Challenges Of Youth Out-Of-Care

The topic for this paper is healthy relationships directed toward youth aging out of care. This topic will focus on the challenges of youth aging out of care and building healthy relationships. Youth in foster care go through a lot of trauma which makes it harder to build relationships. The lack of structure from being separated from family, moved to one foster home to another, forced to age quicker, and so on. As a CYC I would plan out goals for the youth and provide resources to have the support.

I have contributed throughout the presentation by providing my share of the work and helped to get the supplies for the activity and contributing during our meetings. In our group, we split the work and we all did our share, I contributed to the intervention and conclusion section in the proposal and the presentation. I checked up on the group members and help keep a positive mindset. Altogether I contributed to the presentation by providing my section and participating in the meetings.

Our case study is based on a youth named Summer who is currently living in a foster home and will be aging out soon. Summer was neglected by her biological parents which brought her into foster care. She has a younger brother who lives in a separate home due to Summer taking more of a parental role over him. The separation from her brother created a lot of anxiety which led her to miss a lot of schools. When Summer was placed in an all-girls group home, she connected well with a child and youth worker who helped her advocate to reunite with her brother. Summer has a lot of stressors while approaching aging out, she feels she lacks healthy relationships due to the trauma from her past.

Through feedback from the classmates, it was brought up to strengthen our presentation to discuss more about family connections to siblings when one of the youth is aging out. In our presentation, our main focus was how youth aging out of care have difficulty building healthy relationships. For this paper, I will be focusing on building healthy relationships but also discussing the impact on relationships with siblings when aging out of care. Furthermore, I’ll be discussing a strength-based assessment, the possible needs of the youth, and SMART goals.

Intervention

Assessing Summer’s strengths can lead to an intervention that is suited for her, she has a lot of strengths. The first strength that Summer presents is independence. She relies on herself a lot and is able to provide for herself. Another strength is her resiliency due to all her challenges she is able to push through and move forward. Lastly, Summer’s other strength is that she wants to become a child and youth care worker which can be very beneficial because she can be able to support others through personal experience and knowledge.

With the strengths, there are also needs that Summer would need support on. Summer’s first need is to have a healthy relationship with her younger brother without taking a parental role. Her second need is counseling to provide emotional support. Lastly, Summer’s third need is mentoring to help her form healthy relationships.

The SMART goals that I would find beneficial for Summer are:

• To attend counseling twice a week to provide emotional support which helps heal from past trauma making it easier to build long-lasting healthy relationships for a year.
• To have a positive adult mentor to make it an easier transition to adulthood for six months.
• To spend time with her brother once a week for two hours to have bonding sibling time for a year.
• To meet with Jane her CYC once a week for an hour to help support her aging out of foster care and to teach Summer skills to build healthy relationships for the next 6 months.
• Overall I believe these goals can help Summer improve and be able to build an intervention plan.

Based on the case study, I’m going to focus on Summer and how she can build healthy relationships by using her strengths and strategies to achieve them. In addition to the challenges of aging out of care and the family connection to her younger brother Jason. I would use mentoring as a form of intervention. Supporting Summer by providing positive mentors in her life will lead to positive outcomes. For example, introducing a positive role model in Summer’s life that whom she would be able to connect with can improve her overall health. The improvement can make it easier to build healthy long-lasting relationships. According to Natural mentoring among older youth in and aging out of foster care: A systematic review, the use of natural mentoring creates an easier transition from aging out of care into adulthood. The use of positive mentoring will create improvement in school, self-aware of personal strengths, and so on. In developed countries such as Canada youth aging out of foster care with very few interventions create more challenges. According to Interventions for youth aging out of care: A scoping review, with regard of mentorship programs, having mentors results in positive outcomes to be beneficial for the youth to transition into adulthood. This relates to Summer’s case by having interventions that can help her emotionally which can lead to healthy relationships in the future. When she is presented with a positive role model she would show improvement by being self-aware, improving in school, and helping with her anxiety of aging out of care. By being mentored she would become more adjusted to adulthood.

In Summer’s case, she was separated from her brother which created a lot of anxiety and led to her missing a lot of schools. Summer and her younger brother would be more beneficial if they were placed in a home together. This would lead to positive outcomes as improvement in schools and sibling bonding time. Furthermore, this can improve Summer's building healthy relationships by having family support.

There are several resources in the GTA that can be able to support Summer, one resource is called StepStones. This resource provides youth aged 15-24 with an adult mentor to help youth with skills that are needed for adulthood. This can be beneficial for Summer as it’s one of the intervention plans of having a mentor.

Another resource is Turning Point which provides free counseling. This also would be helpful for Summer as it’s one of the intervention plans of counseling.

The role of a child and youth care worker is to advocate for Summer of having a relationship with her brother and directing to her to resources that can be beneficial for her.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Summer following her SMART goals by attending counseling and having a positive mentor will lead her to build healthy relationships. This would lead her to healthy relationships because the mentor would provide her with resources that can help support her with past trauma and adjusting to adulthood and the counseling can help support her emotionally.