Anybody been involved in fostering kids?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Anyone had any involvement in fostering kids?
I’m thinking about giving it a go. I’ve done some research and know what the next steps are in my area (registering interest, doing a training course, meeting other foster parents, getting checked out, certified, etc). I’ve been thinking about it in a vague “maybe, one-day” sense for a couple of years and more seriously for a few months. Specifically, I’m interested in fostering older kids (12+) not young kids, as that suits me better and is very needed in my region.

I guess I’m just interested in any personal stories, as I don’t know anybody who has done this. Foster parents, people who were fostered, people who had their kids fostered, people who grew up with fostered kids, social workers involved in fostering, anyone really - I’m interested in all aspects

2

I have not fostered, but my best friend has fostered to adopt (and has adopted) in the state of Illinois. I considered doing so also until it became clear that my spouse would not be on board with it. Here are my friend’s experiences, condensed:

  1. The qualification process does take a while. For my friend it was between six months and a year, though this was around five years ago or so. The foster care officials knew she was a single woman and did not have issues with this.

  2. Once qualified, it did not take many months before my friend was called and offered a child. Despite her strong and expressed preferences for ONE child, NOT an infant (if memory serves, she requested one child three or over), she was called multiple times to see if she would accept an infant or groups of sibs. Besides the age and number of kids, the requests were often of the “you must decide within the next hour / couple hours” variety: very last-minute. It made for some emotional turmoil for her to turn down kids she knew genuinely were in need but were not a fit for her. Personally I would have had the hardest time with this, despite the fact that sticking to your guns on what you can handle is probably in everybody’s best interests long-term.

  3. After about 4-6 months of possibilities, they did call her about two sibs, girls, who were 2 and 4. Despite the fact that there was more than one kid, and one was under the age limit she was hoping for, my friend thought it over and agreed to foster these girls. It went well, and she knew fairly soon that she wanted to adopt them if parental rights were terminated.

  4. If you find yourself in the foster-to-adopt, know that the termination of parental rights can and does take years in several cases. It was a frustrating time for my friend as the parents would regain and re-lose things like visitation rights etc. I think the whole adoption process took around two years due to these fits and starts. My friend ended up taking at least half a day off every other month (or even more often) to go to court during this time period. She also ended working around the bio-fam quite a bit to try to accommodate visits, which often the parents would not end up making anyway. That was hard for the kids and her too.

  5. About a year or so after the caseworkers predicted it would go through, the adoption was successful, and my friend adores her girls. However, she does not wish to add to her family so will not be fostering more kids.

  6. Even at 2 and 3, it was not the first time the girls had been removed from their home, just the first time they’d entered actual foster care. They have never shown any signs of any kind of attachment disorder that I’ve ever seen or my friend has noted. They are quite healthy and doing pretty well in school despite a few lingering issues from at least one girl’s drug addiction at birth. Maybe this is stereotypical of me, but I’d expect a lot more issues with older kids, even just from typical adolescent rebellion, but definitely if they’d been in the system all that time.

I hope that helps, even though it’s not first-hand. I wish you every success. This is such a blessed, vital thing to do!

3

During my teen years, my mother and then-stepfather fostered primarily older kids. In most places, those are the hardest to place, so it’s a good thing that you hope to do, but these kids can be some of the toughest to deal with. So often, they’ve been in and out of foster care for a large portion of their lives, moved from home to home, and it can be really difficult for them to trust you or anyone else (plus dealing with the side effects/aftereffects of whatever issues caused their removal from parents, plus natural teenage crap that nature throws at all adolescents.)

One kid my folks dealt with was a giant - 6’4", maybe, and about 275 pounds. He had anger issues, and absolutely no respect for the female of the species. At one point, he “showered” out behind the barn, with a water hose, for a week, because he refused to clean bathrooms (“women’s work,”) and my mother told him that neither my sister, nor I, nor either of the other two foster girls living with us were gonna clean up his nastiness. (This was done with the approval of the social worker. It might not fly today - this was the eighties/early nineties, and this particular social worker had been dealing with this teenager and our family for quite some time.) Rob finally had enough water hose showers in November that he grudgingly agreed that everyone shared chores. He lived with my family for about 2 years - his longest placement by about 1.5 years. I recently got in touch with him again. He had a karate dojo in a nearby town, and is married with a couple of kids. Still kind of a piece of crap, but doing better than most would have predicted.

Joy broke my heart. She came to us the first time at age 6, from a single schizophrenic mother. The abuse and neglect she suffered was unbearable to even think of, and she suffered even further at the hands of the foster system: her mother would get treatment for her mental health issues, stay on her medication for a few months, regain custody of Joy, stop taking her meds, and the whole cycle would begin again. Joy was a profoundly damaged child, and the last I heard of her, she was being treated at the state psychiatric hospital.

Janet’s parents died, and she then lived with her grandparents, until both of them passed. Pleasant girl, but not especially gifted, and her very elderly grandparents had meant well, but she was the most ignorant teenager I’ve ever met - I remember my mom handing her a couple of quarters and telling Janet to get a newspaper out of the rack. J put the quarters in, and then just stood there, not realizing she had to open the door to retrieve the paper (this would have been around 1987, long before anyone would expect that to have been automated in any way.) She lived with us for about 4 years, and I guess learned enough about life in general to take care of herself, anyway. We’re friends on Facebook, and see one another around town now and again - she’s one of the success stories.

There were so many others, and each had his or her own set of challenges. One of the biggest, though, was that the state just cut them loose at age 18 - usually with inadequate educations, nothing except their clothes to call their own, and no place to go. Things have improved a tiny bit, but not much. The good foster parents are the ones who become family, providing a home during college breaks, or military leave, or just making sure that legal adult still has a place to be, even though many states no longer offer any sort of financial or legal support after a kid is 18. It’s a grueling job, but it’s also a mitzvah.

4

I have a close family member who fosters. She and her husband have been doing it for a couple of years. All the kids they have had placed with them have been over the age of ten. They’ve had 8 kids in two years. One they have loved enough to want to adopt (and will start the adoption process with that child soon.) Three they have had to have removed from their home for behavior issues. They attend all the workshops and training seminars available and they try really hard and know the kids have long term damage, but sometimes there’s a child who they just can’t deal with. Those kids are hard.

This couple takes breaks from placements as needed. Don’t be afraid to do that yourself. You can’t help the next kid if the previous one burned you out. Those extra months they’ve taken have made it so they feel they can continue as foster parents. Without the breaks they would have quit a year in.

Social workers want the foster parents to be happy and successful. Use the resources offered to you and make sure you set the limits on what ages you can take and how many. You know what you can handle. If at any time you need to change one of those limits, that’s ok too.

5

My wife & I were foster parents for 15 years. We ended up adopting two of our foster kids. My grandma & grandpa on my moms side were foster parents for over 35 years. My best friends mom & dad were foster parents as well. They did it for 12 years. Some of my nieces & nephews were in the foster system. We ended up fostering some of them.

If you are looking for advice, I am happy to give you some. The first advice I will give you is to be sure that both you & your partner both WANT to do this. If you or your partner is just going along to get along, you-all are in real trouble! This is often an eye opening experience. It will strain even the best relationship. You both have to be on the same page. If you have kids of your own, be sure to keep them in mind, as being a “birth kid” is different than being a foster kid. It helps if your kids are on board with this decision.

Next, find the local foster parents organization. Contact them & tell them what you want to do. Attend a meeting or four. Be sure ask them any question that you have. This way you will get “The Straight Dope” on the local fostering scene from folks who are living it. It varies from state to state & county to county. Often there are several agencies that need foster families in one area. These agencies will vary as to how much funding they have, and what their focus is. The local foster parent organization will have members from all of them.

Look hard at working for a private agency, as they tend to be better funded then the government is.

My wife & I worked for/with the local county social services. The following advice addresses our experience with them, our local privately owned agencies are much better then the county, but they have the same issues as the government ones. They just have much better caseworkers & therapists.

Case workers are always in need of foster families for “their” kids. Case workers will often threaten you with blackballing, should you choose to not take their kids. Case workers will lie to you, they will tell you anything that they think will get you to take their kids/burden off of their hands. Case workers are almost never former foster parents. Keep that in mind as they tell you what it is like to be a foster parent. Yes, there are some phenomenal case workers. Those ones are few & far between. When you get a good case worker, hang on to them! They can & will make you & your foster kids lifes much, much, better!

If the kid(s) have been in “The System” for a while, they can & will work the system for all that they can. It is called survival, man! Some of the cases that you will see will break your heart. Most of these kids will lie to you & steal from you. They may not ever trust you. They have been lied to by almost everyone in authority. From the cops, to the intake caseworker, to their current caseworker, to some of their former foster parents.

Being a foster parent does not pay well & getting the county or state to buy some of the supplies that your foster kids will need may be next to impossible. We once figured out how much we made taking care of one family group of four siblings. We had them for two years. when they came to us they had the cloths on their backs & nothing else. Since pajamas are not appropriate attire for school, on their first day in our care, we bought all of them two changes of cloths, one pair of shoes, and one coat each. The caseworker promised us that they would do the paperwork to reimburse us. It never happened. We ended only loosing around $900.00 over the two year period. We paid for their doctors visits, & for their therapy. I know that the county is supposed to supply these services, but the kids could not wait for them to get to the top of the 18 month waiting list. We knew that without the proper health care, & mental health care, they would not physically heal, nor would they learn how to deal with the trauma that their birth parents had inflicted on them. They needed the help now! Not 18 months later. While the company I worked for empathized with our problem, the kids were not our dependents, & thus were not eligible for my insurance. This family group had a happy ending to their foster experience. An aunt & uncle adopted all of them at once. I has worked out well for all of them.

Older kids are always in need of foster families, everywhere, not just in your area. Your services are needed, and you can make a huge difference in some kids life! You can not save all of them, some of them will need more help than you will be able to give, it happens. Learn to accept it. You do not do anyone any good if you are beating yourself up about something beyond your control.

It is a rewarding experience. Would we do it again? Since our youngest is out of our home & has a kid of his own, maybe. My wife & I have been talking between ourselves about taking on some more foster kids, just not for the local county. We would work with a local private agency.

IHTH, 48.

6

Interesting and varied responses. Thanks a lot to each of you for taking the time to write.

I’m not really interested in adopting, though not completely against it. And I am prepared (in theory anyway) that we might have a wide range of experiences, from “Nope, needs to go NOW”, to “annoying and intrusive” “nice enough kid” “very bonded” or who knows? But I also expect that the reality will probably be quite a bit different than the theory, no matter how well prepared you are.

7

One of my cousins has a lot of kids and decided to foster with the idea that they would adopt if they could. They got an infant who was with them for about a year, then her mother sobered up and regained custody. A year and a half later, they got the same little girl, who had been sexually and physically abused while in her mom’s custody. The mom surrendered her for adoption and my cousin and her husband adopted her.

They love her a lot. She’s pretty damaged, with what my cousin says is almost like a death wish. She takes huge, irrational risks all the time, doing dangerous things for the sake of doing them. The whole family is in therapy. They adore her and are glad they fostered and adopted her, but I know that it has been a very hard row to hoe.

8

My sister and her husband have been fostering for about 13 years and it has largely been rewarding for them and the kids they’ve taken in. In all cases but one the child has ended up in a good place (they were adopted, taken by their family, etc.). I’ve helped out at times. To me one of the harder things to deal with is that you sometimes experience the very worst of humanity. They had one tween girl who had suffered some maddening abuse; it made me very open to forced sterilization.

9

Where do you live? In Iowa, foster children automatically get Medicaid, regardless of their foster parents’ income, and some insurance plans allow them to be put on the foster parents’ insurance to pick up what Medicaid doesn’t pay.

10

Did you miss the 18 month waiting list? Medicaid! I hope it is better in Iowa than it is here in Colorado. It would not take much.

As for the insurance, I am sure that some insurance companies do allow foster kids to be added to their policies, at least in Iowa. Adopted kids get added on adoption day. No waiting if you adopt.

11

No, I caught the waiting list thing. Even private pay patients have to wait for some services.:frowning:

My point was that the kids have Medicaid so they have some kind of health insurance, and many insurers will allow foster kids to be enrolled as long as legal guardianship can be proven.

My BFF and his wife considered fostering a few years ago. They thought it would be like when the kids have a sleepover or the cousins visit, and they make up the bed in the basement and set an extra place at the table. They decided not to do it when they realized it wouldn’t be. However, they did have a little insight into this, because they took in her cousin’s kids for a while when the cousin found herself in more trouble than usual. It was a really bad situation.