Rules intended to protect children in foster care may drive away foster homes. I understand the logic behind the new rules. Various states have taken a beating for not protecting the children in their care. Children in foster care homes have died or been abused and the public is outraged. The public should be outraged; I am not minimizing the consequences. However, you don’t see the outraged public stepping up to take foster children into their homes. That is the problem; there are too few foster homes for the children who need them. Most of these outraged citizens wouldn’t... more

When people who do not regularly come over, are coming to your home it can make you feel apprehensive about what they will think. Especially when they show up unannounced and your house looks like a tornado just went through. If you have children, people should expect to see toys on the floor. They also expect to see that the house is lived in and the inhabitants have fun. An experienced social worker would probably be suspicious to find your home immaculate if young children live in it already. It can make you seem fake, and may cause the social worker to wonder what else... more

Do you ever remember a child saying, “Too many people love me?” Have you ever heard an epitaph that read, “Too many people loved me during my life?” Did you ever hear, “I spent too much time with people I loved?” Of course not, what a wonderful thing it is to know there are people who love you and care about you. Knowing there is someone you can call in any crisis gives you a sense of inner security. Children in foster care usually live with broken attachments. In their world, people come and then go, never to be seen again. It must be confusing to hear... more

Three weeks ago our five year old foster daughter returned home to her birthmother. We have spent the 16 months of parenting her developing a strong relationship with her birth family. Not just developing a relationship with her parents, buts aunts, uncles, significant others, and grandparents as well. We worked on building this relationship for several reasons. First, we had parented this child for nearly a year when she was one and two years old. Therefore, we love her, we have known her for most of her life, and she feels like a member of our family. In addition, we adopted... more

How many times have you heard a foster parent complain about their children’s foster care worker? If your state’s foster care system is anything like ours, then probably too often, unfortunately. It has been our experience during 14 years of foster parenting that foster care workers do not stay at their job for very many years. Many are young, fresh out of college, without children of their own, when they start. They are full of ideas about changing the system or making a difference. They are confident in the parenting techniques they have learned at college and expect you to follow.... more

Whether you have a new placement arriving or sending a foster child home, chances are you will be rearranging bedroom furniture. That is unless you are specifically taking a certain age and gender of children. Over the years of providing foster care, we have accepted boys or girls from newborn through 17. We have five bedrooms that we use for sleeping rooms and we usually have eight children living at home. If a girl moves out and our next foster child is a boy then we would need to rearrange the boy’s bedroom. Sometimes we actually have to trade entire bedrooms.

Allow... more

The day finally arrived for Ali, our last foster daughter, to say goodbye to our family and return home. She has been part of our family for 16 months, this time. She arrived a month before her fourth birthday, and now she is five. She also lived with us for nine months when she was one year old, which is why we took her back. (We were not going to foster any more children.) It was a busy day today; Ali had a vision appointment at 1:00 PM. We picked her mother up on the way to the vision appointment so she could be part of it. I had my two granddaughters with me who... more

A comment on a previous entry said that a family should not consider fostering children until their biological children are raised. The commenter said that the welfare of the biological children is at stake by bringing foster children into the home. Most of the foster parents that I know have biological children at home as well. If no one with biological children at home would foster children, we would probably have to regress to keeping children in orphanages. Let’s face it; few older people or childless people are willing to open their homes to abused or neglected children.... more

Do you need to know the long term permanency plan for a foster child in order to accept placement into your home? If you do, it will limit the number of placements you receive as a foster parent. The long term plan is not typically known for at least a month when children first come into foster care. Even then, the plan can change. The caseworker never knows when a suitable relative might come forward asking for the children. While the caseworker might have doubts about certain parents complying with the case plan to have their children returned, sometimes parents surprise... more

One of our readers asked a great question that many foster parents wonder about, at least initially. I responded to her privately but thought I would address her question more fully and share the information with you. Her foster children are in the process of returning home, as is my current foster daughter. She would like to know what the guidelines are for the number of overnight and unsupervised visits prior to foster children returning home. Unfortunately, there are no guidelines for every foster caseworker to follow. There are logical patterns that they sometimes... more