Life is hard — can’t siblings be together?

By J. Patrick Coolican

Tuesday, April 19, 2011 | 2 a.m.

Children taken from homes because of abuse or neglect are separated from their siblings in 20 to 30 percent of all cases in Clark County. This is a little known but deeply traumatic problem for foster children, who are already gasping for air in an unforgiving world.

So let us praise and support Child Focus, a local nonprofit organization founded a decade ago that has a simple but valuable mission: Unite separated siblings, if not permanently, then as frequently as possible, including at a June overnight camp in California.

We’ve all clenched our teeth a time or two about our brothers and sisters. Mine live thousands of miles away, and I don’t see them often enough, but I’m certain I would go to the ends of the Earth for them, and I’m sure you would do the same for your siblings.

In addition to the overnight “Camp To Belong” in June, Child Focus brings together separated siblings six times a year, most recently on a Saturday fishing and minicarnival event at Floyd Lamb Park at Tule Springs, where I watched 13-year-old Cristen scurrying up a rock-climbing wall ahead of his sister.

This week he’s in Carson City lobbying for a bill to create a Foster Child Bill of Rights. He likes the Miami Heat, but laments, “You can have superstars, but they need to work together.”

He wants to study computer science. He is poised and smart, and to talk to him is to realize that in the face of this young man’s fortitude, my daily grievances and complaints about the world are petty and embarrassing.

Child Focus was founded by Gloria Bernal and Dr. Stephanie Holland, who treats many of the county’s foster children. They were outraged that just 40 percent of siblings were placed together and just 40 percent of foster children were graduating from high school.

(Both numbers have improved, with sibling placement up dramatically and the graduation rate — the other core mission of Child Focus — to 50 percent.)

Child Focus, with a staff of three and lots of volunteers (at the event I attended, there were more volunteers than kids), works with about 300 of the 3,000 children in foster care in Southern Nevada. It’s launched a special program called “Share and Discovery,” in which 40 children get daylong activities with their siblings every other weekend.

It may not seem like much, but the program is therapeutically important. “Sibling relationships are the longest relationships most of us have in our lives,” Holland says. “They are supportive in nature, even when they don’t feel like it. For many children, it’s where they learn healthy ways to interact, including sharing and healthy competitiveness.”

I concur: From one brother, I learned crushing defeat in sports; from a different brother, I learned crushing defeat in board games.

Holland says forming healthy relationships is a common challenge for foster children, stemming from an understandable lack of trust in other people. They often see themselves as defenseless boats in a vicious sea. And without relationships, what’s at stake? Nothing. The ramifications of that are clear enough, aren’t they? I hate to be crass, but I’m not sure how else to put it: Child Focus is an effective crime prevention program. We spend about $19,000 per year on each of our 13,000 prison inmates. That’s a quarter of a billion dollars. Down the drain.

The children I met at Floyd Lamb were fiercely loyal to their siblings.

“I’m too protective, but I can’t help it,” says Amber, who has four siblings and is headed to College of Southern Nevada and hopes to study meteorology and broadcast journalism.

Davis, who is on the speech and debate team at Arbor View High School, has his eye on Tulane University, in part because a brother recently moved to New Orleans. At the Saturday event, he kept a watchful eye on his brother Trace, who has the kinetic energy of one of those balls made up of nothing but rubber bands.

Like Cristen, Davis is shockingly mature.

Listen, and reflect on what he told me: “I guess you could say I’m one of the more fortunate.”

Coolican’s column appears Tuesdays and Fridays.