Video: Foster Care, A Look Back

Foster Care: A Look Back is a 37-minute video featuring David and Erroll, two young adults who spent time in the foster care system in the state of North Carolina. In a revealing look back, David and Erroll tell us of their early home lives, their positive and negative experiences in foster care, and the people who made their transition from foster care to independent adulthood possible.

Although the stories they share are filled with struggle, the message David and Erroll send about foster care is ultimately positive. Based on the barriers they encountered and the help they were given, they offer us a moving vision of what foster care can and should be.

Foster Care: A Look Back is designed to promote discussion among foster parents who attend Crossing the Threshold, a training for foster parents in North Carolina. At various points during the video, instructors stop the tape and ask foster parents to talk about the personal qualities and community resources that make it possible for foster children like David and Erroll to achieve independence.

Crossing the Threshold is an in-service training for foster parents who want to teach their adolescent foster children the skills they will need to become successful, independent adults. Crossing the Threshold teaches foster parents to assess an adolescent’s developmental level and decision-making skill; understand separation and loss issues from the perspective of an older adolescent; and communicate in a way that reaches their adolescent.

Both Crossing the Threshold and Foster Care: A Look Back were produced by the North Carolina Family and Children’s Resource Program, part of the Jordan Institute for Families and the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill School of Social Work, under contract with the North Carolina Division of Social Services, Children’s Services Section. Funding was provided with Federal Independent Living Funds.

For more information please contact Ms. Lane Cooke, Coordinator of the Family and Children's Resource Program (Phone: 919/962-3597; e-mail: lgcooke@email.unc.edu).