Reply #46: In Fact, [View All]

kids who are not starving will rummage through garbage cans for food. Now, this child may have been starving, I'm not talking about him. But addressing your general statement, neglected kids do all kinds of weird stuff with food (and feces). If lack of food is part of past neglect, kids will hoard food long after they are quite well fed. It's a survival thing. When their mother wasn't feeding them they learned to get food where they could, or they wouldn't be alive today. It gets etched into their brains. When they get to foster care, even well-fed foster care, they hoard any food they can get their hands on, and it's damn near unstoppable. They hide ice cream under the bed, quarts of milk, lunch meat, half-eaten hamburgers.... They sneak down to the kitchen at night and take what they can find. They don't care if it's from the trash can or the refrigerator. They steal exactly as if they were starving, because they expect to be starving again and are trying to guard against they day.

The first inkling the mother has is when it starts to stink. She finds in under the bed and the kid is busted. Couple days later the place starts to stink again. It's not under the bed, because it will be found there. The search is on. Often they hide the food all over their room, so if one cache gets discovered they will still have others.

Not saying that was going on here, but weird shit does happen.