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Carole Mikita reportingChild Protective Services in Texas may soon place at least some of the FLDS children in foster homes. Foster parents in Utah who have raised children from that religious community say huge problems await parents in Texas.
Carl and Joni Holm say because the FLDS community controls every aspect of the children's lives, when these young people go into foster care, they have great difficulty becoming part of American society.
"I think it's gonna backfire on 'em if they want to spread all the children all over Texas in different foster homes. That just doesn't seem realistic to me," Carl said.
Carl and Joni know how difficult foster parenting FLDS children is. Four years ago, they took in two then 16-year-olds who had escaped Colorado City. Later, they opened their home to a 15-year-old boy.
The children, they say, had no social skills, no education. "They're taught to fear us, and so they won't even look at you. They don't know how to answer the phone. Some of them have hygiene problems. These are not things that some foster homes are gonna be prepared for," Joni said.
Texas foster services, they say, will place the children in homes where they will be extremely afraid. "I think they're gonna have some disasters. They're gonna have some suicidal children. They're gonna have some that will run, and they'll have some that will totally melt down, and I don't know that they're gonna understand it," Joni said.
Expect behavioral problems. The Holms say the children will assume God will punish them for living with people their religious leaders call "unclean." "It's in the back of their mind that they're damned anyway and they're going to go to hell anyway so that they just throw the baby out with the bath water, you know. It's a free-for-all," Carl said.
Even after years of love and support, one of the three foster children returned to polygamy. But not Fawn Broadbent. "I was having someone else make my decisions for me; deciding where I was working at, what I did with my life, and who I would eventually marry," she explained in 2005.
Joni works with a coalition called "Safety Net" which provides health care, education, social services and a domestic abuse hot line for women and children in polygamy. She thinks authorities in Texas should talk with this group so that they better understand the religious indoctrination the children have grown up with.
E-mail: cmikita@ksl.com
