Foster Youth: Using Your Hard-Won Skills to Thrive
- Accrescent Institute
- 4 days ago
- 3 min read
In this quick 4 minute video, Thomas C. Rector, founder of Accrescent Institute, explores how Foster and Transitional Age Youth can redefine their personal histories through the lens of BioSocial Cognition. Specifically, he explains how foster youth can leverage the memories and experiences from their unique and often difficult challenges faced within the foster care system, and transform them from "baggage" into professional and personal wisdom.
This perspective answers questions we receive from Foster Youth as they are aging out of the system:
How can I stop my past experiences from holding me back in my adult life?
How do I use the things I’ve been through to help me get ahead in a career?
Is it possible to turn painful memories into something productive?
How does my upbringing give me an advantage over people from "normal" backgrounds?
Foster Youth: Using Your Hard-Won Skills to Thrive - Interview with Thomas C. Rector (Transcript)
Shannon:
That feeds really well into [our training] Beyond the System: Empowering Your Success Through Learning. And that builds on that same concept of having choice, but brings it further into taking all that stuff you didn't have control over... and turning that into leverage for your future success. Can you talk to that session and talk to what's important for that session?
Thomas C. Rector:
The experiences that we live are memories. Those memories, we have a choice to use in two different fundamental ways. One is we use those for avoidance, and one of those we use for finding the productive path.
And in my presentations, I use the words baggage or wisdom, but really truly is that we get to use them either way. All knowledge, all experiences, whether they were fun or not fun, whether they were hurtful or not hurtful, all knowledge can be used to make informed decisions going forward.
The people, the youth, the individuals who grow up in a tough environment are having experiences with people and situations that a lot of folks don't have. And those inform them in a manner that a lot of folks aren't informed about. So specifically taking individuals that come through the foster system, they're being exposed to multiple cultures and homes, different adult parenting styles, different social workers, the legal system, lawyers, counselors, all these different people, and that is a wealth of experience, of which a lot of it is probably not very fun or desired and maybe hurtful.
But those experiences show us that there are different personalities, different realm of ways people process things. There's a lot of folks that just don't have that information. That can be very useful going forward with regard to developing professional paths and where you want to go. You will be able to identify people that are not authentic. You'll be able to identify people that are just in the moment. You'll be able to identify people that have huge intentions of positive, trying to make a difference. You will be able to understand the legal dynamics that are going on around you. There's just a huge amount of knowledge that the more average, whatever average is, the more average person's experiences - they won't have. They will have to learn that probably the hard way, like so many of us do, in their adulthood, where in fact, a foster youth person has already learned it, experienced it, and now can use that as they go forward.
While it is absolutely there, and it is absolutely not a positive thing in many situations, it is still there to be used as an opportunity to inform the next choices going forward.
Interested in exploring more discussions and practical tools designed for navigating life during and after the foster system? Additional resources are available here:
Foster Youth / Transitional Age Youth
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