Becoming a Foster Parent, Page 2

My Wife and I are taking the P.A.T.H. Class now. We have only had 1 class out of 5. We go to this class every Saturday from 9am till 4pm... Our goal is to become foster parents them adopt my deceased sisters children from the foster care system. She had lost her parental rights to the girls a few months before she died in a car wreck. The girls biological dad in about to loose his rights do to illegal activities. The girls deserve to have a chance at a normal childhood. I am the only family that is going after them. I work for a funeral home and live in an apartment out back. My boss has given us an ultimatum. If we get the girls we are to move out. He think we should leave them were they are. I think he is upset that he will have to train someone else to do my job. My wife and I have just about got our credit back in order from allot of bad choices when we first got married almost 11 years ago. So we don't have the money to put down on a house. And if we move into an apartment we will never get out. I feel moving into an apartment is throwing away money. you will never be able to put roots down, plus it will be very hard to put enough money aside to ever get our family into a house of our own. We have found some diamond in the rough, but the bank doesn't see what we see. This is a 3 bed 1 bath w/ a 2 bed 1 bath apartment out back on 1 acre of land in the country for only 69k. We just don't have the money to put down. We pray for help all the time & now someone else is putting a bid on the house. This was the best deal we have ever seen that we can afford once we moved in... God help us we are in an uphill battle....

Thanks for reading, Jason..............

Posted by: Jason at 01/20/2006 08:35 AM

Although becoming a foster parent sounds like a wonderful and giving thing to do, this article reminds us that it is not easy being a foster parent. These children usually come from homes that were not safe and secure and they do not know how to live in a home that is somewhat normal. They show this through their defiance, anger, bedwetting, etc. This can be hard to deal with for some families and causes them to become bitter about the whole fostering process. Make sure that you go into fostering knowing that these children will most likely have some problems. Do not expect everything to go smoothly. These children need your love and the security of knowing that you are there for them, but it may take them a while to accept it.

Posted by: conservation at 11/30/2005 05:55 AM

[QUOTE=Sarah]
-Do you view bed-wetting, lying, defiance, and minor destructiveness as symptoms of a child in need?
-Can you tolerate major failures and small successes?

These two things really struck me as points that can be very glossed over but are more often than not, integral parts of being foster parents[/QUOTE]

Or a biological parent ;)

Posted by: RedRider3rd at 11/06/2005 04:08 AM

It's so true that ideas of reform are very variable, and I think that is probably the case in just about any realm that involves human beings; part of what sets us apart from other species, etc., is our abilities to form opinions and communicate differing viewpoints, and each person seems to have a lot of different opinions in bulk ...

And your mention of financial contributions, general allocation of funds for families and simply the value placed on "family" in today's society (which is so very different depending on who you talk to, and leads to a very confusing message for virtually everyone) makes me think ...

In my experience, it's a sad truth that often the people in charge of things like how much money is allocated towards childcare, etc., are either not parents, or were parents many years ago when the needs of children and families were incredibly different. As a young professional at an adoption/foster care agency, I always noticed that the people I worked with were very hesitant to hire anyone under 50 years-old to be advisors, social workers, board members, etc., and pretty much reluctant to take me or anyone else under 50 seriously when they tried to give constructive suggestions for improving fundraising, program content and budgets, etc. And they often didn't feel that the young mothers, foster children and parents in the community were "qualified" to give constructive opinions about reform.

This always baffled me -- what 50 year-old, with children or without, understands the very unique challenges of today's families, parents and children? And why aren't the people being affected by the policies or even the younger professionals entering the workforce trusted and taken more seriously, when both these groups have valuable and truthful insights because they are in some ways "closer to the action"? Even 10 years ago, the world was very different with different problems and issues for children and their parents to overcome, and I am constantly finding myself unable to understand some of what I see going on with young people. Even when I was in high school, a mere 12 years ago, my peers' and my ideas about important issues such as teen sex, drugs, alcohol use, etc., were vastly different from the ideas of today's generation. So what business do a group of 50 year-olds have making policies and deciding what is a priority to be funded, etc. when it comes to family issues, when even I, much younger than 50, can't fully understand the complexity of what children and parents need to survive?

Posted by: avalanche at 10/13/2005 08:28 AM

What's interesting about the subject of reform is that our ideas of what reform looks like varies sooooo widely. For instance, the post about states paying too much money for the care of children is a beautiful example of our society's ambivalence over how much parenting is worth. We still haven't figured out how to compensate people who provide day care for their own or others' children.

Our state's foster system has all the issues mentioned, yet its financial contributions for a child's care are minimal. The result is that fostering for the state is left either to people with bad/selfish intentions, or good-hearted people with not enough self-esteem to value their time and skill, not to mention their expertise and emotional commitment. In other words, you just don't get the caliber of parent that children need when they've been through a lot.

The private agencies offer somewhat higher stipends, but obviously not nearly the amount of money that a good therapist charges for re-parenting! In one private agency I know of, fostering is called "professional parenting," which doesn't put clothes on a child's back, but does at least acknowledge that this is a job for professionals, not volunteers.

And it's easy to get sentimental about it, but the problem with paying people like volunteers (i.e., nothing or next to nothing) is that then they feel justified in doing a sloppy job. Or they can't help but do a sloppy job because their attention has to be on making money in an extra job on top of providing parenting. Until we learn to treat child caregiving as an honored and fairly-compensated profession (whether parenting biological, adoptive, or foster children), we will have trouble holding people accountable for the way they do it.

Posted by: alchemy at 10/12/2005 10:43 AM