Healing and Reunification
Alex Gross
Written by Hallie Riggs, MSW, LCSW, CSW-PIP, Clinical Director of the Simply Smiles Children’s Village
Our role at the Simply Smiles Children’s Village is two-fold. First, we help to ensure the safety of children in our care. This is paramount. Second, we work to support the healing of parent-child relationships.
For some, this might seem like a paradox. How can we honor the relationships children in our care already have with adults who have struggled to keep them safe or even hurt them? Because just as caregivers can hurt children and still love them, children can love those who have let them down. And they do. Because our family is our family.
Our experience loving and caring for children began in Oaxaca, Mexico, where we continue to provide safe and loving homes for children in need. At times when children have had nowhere else to turn for safety, we have been there. And at times when children have been able to return home, we have had to say goodbye. These goodbyes are painful. They are bittersweet. And they are so important. With each goodbye, we are helping children to understand that goodbyes aren’t always a bad thing. They are sometimes a sign of healing, of growth, and of hope. Certainly, there is an emotional impact on our team. And so we work hard to support one another during those transitions, and to manage a balance of loving children in our care fiercely, while maintaining the perspective that successful reunification is always our goal.
The first home of the Simply Smiles Children’s Village on the Cheyenne River Reservation.
When parents are well and able to provide safe, loving care for their children, then wherever they are is exactly where those children belong. When this isn’t possible, other family members stepping in to care for these children is the next best option. And when this can’t be achieved, the most we can do for children is to keep them safe with their siblings, and find them shelter with someone from their tribe–a member of their kin. Reunification is critical to cultural preservation.
This is why the mission of the Simply Smiles Children’s Village is so essential to Indian Country. It is a response to decades of misunderstanding–or refusing to understand–the specific needs of Native people based upon the atrocities committed by our non-Native ancestors, and the injuries that continue. “Entire generations of American Indian families have been disconnected as a result of relocation and systematic practices of child removal” (1). In Indian Country, we have a legal and ethical obligation to keep Native children with Native families. And, we have a legal and ethical obligation to help reunify children with their biological caregivers, whenever it is safe to do so. “Reunification is an essential component to rebuilding American Indian communities after efforts of forced assimilation, removal and relocation” (1).
We must do everything we can to ensure that during times of crisis and instability, we find homes for children that they can recognize as their own, and that they can count on.
Frequent moves damage the trusting relationships that children work to build with new caregivers–sometimes beyond repair. Each move to a new home risks disruption of their physical environment, their daily schedule, their school, their friendships, and perhaps even their proximity to their siblings and parents. These disruptions can prevent the healing that children and their biological families need.
Every time a child is removed and placed in the care of another adult, the voice inside their head that tells them, “Don’t get too comfortable, this could all change soon” becomes louder. Often, after too many moves from foster home to foster home, children come to expect these disruptions. They don’t bother to attach, as a means of self-protection. They act out to speed up the process of disruption. And when they are misunderstood, given up on, and relocated time and time again, they receive the message that they are not worth holding onto, that they cannot count on anyone, and that feelings of safety can never last.
So which do we prioritize: keeping children with their kin, or ensuring as little movement as possible? Both. The Simply Smiles Children’s Village offers the unique opportunity for Lakota children from the Cheyenne River Reservation to remain on the Reservation, to be raised by kin in their community, and to remain connected to their biological families while those family members work to repair their relationships with their children, learn parenting strategies that are rooted in Lakota values, and ultimately heal.
Cultivating healthy relationships is a practice. The work of our Native foster parents at the Simply Smiles Children’s Village will be to nurture this practice with children and their biological caregivers, using the traditions of Lakota culture and child rearing traditions. Because the Lakota people have always known what many communities are now only beginning to understand: children are sacred beings.
The Simply Smiles Children’s Village provides a long-term home for children–a place they can count on for as long as they need. For children who need a safe place to land, we will be there. For parents who need the support to repair fractured relationships with their children, we will be there. And when children are able to return home to their biological caregivers, we will be there, providing support to those families for as long as they need–becoming an extension of their family, remaining their tiospaye–their extended family.
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