they're incarcerated. They may not even have a high school diploma. They don't get through school. They certainly are not going to college. They're not getting vocational certificates, any of those things.

Half a million kids are in foster care at any given time in the US. When you take a quarter of that, it's a lot of kids who are failing at life, and it's because of those educational outcomes. So that was my area of focus, which is really on how to improve those educational outcomes for these kids so that when they do age out, they are ready to live independently, as successful adults, having a job, not relying on government assistance.

 I am trying to bring awareness to these needs because we really need to be doing better for our kids.

Dr. David Layton: Wow. There is obviously a situation, and I appreciate your being very active in that. Some questions came to mind.

You said they age out. When they turn about 18, I guess?

Sharon Dunlevy: Actually, it's higher now, and I can discuss that. Okay. There's a law called the Family First Prevention Services Act, and when they first enacted that, it was to help kids from the ages of 14 to 18 transition into adulthood. And what they found was that because trauma causes actual physical problems in the brain, not just emotional problems, they tend to have some learning disabilities that they need to overcome. And so, they found that at 18, these kids were aging out, but they weren't out of high school. They raised the age to 21, and now it's actually all the way up to possibly 26 depending on the state.

Dr. David Layton: I can see where a child might be a slow learner. I, as a child, was a slow learner, but there were some barriers out there that I had to deal with.

My field of study is in adult learning, and I understand very clearly what you're saying about being prepared to learn, overcoming some barriers to learning, and things like that. That adult learning is not necessarily age-specific. It's more of a readiness to learn. And so that's, I see that tie in a little bit.

Dr. David Layton: And by the way, I sensed, separate but equal doesn't always work, or it doesn't always come into play. A child may have some minimums, but not the advanced opportunities that other children might have. Not in a foster situation.

Sharon Dunlevy: Absolutely. And big ones in terms of education are the extracurriculars. So right now, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) is our overarching education law in this country. Before ESSA, if a foster kid changed homes, they had to change schools if it was out of the district. So they were jumping from school to school. I talked to a young man a couple of weeks ago who said that in 10 years in foster care, he went to 30 different schools. And that was not unusual.

In ESSA, they changed the law so that if a child does change homes, but they feel like that school that they were in, even if it's out of district, was the best place for them to be, they would stay there and the schools would have to work out how to provide transportation. It reduces the amount of time that they are out of school.

They are already missing a lot of school time because not only are they moving from home to home, but they also have court cases that they cannot miss. They might have therapy appointments for them to be able to regulate their emotions while they're learning, or they may just be really easily triggered and cannot learn because they're worried about staying safe.

There are a lot of things that work against foster kids, and we don't think about those things. Like you said, we think that separate but equal is not; they don't have the same advantages. Schools don't have to provide transportation for things like extracurricular activities, which might be an area where a kid could learn by being in a sports program, being in a choir, or those types of things. And if they don't have transportation for it, then they lose out.

We know that kids learn more often outside than inside school. We learn how to read books, we learn how to study, but what is it that really fuels learning? And it's those things that we do that we love, like playing a sport, doing music, doing art. Their foster parents are working; they don't have the time or the resources to drive them back and forth to extracurriculars in addition to all the court hearings and therapy appointments.

Dr. David Layton: I learned this again while working with education. Sometimes we might think a person is a slow learner, but in reality, there are a lot of environmental factors going on there.

Sharon Dunlevy: One of the things that we have found is that our brains do not fully develop now until we're the age of 25. And that's the prefrontal cortex here, where we think logically, we can make patterns, we can organize our days.

Again, trauma keeps the kids in that lower part of their brain, back here, where it's survival and not into where the thinking brain is, which is up here. So survival is very much instinct, and this is thinking. And so we call that executive functioning. There were a lot of adults who never learned executive functioning. If they haven't learned some of those things early on, it's hard for an adult to learn them.

We can fix that. We can create a situation where we're healing that brain, but it takes very deliberate experiences to start teaching that prefrontal cortex to overcome the instinctual part of our brain. And so it's deliberate work, and it's very intensive work. It is possible to really overcome some of this with new experiences and positive messaging.

And when you're in a school where the classroom has 30 to 35 kids, the teacher has no instructional aides, and they have too many kids with ADHD and all of this stuff, it's really hard to make room for that poor trauma kid, right? They need that extra help because they're busy serving all the other kids. We don't set our schools and teachers up for success.

Dr. David Layton: And I can see where a teacher would not have the skills or knowledge to deal with that?

Sharon Dunlevy: True.

It's going to take a lot of time. It's going to take a lot of people rethinking trauma, and the reality is it's not just foster kids. We live in an age where our kids are so exposed to everything because of social media, because of worldwide TV. When I was growing up, if there were a school shooting, I wouldn't know about it unless my parents told me. It's just the way it was, but now kids know everything, and so the likelihood of them experiencing a traumatic event is so much larger than it used to be.

Every child has the potential to have trauma reactions because of that. Plus, you add in COVID. COVID was very traumatic for people. Just the fact that school was canceled and they didn't know what to do with themselves was stressful. Parents probably did not behave as well as they could during COVID because you got their kids running around them 24/7. They were used to their kids going to school for eight hours, and now they have to deal with them all the time.

We need to be more focused on trauma-informed practices that affect all of us, all of our kids, and we know that there are adults who have hidden trauma that we've not talked about. We've got people out here who are parenting without knowing that they have their own trauma, or they haven't dealt with trauma in their past. We need to be a more sensitive society around this idea that we don't know what happened in somebody's past, and we can't judge somebody based on now without understanding that it might be a trauma response. Maybe that person is a bully at work because he feels like he's a failure, so he's taking his anger out on other people, and maybe he was told he was a failure by his parents growing up. Those are the types of things that we really need to start being aware of and understanding that these could be trauma responses and that we need to be sensitive, empathetic, and compassionate, words that we don't like to talk about right now, but that's going to make a difference in our society.

And the more we can do that in our schools and really help these kids, the more likely they will grow up to be empathetic and compassionate adults.

Dr. David Layton: I know we have made the connection between a child who was perhaps abused in some way and then later on acting out. But I don't know that we always make the connection that just the general environment the child is in can also lead to some things.

And so that kind of leads me to the question of where do I go from here to help resolve this?

Sharon Dunlevy: A lot of times, foster kids don't want people to know they are in foster care. You may have foster families coming to church with you, or you may have foster families eating around you, and they're not always obvious.

For your audience, especially because I do know there are a lot of faithful people out there, look at your church and see if there are ways to open your doors.

Here's what I mean. Foster children tend not to have suitcases, things like that. When you hear about a foster kid moving from home to home with a trash bag, that really does happen. How many of us have old suitcases lying around at home that we could be donating to a licensing center? And all you have to do is look up foster care licensing in your area, and they will pop up. They need clothes for kids. Prom dresses and prom suits, right? Those are things that people don't think about.

The other thing you can look at is for foster families, especially if they're trying to work on reunification, they need safe places where they can meet with the bio parents. A church would be an ideal location. It's a safe place. It's neutral. It's not one or the other's home. They're not feeling judged for how their home looks.

Another possibility is just opening your doors for foster parents to have a support system. If your church already provides childcare for other meetings, consider providing childcare for foster parent meetings. The foster parents that I work with need support. They need to be able to talk with others. They feel isolated, they feel helpless. I feel churches really could do a lot more to reach out to foster parents in their communities.

Not everybody needs to be a foster parent. Not everybody can be a foster parent. There is a lot of emotional work, and you need to be willing to put that consistent time into helping the kids get over those trauma behaviors and things like that. And it is a lot of work and it does take a lot of time, but there are other ways that you can support foster kids and foster families.

Dr. David Layton: As you were talking about some things we could do, one thing I noted with the North Alabama Christian Children's home that I've worked with is that there's a requirement that the house parent be given a break periodically. To do that, somebody has to be watching out for those children so they have some, for lack of a better term, standby foster parents who can go in and at least be an adult in the house.

Sharon Dunlevy: What we have in Indiana is respite foster parents. You could get your license as a foster parent and not have to take kids regularly, but say, Hey, I will take kids when somebody needs a break.

Dr. David Layton: My podcast is about helping people discover, sustain, or regain hope. The underlying question of all of this is, how do you, as an advocate, help in bringing about hope in children? Hope is incredibly critical, and the greater our hope, the greater our view of the future. There's so much stacked against a child, and now you add all of these environmental things to it. It's incredible. So speak to that just a little bit, please.

Sharon Dunlevy: It will sound a little counterintuitive, but to bring hope to the child, we must bring hope to the parents. Who's influencing the child the most? It's going to be the adults around them.

A lot of what I do is train foster parents, and one of the things I train them on is self-care. Caregivers can get secondary trauma by working with people with trauma. You get trauma vicariously because you're so exposed to what these kids have gone through. And then what happens is you burn out. If foster parents don't fill their cups, they won't be able to care for those kids. It's the airplane metaphor. Put your mask on first.

And then the other thing is we, as a society, tend to look for the negatives more than the positives. I encourage my foster parents to give three praises for every one correction they give a kid. And when I say praises, I don't mean just good job. Really praise what they did, so they know you're paying attention. For example, if you've got a kid in your home who just hates doing math and really fights it over and over, and yet one day they sit down and they do their math homework without you having to bug them. Say, awesome. I just saw you do your math homework, and I didn't even have to bug you.

It's important for kids to know that we see those positives, and what happens is the more we focus on the positives, the less we're going to see the negatives. And the more the kids focus on the positives and less on the negatives, the more they will see them. Let's be real, these kids often feel that they're the reason that their families fell apart. They're the victims, but they blame themselves.

Focusing on those positives helps them see the good in themselves. When we look for the good in people, and the more we look for the good in people, the more we'll see it. We can give that hope to kids by looking for the good in them. They don't always feel like they have a future, and we want to give them that sense of a future.

Dr. David Layton: I think I'm picking up from what you're saying that just that positive interaction with the child lets the child know, yes, somebody does care, even though the child may not even be aware of it. It just has that kind of an impact.

I tell people we need to be in the hope business. One guest said something along those lines, that we need to be Hope Brokers.

Sharon Dunlevy: Oh, I love that. That is great.

Dr. David Layton: Alright. Friends, thank you for joining Sharon and me as we Journey to Hope. I trust in some small way, we've encouraged you to discover, sustain, and regain hope through this effort.