Making a Difference for Children in Foster Care: A Commitment
- Accrescent Institute
- May 17
- 15 min read
Join us for an insightful conversation with our founder, Thomas C. Rector, as he shares insights on - and his commitment to - making a difference for children and youth in the foster care system.
We discuss why a commitment to children in foster care matters, including the unique challenges foster children and youth face as they navigate the foster care system and eventually age out into adulthood.
Foster Care Interview with Thomas C. Rector (Transcript)
Table of Contents
A Commitment to Supporting Children and Youth in Foster Care
Message for Those Who Support Foster Children and Foster Parents
Why Does Positive Response Matter for Children and Youth in Foster Care?
Advice for Those Who Support Children in the Foster Care System
Transitional Age and Aged Out Foster Youth: Using Experiences for Success
Intro:
Today we’re going to talk a little bit about foster care. You have a long, 30-plus year history with foster care, and at Accrescent you have given us the directive that we will support organizations who support children in foster care and youth aging out of foster care.
A Commitment to Supporting Children and Youth in Foster Care
Can you talk a little bit about why foster care is important to you and important for Accrescent Institute?
Thomas C. Rector:
Yes. The journey, and I imagine I’m not the only one that has had a journey, the journey from my standpoint is we raised two children and then decided to start over in our early 40s, and to do that, we ended up getting acquainted with the foster world. We have two adopted children through that process.
We wanted to have children again because we liked the experience of being parents, we liked the engagement. I specifically really enjoy the teaching, the development, the person who comes alive from all of those experiences, and each one of them is unique and different.
The first experience in foster care was an 8-month-old boy that came to us, who we eventually adopted.
We’d raised two kids, and they’re good people, they have their eyes focused forward, they do what they need to do, they’re responsible, they contribute to the community. You think, “Oh, I know what I’m doing.”
Proceeded to implement the same kind of strategies, the same kind of methodologies for our foster children, and it became clear very early on that wasn’t the right fit, the right thing for them.
If I was going to be successful as a dad, I needed to figure it out. I did a lot of self-searching, asking and listening, listening more than I used to. I came to several fundamental conclusions.
One was I’m all-in, this little boy, I need to contribute to, he needs to have the devotion, the commitment, the caring, and he needs more than that, he needs something else that will enable him to grow beyond the limitations that were given to him in his first eight months.
The memories he had were not positive. I just needed to know more. One was just absolutely this is the right thing for me to do, I can do this, I know how to do this.
The second was there needed to be a different understanding of how to process it. The material that I saw out there, lots of books, lots of articles, lots of training, and all of those were based off an assumption first and then going forward with a solution. And the assumption was either it was based off what a cause-and-effect kind of thing was or someone’s way of doing things.
I recognized that they weren’t coming from the foundational component of understanding how the child develops. Why are they behaving the way that they are? And how can I contribute so that they can go in a positive direction?
There was a great deal of research that went into learning more about the human, the mind, how things process. In my particular case, all of that stretch, all of that new stuff to take on was motivated because I needed to make a difference.
Along the way, pretty early on, I recognized that I was one of the lucky ones.
I had two parents that cared. They were my parents. They invested learning in me. They fed me. They took care of me. They cared. I was basically clueless that that wasn’t a normal thing, I was one of the lucky ones.
And I had no control over that. I just happened to come up with these parents, where these other children did not have that luck. It wasn’t fair. It just wasn’t fair for them.
The commitment personally and the commitment through our organization is what can we do, how do we do it, where do we go, who do we talk to so that they can learn the same fundamental information that I discovered and they can apply it.
It’s not a recipe like cause-and-effect. It’s understanding what’s going on and then understanding how one can engage that, modify that, and add to that.
We need to make a difference.
Unique Challenges Foster Children Face
Shannon:
One of the things that you just said, that you realized you were one of the lucky ones. Children come into the foster system, generally in almost all cases, through no fault of their own.
They had no control over the family they were born into, the parent’s situations that they were born into. They come into the foster system and have to navigate it.
You work through a Memories Matter type approach.
Q: What are some of the unique challenges that children coming into the foster system face that you recognized in your journey as a foster parent, as a mentor, as a CASA, your variety of different roles in the foster world?
Thomas C. Rector:
I would say first and foremost is they are not surrounded by their foundation of family.
They’re loose and waving around, they’re not connected where they get up in the morning and know they’re with their family, know that this is the way we do things.
That connection, if not lost, is very fragile and distant for them. Even if it’s a bad situation, there’s still a connection, unless it’s really terrible. It’s there, we have this to begin with.
I think the other one is they are put into a world that they do not have connection to, they don’t know what it’s about. They have to re-learn or add to their learning to be able to navigate and understand, so they’re in a huge, great big unknown.
Even when a foster child is moved from one house to another, which is terrible, when they’re moved, they have to go into another new world and learn that again. So, they’re surrounded by new. I would phrase it as foreign.
These are different people, and they have to be able to survive this, to be productive in it. Really, survive it. Productiveness is another level of survival that’s much better.
I think those are the two things. They lost the grounding, either they didn’t have it all or it was so poor and then they lost it because it wasn’t there. The other is they’re put into foreign environments that they have to navigate.
The third would be they have zero control, everybody else has control. What that does is create a package of, “I’m not safe.” It’s hard to connect if you’re spending all of your time in an unsafe environment, you don’t have a lot of juice to work with to learn and grow and get comfortable. I’d put those as the top three.
Siblings in Foster Care
Shannon: I remember when I was a child and my parents took me to an event that was giving Christmas presents for foster kids. I had it in my head that there was a foster child that I had picked out a gift for that was going to get this gift and she would be like my sister and so forth.
I remember making a comment to her saying, “You’ll be like my sister,” and she was like, “No, I won’t. I already have a sister.”
That was my first conversation with somebody in the foster system, but it was also a conversation that opened my eyes that she already had a family, she already had a sister, she didn’t get to live with her sister because they were in the system and siblings are often separated in the foster system. It was a very eye-opening event for me that my world was not her world, and that her world was different.
Differences in Family Cultures
Q: You’ve had a variety of those types of things as you’ve gone through. For example, I think I heard a story from when you were a CASA about understanding they didn’t have birthdays or celebrate things like Mother’s Day in the same way that you did, that what was normal within your family culture was not normal within another family’s culture. Can you share that a little bit?
Thomas C. Rector:
Yes. I was a CASA volunteer for 10 years to two boys. They were 9 and 11 at the time that I came into their lives, and they were with their mother at the time. There was no father involved in the transaction.
There was so much stuff, there was so much uncertainty, there was so much trying to get from day to day, to navigate through the things that came up, there wasn’t the energy or time to stop that and celebrate. They didn’t have the freedom of safeness to stop everything, be safe, and just celebrate.
The birthdays, Mother’s Day, and Father’s Day, and those kinds of things, they just didn’t fit into what their circumstances were at all. Which then meant the two boys were raised in that situation, which is what they learned, then they moved on and perpetuated that particular thing.
I would try to do something on those particular days, especially on Mother’s Day. Mother’s Day is a good opportunity to stop and stand back and just appreciate. These two young boys hadn’t spent their first decade doing that, it was much more about survival or taking.
It’s also one of those things that’s in your face that I’m so lucky, and it’s not fair they don’t have the same thing, and it wasn’t their choice. They had no choice on what their circumstances were. What can I do?
As a CASA volunteer, you have a specific role and limitations. That was one of them that I tried to leverage as much as possible to convey the goodness of that.
It was a while ago, but I still remember.
Challenges Foster Youth Aging Out of the Foster System Face
Shannon: In 2025, ChildWelfare.gov states that there are 365,000 children and youth in foster care. That’s like a large town. There are 18,500 youth that leave foster care without a permanent family.
I have some very specific experiences with aged out foster youth. Just the hope that they had as they left the system, and then the crushing realities that they weren’t equipped with the skills to have a healthy family that they desperately wanted. Those were very personal anecdotes that I was a part of.
Q: What are some of the challenges that youth aging out of the foster system in that transition face that we may not recognize having not gone through the foster system?
Thomas C. Rector:
As a general statement, the foster experience is mostly about trying to survive. People, system, other people in control, social pressure.
When they get to the other side and they’re aging out, they generally have not had the opportunity to have built the skills to be engaged as a productive adult.
They’ve spent their time trying to be a surviving youth and they did not have the opportunity to go out and learn the skills or even the culture or the processes for renting an apartment, interviewing for a job, getting up every day and going to work, all those fundamental things. For the most part, they didn’t have that opportunity to learn those ahead of time.
Then they’re out of the foster system, which was their support system, "what do I do" and "how do I do this". The cards get stacked against them pretty heavily because of that.
We recently did a training specifically targeted for the aged out foster adults, from 18 to 24 kind of age range. They were in the room trying to learn what to do, how does the thing work to be able to go to college, to get a job, to get your own place.
It was a shining component of messaging of while they were in the foster system, they were trying to survive the whole thing that was going on, their own experience, other people’s experiences, the system was imposed upon them.
They had a large skill set in that area, but they had not had the opportunity to do the I got a job, I’ve got a little bit of money, I set up an account or Venmo or whatever it is. So many times, they just didn’t have those fundamental skills or knowledge to work with. I think that’s the biggest.
Message for Those Who Support Foster Children and Foster Parents
Q: You’ve had a variety of roles that are about supporting children and youth in foster care, and you speak to a variety of individuals who are committed to helping and supporting foster children across a spectrum of roles. What is your overall message for anyone who is supporting foster children and foster parents, and what do you wish for them to know?
Thomas C. Rector:
I’ll start with a personal moment that occurred.
While I was a CASA volunteer, the younger boy was in and out of trouble. I was always there and I was always the one doing a presentation to the judge and writing reports.
The people that are in the system, you gain a rapport with them, or at least a familiarity of those particular people. This was a gentleman, a professional, and this was the third or fourth time, and the young teenager was probably going to have to do a lockup experience, a confinement kind of experience.
I was advocating for particular things for what should occur or how it could occur within the context of that.
It ended up where he and I were by ourselves, the gentleman and I, and he asked the question, the words were something along the line of, “Why are you still doing this?”
But the question was really, it’s the same old thing, we’re not making a difference, it’s a dead-end, it’s not working, and he was asking "why do you keep doing this because it doesn’t look like there’s anything happening."
My answer was because of that, because we have to keep doing this. This is a long-term life experience, this is an investment in who they are going to be.
If their experience is somebody thinks to give up on them, then that’s what they think relationships are about, that they’re good until they’re hard and then they’re not. That’s what we get when we have family, family is there. Not always is it fun, but they’re there.
I think that, first and foremost, the day to day stuff that seems like we’re pushing water uphill and we’re not making any headway, and yet that’s exactly why we’re there is to keep pushing the water uphill.
Because this young person needs somebody that they see, that role model that when it’s hard you just put your head down and keep going and be pragmatic about it.
I think that’s really important for those of us that work in the trenches because days are hard and situations are hard, and it seems like it’s fruitless. Then every once in a while, you see a shining star, which is pretty cool.
The other thing, personally, is to not react, but to understand.
There’s all kinds of words, phrases, attitudes, choices that are out there that are pretty darn negative, and it’s easy for those to accumulate and make a person feel down on it. I think the right thing to do is not to react to it, but to understand it.
That’s what Accrescent Institute brings in their trainings is the ability to have the tools to be able to understand the why behind it.
When we know the why, then we can construct some constructive solution or path to make it better. In the moment, maybe not. In the long run, absolutely yes.
Why Does Positive Response Matter for Children and Youth in Foster Care?
Shannon: You and Christine Slette from CASA of Del Norte recently were at the California Foster Youth Education Summit. This is an organization of people that support foster youth within the education system in California in lots of different roles. The training that you and Christine did was on using Positive Response.
Q: Why does Positive Response for a foster child or foster youth matter?
Thomas C. Rector:
The Positive Response program was a creation of Christine’s. She used the BioSocial Cognition, Accrescent Institute, material to found her program of Positive Response. She is a distinctly influential person in her community. It’s a smaller community, but she is very much influencing the community and has been there a long time.
She needed something that would connect to not only her advocates and the foster parents, but the community as a whole. Because she understood that it’s the whole picture, it’s not just the behavior in the moment.
All of the foster children, in one way or another, end up being in meetings or working with professionals that wear all different hats. What’s so important to understand is memories matter. Memories matter when they’re positive and they matter when they’re negative.
What is so important about that is we think of memories as being history. They’re not just history. They’re the library of resources that we draw upon as individuals to make future decisions.
Positive response is to bring awareness to all of the people that have some connection to the foster child to be aware that whenever we can respond in a productive positive way, there are so many things that we can frame.
It’s raining today.
I have a chance to use my raincoat today.
Those are the same facts. The same fact was occurring, but there’s different perspectives on it.
What’s important in the Positive Response program to understand is that how we frame the words and phrases matter. They absolutely matter.
If the child or the youth is hearing negative, negative, negative, failure, failure, failure, then they’re in a conditioned environment that puts them down, doesn’t lift them up.
The positive response program is to understand that makes a difference and then to understand why it makes a difference. And then, how to use your knowledge to achieve the positive thing.
It was very well-received, lots of questions, lots of interface, probably 80 to 100 people in the room from all different professions.
The key is to understand why it makes a difference and what we’re doing is making memories.
Shannon: Christine wrote a very powerful case study for that, the Becca case study. It was just one of those not-easy, heart-wrenching kind of things. It was based on reality that she faces as a CASA director every day. The one she wrote last year also was incredibly powerful as well. It brings up that foster care is not simple. It’s very messy. It’s very complex.
Advice for Those Who Support Children in the Foster Care System
Q: Do you have any words of encouragement or advice for those who are in the trenches helping to support children in the foster care system?
Thomas C. Rector:
Yes. They need somebody who is absolutely there. That doesn’t mean we’re hugging all the time, but we’re always there. T
hey need to have the experience that there is such a thing as an adult, a knowledge person, a mentor, that there is somebody that is there through thick and thin no matter what, they’re consistently the same.
The more of those kinds of experiences they have, they will accumulate and be useful, used, referred to, and depended upon in their adult years.
Transitional Age and Aged Out Foster Youth: Using Experiences for Success
Shannon: One of the things that you spoke of at JBAY's Blueprint for Success Conference, which you were speaking specifically to youth who had been in the foster system and were now in college, you specifically wanted to do this custom training for them and you had a specific message that you wanted them to have that had to do with their own definition of success.
Q: Can you share a little bit about what your heart was for them in that moment, why you wanted to do that training for them?
Thomas C. Rector:
They have a tremendous opportunity that comes from their experiences. The world, and probably mostly their perspective, treats the foster experience as not as a positive experience.
What I wanted them to see is that they dealt with lots of professionals, lots of different school things, many different things that their peers that are not foster did not have the experience. In truth, all of those experiences they have are tools to be able to navigate and work forward with the adult world that goes on out there. Many, if not very many, students did not have that life experience.
What I wanted them to be able to see is, yes, you had all these experiences and they weren’t always fun, but they’re very valuable if you use them as wisdom.
You know how to deal with lawyers, how to deal with the court system, how to deal with reports, how to deal with disciplinary systems probably. You know all of this, you’ve been to that school of life. Many of the college students haven’t been there, but in fact, that’s what the real world is about.
What I wanted them to be able to see is they have a whole bucket of wisdom that they can use and leverage as they go forward, and I was able to show them where that was and how that’s being used within the brain and the memories and how the processing goes.
It was very successful, very gratifying. I think most of the young people that were in the room came away with, “I know this stuff. I know these other people haven’t done this. Yeah, I know something they don’t know. I’m going to use that information.”
It was good, gratifying.
Shannon: I know when you told me that story, it resonated because my youngest is 21 and they’re just learning how to navigate all of these things and they need a lot of support for that. That’s absolutely true that the foster youth are coming in with all of these experiences navigating that I know my own children just didn’t have those experiences and those memories to draw upon, so they’re learning them and they’re all new for them. That was kind of cool.
An Investment in the Future of an Adult
Q: As we wrap up here, is there anything else that you would like to share about foster care, children in foster care, or those who support them?
Thomas C. Rector:
It’s hard. Anybody that’s in it, it’s hard. It’s hard physically. It’s hard emotionally. It drains a person a lot.
I think that being able to know that, feel that, acknowledge that, and at the same time see it as an investment in the future of an adult (or adults) is the key.
It’s not going to waste, it’s being given to these youth that didn’t get a straight shot at the beginning
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