Last week, Connect for Kids hosted an online conversation with four experts in the field of foster care. The experts weren't researchers, field workers, teachers or advocates -- they were teens with foster care experience. And they pulled no punches.

The conversation covered a lot of ground, but the part that has really stayed with me came towards the end. Asked if they felt they had ever been failed by a social worker, all four answered with a resounding yes. They felt they had been lied to, not listened to, and ignored. That information they really needed to have so they could sleep at night, such as the location of a sibling, was withheld from them. The sense of betrayal emanating from their answers was overwhelming.

What is going wrong? Why is it that this person who should be a foster child's ally so often winds up cast as the enemy? Our teen experts suggested that social workers are overwhelmed by large caseloads. Probably true.

But it seems to me that there's more to it -- that something about the foster care system may make it hard for social workers and children to develop trusting relationships. Do social workers have to answer to too many bosses? Do practices in the field (for instance, generating written reports about a child's behavior that are not shared with the child but may affect his or her placement) taint the relationship? Do social workers always have all the information they need to be effective? Do social workers eventually buy in to the stigma that paints foster kids as "demented, angry bags of wrath" as one of our experts put it?

Send comments to susan@connectforkids.org