Closing your eyes before you go to sleep is something most people don?t think about, but for a foster child it can be a small act that holds many terrors.

?It is a very trusting thing to close your eyes and drift off to sleep,? said visiting American child psychologist Rick Delaney. ?When we sleep we are at our most vulnerable. Many foster children have trouble falling asleep, staying asleep, or are afraid to sleep alone.?

Sleep difficulties, can be just one source of frustration for foster parents who care for neglected or abused children.

Dr. Delaney was on the Island in May to help foster parents iron out some of these difficulties through special workshops offered by Child and Family Services.

Dr. Delaney is a freelance consultant on foster parenting and also the author of several books including ?Raising Cain: Caring for Troubled Youngsters?, ?The Long Journey Home? and ?Fostering Changes: Treating Attachment-Disordered Foster Children?, among others.

?A forum for foster parents to ask questions and talk about their experiences is essential,? said Dr. Delaney. ?I understand there have been attempts to have foster parent associations here in Bermuda, but it is not real common for foster parents to get together as an association or support group. I strongly recommend it.

?The type of parenting they have to master and become good at is so different in a lot of ways than just your average everyday parenting. A lot of foster and adopted children have been through such unusual pasts. The parents really need to share information about how to cope with certain kinds of problems.?

Dr. Delaney said that when foster parents come together they are often like war buddies who can sympathise with the challenges each is going through.

The workshops with Dr. Delaney were an opportunity for foster parents to express their concerns and exchange ideas. He talked with foster parents about how to help the neglected or physically abused children in their care.

?The concerns of Bermuda foster parents aren?t that different from the foster parents I work with in the United States,? he said. ?Foster parents at this workshop wanted to talk about things like sleep difficulties. Another thing is food issues. Some foster children have eating disorders although it is not the type that we normally read about. It has more to do with taking food for survival, hiding food under the mattress. They may be eating as much food in one sitting as they possibly can for fear they will never see a plate of food again.

?Some people say children ?steal? food, but to my way of thinking it is the wrong verb. What they are doing is surviving.?

Other issues include bedwetting, stubbornness and behavioural issues.

?Some of these children are not use to having anyone there to provide structure, rules and discipline for them,? he said. ?They may have a viable parent in the person of a foster parent, but this is an alien to them. They just don?t know. They are not use to people asking them co-operate and work together as a family.?

Dr. Delaney said that mental health professionals should try to include the foster parent in the counselling equation.

?I strongly advise that our foster parents get support from the mental health community from counsellors and so on, so the counsellors don?t merely see the children in isolation but also try to give support to the foster parents and perhaps some direction or advice,? he said. ?Admittedly, many mental health professionals don?t have expertise in this area, but I am doing a lot of work trying to get information out through the internet to mental health professionals and counsellors about how to properly work with foster and adopted parents and their children.?

Dr. Delaney runs a website that is a kind of training centre and information clearing house for foster parents at www.fosterparentcollege.com .

Although foster parenting carries with it challenges, Dr. Delaney said it could also be very rewarding.

?It is tough duty at times, but many of the foster parents I know become so good at working with these children. They turn their lives around with patience, experience and support from other case workers and from other experienced foster parents.

?I have met some foster parents who become so skilled at helping children that they want the most troubled children we can send in their direction.

?It is not that they are looking for the children?s thanks and appreciation. Sometimes that is a long time coming. They can see the children change in small ways over time to the point where it all adds up to a life changing experience. Many foster parents get hooked on parenting. They are almost addicted to this wonderful lifestyle of raising children.?

Dr. Delaney works with a number of agencies in the United States, primarily foster care agencies, national and regional and state programmes. He is originally from Colorado and has two daughters of his own.

?I started working with children in psychiatric hospitals and institutions about 30 years ago,? he said. ?When they were done being treated they would often be put in foster homes.

Back in the 1960s many homeless children were kept in mental institutions, but since then there has been a deinstitutionalisation movement to try to get children and also adults with emotional and behaviour problems out of institutional settings into homelike settings.?

His work is exclusively with foster and adopted children and their families. ?Some of these children are not measurably different from any other child walking down the street,? he said. ?Then there are some that are mildly and some seriously emotionally disturbed.

?I think it is really important for foster children to get psychological counselling. Many of them have some sort of trauma that they are dealing with, and it is inevitable that they have loss issues. They have lost so many people along the way, some that have been good to them and some not so good. In many cases the children will miss anyone they have lost, no matter what the quality of parenting has been.?

Dr. Delaney estimated that there were 135 children in foster care in Bermuda. Like anywhere else in the world, there is a shortage of foster parents on the Island.

?The concerns here are very similar to the concerns in the United States,? he said. ?When children are not properly cared for it affects them pretty universally in the same way. There are some issues here that are macrosystem issues. I am no expert on the system of care here, but I understand that some laws that are on the books from the 1960s haven?t been revised or updated to reflect our current struggles with children needing foster care.

?Substance abuse issues have produced many more families of dysfunction, accordingly there are so many more children needing to be out of those unsafe worlds.?

He said that children also need to be moved into permanent homes, as quickly as possible.

?Children will stay in foster homes for five or six or seven years maybe longer without knowing what their future holds,? he said. ?In some states there are now laws which require that foster children either be placed with adoptive families or reunited with their birth parents in a timely manner. Children who languish in foster case indefinitely are injured to some extent by the process of not knowing what is going to happen to them.?