In this opinion piece for Youth Today, Benjamin Bencomo - an assistant professor of social work at New Mexico Highlands University - writes about his experience as a social worker supporting an Indigenous young person as he aged out of foster care and how he learned to allow the young person to define his own goals for a successful transition to adulthood.
"He was going to get an academic scholarship, and with financial assistance provided through our department using Chafee funding, he was going to attend a large university and get a bachelor’s degree and perhaps a master’s degree," writes Bencomo of his own ideas for the young person's future. "He was going to move away from negative influences in his hometown. He was going to get a high-paying job as an engineer or a chemist or maybe even in the medical field. He was going to buy his own home and become a 'successful adult.' Except, those were not his plans. These were my plans for him and it became clear at that moment that he and I had different ideas of what a 'successful adult' was." The youth, instead, expressed his desire to return to his biological family, care for his ailing grandmother, and support his family financially.
This interaction spurred Bencomo to explore the needs of ethnic minority former foster youth as they transition into adulthood in his doctoral dissertation. Through interviews with young people, he discovered that four main themes emerged. "Two were consistent with common benchmarks employed to gauge a successful transition into adulthood, namely education and financial solvency. However, just as important for ethnic minority former foster youth were family and community."
While practitioners may think it best to discourage former foster youth to reunify with their biological families, Bencomo argues that most youth will seek them out anyway. "Rather than spending our time and energy discouraging this connection," Bencomo writes, "perhaps we should spend it on providing education and support to the youth so that they can plan to do so safely allowing for renegotiation of relationships, in a way that doesn’t revictimize them. For many youth, this reconnection is necessary for developing their individual identity. For some, identity is rooted in family, in history, in culture and in community, and is what many ethnic minority youth desire."
Bencomo calls for services to support former foster youth not only in their pursuit of higher education, but also to pursue other options such as trade schools, apprenticeships and job placement programs within their communities of origin. "Perhaps we need to reconsider independent living for former foster youth and allow for an exploration of how interdependence and a sense of belonging within their communities of origin can also be deemed a successful transition for youth aging out of foster care across the country.