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Some details before we get started My wife and I recently became first time foster parents. We are a pre-adoptive home for our new 12 year old girl (we can call her Sara) who has been with us for 3 months now. I hoping to get some creative ideas or some insight on how to deal with a situation we inherited from her prior foster family. We live in a different city, about 30-40 minutes drive from her previous foster home. Sara, like many foster children, comes from a past of serious long term abuse by her biological parents and non biological father figure. That said, there are surprisingly few behavioral problems over all and the ones that present themselves are mostly manageable. The issue that I am struggling with is that during her time with her prior foster family, she developed a relationship with a 16 year old boy. A boy who was briefly suspended form his high school for carving swastikas into the bus seats and then voluntarily dropped out of school rather than going back. Additionally, the county and her foster agency's social workers have made it clear to her and to us that she is not allowed to have any contact of any sort with him ever. Her prior foster mother confronted both the boy and his family about the impropriety of such a relationship and about crossing the boundaries set by Sara's social workers. So after Sara moved in we allowed her to have access to the cell phone that her prior foster mother had purchased for her. We set expectation about usage and about the boy. She said she understood and that she was on the same page even if she didnt agree with why. GREAT!!! except she then concocted a whole story about a new boy that a different foster sister was friends with and that she remained friends with blah blah blah. Put in the banned boy's cell number and would text and facetime with him until we did a thorough enough search of her phone to figure it out. Now clearly the easy solution is to remove the cell phone from the equation, but this does not fix the problem. Sara has made it clear through many conversations that she will not try to understand why it is wrong to engage with this boy who developmentally should not be her peer. That risking her removal from our household by the county and sundering her adopting is a risk she will take. Even though she is very invested in us adopting her. She has made it clear that given the opportunity, any opportunity she will contact him again. And she will not attempt to foster new relationships with other peers to get the same thing she gets with this boy. At this point I should be clear that while there is a romantic component, the primary issue is the connection to this boy because he skipped curfew one night to listen to her talk about her past whilst she was having a panic attack. He is someone that understands her abuse. So given that this is an area that she openly admits she can never be trusted in, given that regardless of how much we act as curators of her online time, she will still use her access to homework computers at school her friends cell phones etc to contact him, how does one go about attempting to assist a child who in nearly all other respects in a wonderful 12 year old but one who will endanger their future to continue communicating with a boy who is at best, a severely socially, emotionally and intellectually, developmentally disabled and bad role model or far more likely a 16 year boy attempting to prey upon a preteen girl with a history of sexual abuse.
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