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Connections and the Foster Care System

Connections and the Foster Care System

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In our latest episode of Adaptivity, our podcast on the science of adolescence, we talked with Sixto Cancel and Dr. Leslie Leve, both experts on youth in child welfare system, about what that system could look like if it reflected what we know about developmental science.

Both guests zeroed in on the critical need for connections during our adolescent years.

“When we think about what makes healthy development for adolescents, it is rooted in connection,” Sixto told host Dr. Ron Dahl. “It’s rooted in experiences that allow for healthy risk-taking, like learning how to drive, learning how to cook, being able to get exposure to different cities, different experiences—and being in the foster care system, those things are restricted.”

Research is clear that our relationships with parents and other caring adults are as important to our healthy development in our adolescent years as when we were small. Secure and supportive relationships with parents and other supportive adults can help us build resilience, develop a positive sense of self, and navigate challenges.

“These connections are so critical,” Leslie agreed. “Especially when you consider the histories that many foster youth have experienced where they have been moved from home to home, from family to family, and had some of their really important connections severed multiple times in their development.”

Sixto and Leslie outlined several ways the foster system can prioritize these essential connections for youth:

  • Support families to avoid removing a young person from their home in the first place. Most young people in the foster care system are there as a result of neglect. “If the water and electricity is out and the child has asthma, you have to have the lights and water on,” explains Sixto. “Instead of bringing that child into foster care and spending months trying to get that child back home, how might we be able to pay those two things as a system to get that family up to date?”
  • Prioritize kinship care. “When a removal has to happen, we should be ensuring that kin—uncle, grandmother, aunt, cousin—have the same resources that we provide to foster parents to take in their child,” says Sixto.
  • Provide parenting support to foster and biological parents. “Parents, just like adolescents, are coming into their role…with a whole range of unique experiences,” says Leslie. “Maybe they haven’t learned some of those skills around how to communicate with adolescents, how to set limits without being overly punitive but still having a boundary, how to provide effective supervision or monitoring of your adolescent, how to problem solve when issues come up that you can discuss with your adolescent.”
  • Ensure youth have a warm, consistent relationship with a mentor. “One of the top qualities I would say in that scenario is someone who’s persistent and just shows up day in and day out,” says Sixto. “No matter how much you might test the relationship, push back a little bit. If your home changes, if you have to go to a new school, having that person who is going to be connected with you and be able to show that they’re willing to stay in connection despite these things that might happen is so important.”

Youth in the foster system have already had to navigate challenges that would be unimaginable for many young people. We need to prioritize connections with caring adults so they can heal from past trauma and go on to thrive.

“We now know enough about the neuroscience, the development of young people, enough about trauma and enough about healing,” says Sixto. “There’s such an opportunity to actually start to invent new programs based on the latest science that we know around healing, around development and around trauma.

The question now, says Sixto, is how do we connect the science even further?

To hear more about evidence based ways to support youth in the US foster care system, listen to this episode of Adaptivity, “Rooted in Connection: Reimagining the Foster System for Adolescents.” If you like it, rate us and leave a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Additional Resources

The Connecting Adolescent Brain

Fact Sheet

This fact sheet gives an overview of adolescent brain development and explains how access to resources, opportunities, and meaningful relationships during adolescence can build connections within our brains and with the world around us that support us into adulthood.

Brain development during adolescence is fundamentally a story of connections.

Around age 9 or 10, hormonal changes kick off a period of intense learning and development, when brain cells form, strengthen, and streamline connections in response to our experiences more rapidly than in any period of life after early childhood.

Activity increases especially in the brain networks that propel us to explore the world, learn from our mistakes, and connect with others in new ways. In turn, these new experiences prompt our brain cells to connect with other neurons in ways that help us adapt to new events and new information. These neural connections become stronger the more we use them, while unused connections are pruned away, helping the brain become more efficient at acquiring and mastering new skills and new ways of thinking.

This brain-building learning happens through direct experiences in our environments and interactive, responsive relationships—with our families and peers, in our classrooms and neighborhoods, in community activities, and even online. The resources, opportunities, and experiences we as adults provide in and out of school can help young people’s brains build the extensive networks of connections that will manage the complex knowledge and behaviors needed to navigate adulthood.

Learning by Exploring the World Around Us

One of the networks that changes significantly with the increase in hormones and dopamine at the beginning of puberty is the “reward system” in our brain. Heightened activity in this system increases the feeling of reward we get from exploring the world, taking risks, and learning from the results.

Meanwhile, the network of brain regions that make up the “social brain” also changes during adolescence. These changes help us tune into social and emotional cues, like facial expressions or social rejection and approval, and increase our desire to earn respect and contribute to others. It also enables us to learn the nuances of changing social contexts in ways that help prepare us for adult relationships.

The prefrontal cortex (the region of the brain that orchestrates critical thinking and behavioral control) undergoes its most rapid period of development during adolescence. It builds on many other systems within the brain to manage our responses to the flood of new information and intensifying emotions. Engaging with other people and our environment and learning from our successes and our mistakes, known as “action-based learning,” helps shape the prefrontal cortex by strengthening the connections within it and between it and other brain networks. We learn through repeated practice—which includes trying and sometimes failing—what is adaptive and appropriate in different situations and how to guide our behavior accordingly, in ways that equip us to pursue new forward-looking goals.

When adults provide youth with opportunities to try new things, to practice navigating emotions, and to learn from failures along the way, it helps build the brain connections that we all need to grow into healthy, thriving adults.

Policies, Experiences, and Mindsets Shape the Connecting Brain

Although we can continue to learn new skills and behaviors as adults, the adaptability of the brain during adolescence means that these connections are much more likely to form quickly in response to experiences. The extent of these changes make the adolescent years a critical window when investments in the right policies and programs for youth can shape long-term positive development.

Likewise, this makes the adolescent years a time when negative experiences including racism, other forms of discrimination, poverty, or abuse can create steeper hills for young people to climb toward a healthy adulthood. When adults ensure that all young people, especially those who have experienced earlier adversity, have what they need along their journey, they can build the skills and capacities they need to thrive as adults. This includes opportunities to explore and take healthy risks, to connect with and contribute to those around us, to make decisions and learn from the outcomes, to develop a healthy sense of identity, and to rely on support from parents or other caring adults.

Understanding how and why the brain develops during adolescence lets us provide the support young people need to build healthy connections—in their world and within their brains—that will help our youth and our communities thrive.

Adolescents Learn Essential Skills for Adulthood through Exploration, Discovery, and Taking Healthy Risks

Fact sheet | Education | Community Engagement | Out-of-School Time | Digital Tech | Adversity, Bias, & Discrimination

This fact sheet reviews research that explains why adolescents are more motivated to take risks, why that’s important to learning and development, and how policies and practices could support healthy risk taking to promote positive development.

When policies and programs support adolescents to explore their world and take positive risks, it leads to healthier, more connected communities.

Being able and willing to take risks and try new things is a part of our natural tendency to explore the world during adolescence. It’s a fundamental aspect of learning that helps us develop our skills, discover who we are, and ultimately expand our worlds beyond the familiarity of home.

Research on adolescent brain development helps explain why we’re more motivated to approach things that feel uncertain or scary during these years, and why these risks are so important to learning and development. It also provides insights into how policies and practices could recognize this drive for new and exciting experiences and provide opportunities for healthy versions of risk taking that can support positive development.

Brain development during adolescence encourages exploration. The increase in hormones at the beginning of puberty launches changes in the “reward center” of our brain. Heightened activity in this area of our brain during adolescence, compared to early in childhood or adulthood, makes us more sensitive to the rewards and good feelings that come from surprises and new experiences. This increases our motivation to explore the world, take risks, and learn from the results.

This enthusiasm to try new things is important: new experiences cause new neural connections to form and, with repeated use, strengthen within our brain. When we have opportunities to safely try new things and to learn from mistakes along the way, we build connections that support learning.

Exploration and risk taking are an important part of healthy development during adolescence. Research has shown that adolescents are more willing than adults to lean into uncertainty and explore situations in which there is a potential for a reward (in whatever form) but the outcome is not assured, and this exploration can lead to a more positive mood.

This tolerance for ambiguous outcomes is essential to learning and development during adolescence. Anything that runs the risk of failure or rejection—like attempting to learn a new skill, running for student government, trying out for a team or school play, asking someone out, or standing up for a friend—can feel uncertain or even scary, especially during adolescence when most of us are trying these things in new ways or for the first time. Adult support can help young people to take on new challenges, even those that seem intimidating.

Racism and other forms of discrimination curtail opportunities for healthy risk taking. Unfortunately, opportunities to learn from exploration and risk taking are not equally available to all of us during adolescence. A history of racial and economic inequities has led to fewer resources for organized activities in schools and neighborhoods with higher populations of youth of color.

Racism and bias, such as Black and other ethnic minority youth sometimes being perceived as more adult-like than their same-aged White peers, often result in harsher consequences (such as suspension, expulsion, arrest, or incarceration) for mistakes that might be labeled “learning experiences” when made by White adolescents.

Adolescents need healthy outlets to channel their motivation to take risks. Although not all adolescents are comfortable with risks, our reward system during these years is generally more excited by risks than at other times in our lives. Without healthy outlets, the attraction of risk and novelty can make us more vulnerable to unhealthy behaviors, such as reckless driving or drug and alcohol misuse.

Avenues to channel this motivation for new experiences into positive exploration include:

Policies and programs can provide outlets for healthy risk-taking to support the developmental need to explore during these years and direct the desire for new experiences toward positive activities such as trying a new sport, engaging in activism, or making new friends.

➢ Secondary schools and college admissions processes should encourage adolescents to take academic risks. For example, high schools could provide broad access to advanced classes and new subjects for all interested students—and college admissions offices could value attempts at challenging coursework that may result in lower letter grades.

➢ Identify and counter racism and other forms of discrimination that ultimately result in young people from different backgrounds facing disparate consequences for taking risks. Recognize that racism and bias can cause adults to perceive Black and other minority youth as more adult-like than their same-aged White peers.

➢ Fund and support an array of opportunities for youth to try new activities at school, at home, in the community, and in the digital world.

Adolescents Need Supportive Environments Where They Can Develop Values, Goals, and A Positive Sense of Identity

Fact sheet | Education | Community Engagement | Out-of-School Time | Adversity, Bias, & Discrimination

This fact sheet shares research about adolescent development that helps explain why adolescence is such an important window for building a sense of identity and how adults can support the process.

Policies and programs that support adolescents to explore and discover their values, goals, and a positive sense of identity lead to healthier, more connected communities.

Adolescence is an important period for exploring who we are, what we value, and who we want to be. Over the course of our adolescent years, we are developing a more integrated, stable sense of our identity that we carry with us into adulthood.

Healthy development in adolescence involves creating a positive sense of self and belonging based on our values and aspirations. This process can be challenging for youth facing racism, sexism, or other forms of bias and discrimination, which too often cause young people to be defined by others in ways that are grounded in negative or otherwise limiting stereotypes.

Research into development helps explain why adolescence is such an important window for building a sense of identity and how adults can support the process.

As our cognitive abilities mature, we’re able to think in more complex, abstract ways that help us engage in self-reflection on a deeper level. Regions in our brain associated with perspective taking, decision making, self-regulation, and values become more active when we’re evaluating ourselves in relation to others, especially in social contexts. In addition, we become more sensitive to social stimuli, increasing the effects of feedback from our family, peers, communities, and media on shaping our identity.

Our sense of identity is more than just who we are—it also affects what we do. Throughout adolescence, our sense of identity increasingly influences the decisions we make. Research suggests that we value behaviors more when they fit with our sense of identity. For example, if we feel strongly about our identity as a good student, we may choose to skip a party the night before a big test.

Healthy development involves creating a positive sense of self and belonging that includes our sense of racial, ethnic, and gender identity. Positive feelings about our racial and ethnic identity are associated with psychological well-being and even serve as a buffer against external stressors. For youth of color, positive identity formation supports emotional adjustment, academic outcomes, and health. For sexual minority youth, a positive sense of identity is protective against depression and makes LGBTQ+ youth more likely to form supportive friendships with other sexual minority youth.,

Our increased motivation to explore and take risks during adolescence allows us to try out different interests, “selves,” and roles within our peer groups, families, and community. Inequities resulting from poverty as well as discrimination within systems and by adult “gatekeepers” can limit opportunities to safely explore and reduce options related to school and work.

During adolescence, we need agency to explore our place in the world, to set our own goals, and to determine how we want to be seen. We also need leeway to change these over time. The challenge for youth from historically stigmatized groups is that often they are being defined by others in ways that are grounded in negative stereotypes.

➢ Create equitable opportunities for youth to explore roles and activities that can help them determine what they value and who they want to become. These could occur throughout the contexts in which youth engage every day, such as at home with family, in the community, at vocational and career training programs, on sports teams, and in school or extended learning programs. Learn more about one example of an afterschool program that focuses on boosting leadership skills and embracing cultural identity, Youth Empowerment Solutions.

➢ Ensure access to images and messages that affirm and support pride in racial, gender, or other identities and provide space for young people to explore their identities.

➢ Develop opportunities for young people to forge identities as group or community members. Substantial research has connected extracurricular activities with positive youth development by contributing to young people’s sense of identity as a member of a group or community.

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