Imagine what it must be like to raise six children. Now imagine raising six biological children and adding 20 foster kids into the mix.
For the last decade, Amy and Mark Shaw of Rochester have been doing just that.
“We got into foster care because we wanted to give kids the opportunity to have an environment where they can grow,” Amy said.
“When you take someone into your home, they are a part of your family. It’s just one of those things that we’re about,” said Mark.
Most of the children the Shaws have cared for have been teenagers, which is a demographic that many foster families shy away from. Some kids have stayed with them for only a few months and some for years. The situation for each child is unique and the Shaws understand that it may not always work out.
“Sometimes kids come into the home and it’s not a good fit. Sometimes there’s personality conflicts,” Mark said.
“It’s been good and bad. I’ve been close to a lot of them and I’ve been distant from some of them,” said Megan Shaw, one of the younger members of the biological children in the house.
“It’s hard when you get used to them when they have to leave,” she said.
Personality conflicts are but a small part of the foster family experience. As much as foster parents do their best to help the children for whom they are charged to care, often times there are internal wounds that love and encouragement cannot easily heal.
A few years ago, the Shaws were the foster parents of a teenage boy from Fall River. He lived with the Shaws during the week, but returned home on weekends. One day, it was discovered that he had brought a weapon to school. He was expelled and then removed from the house.
At another time, they were caring for a five-year-old girl with serious behavioral and emotional issues who proved to be too much to handle.
“She was being traumatized from the age of two,” Mark said.
The young child was also on medication and was the victim of hallucinations. She was sent to a respite home during weekday afternoons because she would try to stab her foster siblings with pencils as they did homework. In the end, she was not a good fit for the Shaw household.
A teenage boy named Chris called their house on Hiller Street home for over five years. He was in high school when he met the Shaw family but suffered the burdens of addiction and an alcoholic father. But they took him in as they had all the other kids. The Shaws even saw that he got into college.
“We encouraged him to live at our house for a bit more structure,” she said.
Chris decided to live at school but he soon began to act out. One night only six weeks into the semester, Chris and his friends were drinking heavily and huffing chemical fumes. They piled into a car and eventually hit a tree at over 100 miles per hour. Chris died that night from his injuries.
“We had him for five years. He was a member of our family,” Mark said.
Being a foster parent doesn’t always end in tragedy or the removal of a child from a home. The Shaws are foster parents because they love kids, no matter where they come from or what they’ve been through.
“Part of what foster care is about is that you hear about all these kids who get pushed through the system and go from house to house. We wanted to help give them a better opportunity and more stability,” he said.
The Shaw family is registered with Dare Family Services, a group that serves much of southern New England. As part of the process, all families are required to go through intensive training to prepare them for the experience.
“Fostering isn’t about providing a bed or a home for a child. It’s about creating life-long connections,” said Pamela Camara, executive director of the East Taunton Dare office.
“There’s always a need. Nobody in our field would ever say there’s not. The need is in finding people who can truly rise to the occasion in helping these kids. They’re presented with more significant challenges as the years pass,” she said.
In addition, Dare provides weekly visits to check in on their families and to keep tabs on problematic behavior and positive progress of the foster children.
Today, Amy and Mark Shaw are foster parents to two teenagers, Patty and Isaac. Patty, who has been to previous foster homes, is 16, and has been living with them for two years. At a young age, Patty was known for acting out and disappearing.
“As an 11-year-old, she felt she had the privileges of an 18-year-old,” Mark said.
“When I was younger I didn’t really like following the rules,” Patty said. According to Mark, she has a good relationship with her biological mother and her ties to her father are improving.
“I’ve gotten better, but I’m still working on it,” she said.
Now, Patty has goals of going to college to study child development. This summer, Megan helped get Patty a job at a local country club.
“The prospects for Patty today are looking a lot better than they were two years ago,” said Mark.
The newest addition to the household is Isaac, a 15-year-old boy from Fall River. The Shaws are his first foster family and he has only been living there for about two weeks. Before arriving in Rochester, Isaac had served a month in the Department of Youth Services lock-up. He had a penchant to skip school and do drugs.
“I had to go to detox. I was smoking weed, doing ‘shrooms, coke and dope,” he said. “I’ve been sober now three months. My head feels a lot clearer.”
After Isaac found out that the state was looking for him, he decided to run, and along the way picked up his heroin habit.
“I started doing heroin when I was on the run. But when I think about it now, I think it’s disgusting that I would ever do that.”
He was eventually turned in after a friend informed on him to authorities.
“I came to find that they were going to put me in a foster home anyway, so I made it worse for myself,” he said. “This was the first summer I ever missed out on. I’ll never make that mistake again.”
Right now, Isaac is not enrolled in school because he hasn’t had a physical exam in years; he has a doctor’s appointment scheduled for early this month. In the meantime, he is already formulating plans for his future.
“I want to open up a salon with my sister. I want to be a barber,” he said. “If you had asked me three months ago, I wouldn’t have wanted to go to college. But it’s better to have a future.”
That future may not have been possible without the aid of people like the Shaw family.
“I’ve known a lot of them and I share the stories with other foster kids,” said Megan. “‘You can go this way or that.’ They can get free college from the state. They have choices.”
“It’s a lot like raising your own kids,” Mark said. “We deal with a lot of teenagers, so we’re focused on their futures.”
By Eric Tripoli
