It seems all you ever hear about foster homes is his kids are neglected. You never hear the good heartwarming stories. I would assume they have to exist or foster homes would stop being a viable alternative for kids in those situations.
Have any of you ever been in a foster home; and would you care to share your experiences and thoughts in general? Do any of you know children or adults that were in foster care?
I went into foster care when I was 12 and left when I was 18. I had 2 homes I wouldn’t wish on anyone and 1 home that exceeded all expectations. The rest were in the middle.
You want good stories so I’m only going to mention the last one:
My 7th and final home was the best. I had swapped with another girl to get into this house. She (MG) wanted to live in my current house because she knew she’d be king shit there. I wanted her house because I knew that if she hated it, I’d like it. (MG was the real sister of one of my foster sisters, which is how I learned about her and her foster home).
The house is in a very nice neighborhood and was large and comfortable. The parents were an older retired couple and their own 5 children had already married and moved out. They became foster parents to help 1 particular kid and just never looked back once she became an adult and moved out (after marrying one of their sons).
They had a basement bedroom that was reserved for the long time, most trusted kids. I started out sharing a room with 2 other girls on the second floor. There was also a room with 2 girls and another room with 1 girl, in addition to the 2 girls in the basement. So, 8 girls total. After about 6 months, I was moved into the single room on the second floor and then about a year after that, I was moved into the basement. I stayed in the basement until I graduated high school and moved out. I had 2 different roommates while in the basement and I got along well with each of them. TM was first. She had been in the house longest and got along very well with the parents. She left during her 2nd semester of college. She mostly left because she hated KP. KP had arrived about a year after I did but was older and was in her senior year of high school when she moved to the basement. She also got along very well with the parents. She stayed with them until she finished her BA.
Even though the school was out of my district, my foster parents made a deal with DSS to supply me with a city bus pass every month so I could stay at my school. It meant that I had to leave the house around 5:30 every morning but it was worth it to finally be able to stay in a school for more than 2 years. I was actually able to make and keep friends for the first time in my life.
My foster mother was great when we just needed someone to talk to. My foster father was great for teaching life skills. He helped me find my first non-babysitting job and he taught me how to do my own taxes. They both went to all my award ceremonies and my graduation. They treated my mother well and didn’t bad-mouth her the way most of my other foster parents had. I also got on well in the neighborhood, which was surprisingly accepting of a foster home in their upper-middle class neighborhood. I started babysitting for the family down the street when I was 16 and stayed with them until I graduated, even after they left the neighborhood.
My foster parents’ kids also treated us very well whenever they came to visit. If the parents were going on vacation, one of their 3 daughters would stay with us (which was awesome because as much as I loved my foster mother, she was a shitty cook and her daughters were so much better).
I think what made them better than all the others was that they were totally aware of what each child needed. For TM, KP, and me, they realized we needed a lot of freedom because all three of us were very responsible. Our foster parents let us make most of the decisions about our lives because we had proven that we were capable. If they felt we needed parental guidance, they’d give it but ultimately, we made our own decisions. The girls who slept upstairs got a lot more guidance, because they needed it. I went back to visit a few years after I had moved out and I learned that only 1 girl moved to the basement after I left. Shortly after that, they retired from foster parenting.
I owe a lot to that family. They did more for me than every other foster parent or any of my 3 social workers ever did.
Even though I was miserable in most of my foster homes, none of them were actually abusive.
There are foster homes with great parents and foster homes with terrible parents. In many cases though, the real problem is the other kids. If you give off an aura of brokenness, you will be treated very differently from a kid who gives off an aura of self-sufficiency.
A lot of foster parents are doing it just for the money but as long as they supply the kids with a reasonably clean, safe place to live, who cares why they’re doing it? I had foster parents who were in it to “help” disadvantaged kids. Their idea of helping was forcing their religion on unsuspecting kids who didn’t know they had a right to say no. Frankly, I preferred the parents who fed me and ignored me. I was lucky that I never ended up with abusive parents because they certainly are out there.
If I had to guess though, I’d say that the vast majority of foster homes are good homes. Not as good as my last home but still good. After that, I’d guess the next largest group would be the ambivalent homes. From my own experiences, and from talking to my foster sisters and brothers, I’d say that the truly horrible homes and the truly spectacular homes are probably pretty even. This is based on the fact that I only heard of one spectacular home (my last home) and I only heard of one truly horrific home. Then again, it has been 13 years since I left foster care. There’s no telling what has happened to the system since I left.
I was in foster care for not very long following an arrest for chronic truancy, the conditions of my release being that I had to complete the current school year with a B average. So I was in for maybe 6 months.
My caregivers were an older, though not elderly, couple whose natural children had grown and moved on. She was from New Zealand and had the greatest accent, he was a prison guard with a way too long commute. They were great people. My birthday was about a month after I was placed there and they made efforts to make it special for me. They were strict and had expectations of me that I maybe wasn’t used to, but they were by no means neglectful or abusive.
I visited them frequently after I was sent back home even though she sometimes made me uncomfortable by expressing her desire to adopt me (understand, I don’t have bad parents; I had a bad, non-family situation that basically caused my truancy and had nothing to do with my parents’ abilities but she always made it sound like my home life must be so terrible, like she wanted to “save” me) and when I grew up and had my first baby, I brought him to meet them.
Good people. I should look them up. Last time I did that he was working out at SeaTac and she was in NZ nursing her dying mother (almost $30 for that 10 minute phone call…) but I lost track again after that.
Silver Fire, you can get put into foster care for truancy even if you have good parents? What was your non-family situation that made you have to go into foster care? And were your parents upset? I imagine that most normal/healthy parents would do anything possible to avoid losing their kids.
Apparently.
Of course they were.
You’re assuming they didn’t?
Short version (which I am deciding to post against my better judgement, I will say): I was kidnapped days before the start of the school year and didn’t get back home until mid-September. It was this guy who was crazy and who my parents had already been to court about (for orders for protection and what not) because, well, he was crazy. He used to send me roses at school and follow me home and stuff and my parents battled with local police and the court system for months to do SOMETHING about it but nobody really cared, I guess. He was finally arrested for breaking the OFP by contacting me (yet again but a cop actually saw him get in my face and yell at me and be all crazy that time) and, after spending five days in jail, he was released on bail and scheduled for court on Sept. 4. He must have decided he didn’t like jail very much and didn’t want to go back because the same day he got out he came and got me.
So that whole thing fucked me up a lot. Then when I got back to school (not until his arrest in October; my absence to that point was totally cool with everybody though, per a social worker) I got a lot of unwanted attention from students as to my whereabouts because of a lot of really silly rumors and that whole first day was horrible. My second day I dealt with some really awful attitudes from the teachers/administration re: my “absences” because I had questions relating to material everybody else had learned in the month and a half I was gone. When I went to the principal (who “resigned” a little later for reasons directly related to this) for help and she looked at me and said “Well, what do you expect?” I left and never went back.
Nothing really to do with my parents, see? They knew I’d had a ton of problems those two days and they worked hard to find a school that would take me on open enrollment so late (I wound up having to commute an hour one way for 8th and 9th grade) but they didn’t know I wasn’t going to school until about a week before I got picked up. In fact, NOBODY (except the actual school, I’m sure, but they didn’t bother reporting it) knew I wasn’t there. My parents called the social worker when they figured it out to ask her about resources to help me because talk therapy and Prozac weren’t doing it. The social worker (who was totally absent to this point and never would have known unless they had called her) decided that my parents obviously don’t pay attention to me and that was that. There were also accusations of elaborate drug operations and alcoholism (I’ve seen my dad drink a beer twice in my whole life; my mom, never) that never went anywhere, though my parents were subjected to interviews and testing and whatever.
I know how family court goes (I was in a not terribly difficult custody thing with my ex for three damn years) so taking just six months to spring me, especially considering what they were up against and without any help, is rather impressive, I think.
Anyway, that’s about it, I guess. Believe me when I say I have tremendous parents.
ETA: Also, I have siblings who remained in my parents’ care, no questions asked, the entire time I was gone. Something went very, very wrong with my situation, something I still do not understand and neither do my parents. Neither did social services who reviewed the whole thing after the fact and fired the social worker involved for a variety of things.
I think you mean that is all you hear, not all everyone hears.
My daughter spent the first 10 months of her life in foster care before we flew to Korea and picked her up. During that time, she was loved and well taken care of.
I am a teacher and have kids from foster care all the time as students. They are just fine. I’ve never had a case of neglect.
Where did you hear such horrible stories of foster parents?
My grandmother and her sister were foster parents to a string of small girls during WWII. Grandpa had volunteered for the Army. As he was a bit old for it, they put him to supply work in Alaska. My dad was about 6-8 years old at the time.
Shortly after he met my mother, he also met a slightly younger friend of hers named Peggy. For some reason, he thought Peggy walked on water and was always quizzing Mom about her and worried about the guy she was dating. My dad went on to explain that he couldn’t explain it but he felt very protective of Peggy and that she shouldn’t be jealous.
Time passed and my parents got married one fine May day. The wedding had the traditional receiving line where the bride and groom are flanked by their parents so they can introduce people to each other. Peggy comes through the line and Dad turns to his mother and says, “Mother, I’d like you to meet a friend of Pat’s. This is Peggy Wentworth.” Well, I’m told Grandma’s eyes got huge and she said “Little Margaret Wentworth, my lovely little girl!” etc. etc.
Yep, Dad had been Peggy’s older brother when she was just learning to walk and talk. She had spent about nine months with the family before moving back in with her mother, a newly-widowed war bride.
It’s a story has always stayed in my heart.
No, I meant what I said. You interpreted differently than I meant it. When I say ‘you’ I mean that my perception is that the media only seems to publish the horror stories; there’s not much interest in news, books, movies, etc. to make a point of how wonderful a foster care system is. I certainly didn’t mean that’s all I hear, because to me that would indicate hearing about foster home care from someone talking directly to me and that’s not the case. I’ve never met (as far as I know) or talked to anyone who has personally given me first had information about a foster home. That’s why I asked the question. Perhaps I should have said “It’s my perception that most media outlets stereotype foster care as very negative; I would like to believe that isn’t true. Please share stories of your first hand knowledge of foster care.” Is that better?
Yes, actually, though I would have asked for specific examples.
By the way, my Mom was in foster care in the 1950’s in England. Her birth Mom and birth Dad were very sick(tuberculosis) and she was put in foster care. Her foster parents were amazing and loved her quite a bit. She actually did not want to go back after her parents were well.
In Spain, government-managed foster homes are a very recent invention: social networks are very strong here, I know several people who got fostered to relatives.
One of them was a new classmate who joined us for 6th grade. Carlos had previously lived in Switzerland with his parents and little sister; they’d sent him to live with Grandma “so he’d go to school in Spain.” Our school system didn’t involve changing classrooms: students stayed in the same room except for activities requiring special equipment (gym, typing, shop) and it was teachers who moved; courses were divided in class groups by strict alphabetical order, and students arranged in almost-as-strict alphabetical order. The school made an exception for Carlos, sending him to our group: he had been learning Spanish at home, German outside, and long-time-classmate Patricia (whose mother is German) had been learning German at home, so he was sent to our group and the seating arrangement was prepared so that he’d sit beside her.
In our first recess, he tried to get all gorilla on the other guys - who promptly figured out that he’d been getting into fights in his old school and expected the same in ours. As soon as he stopped thumping his chest, he started making friends.
By Christmas you couldn’t tell he was either new in town or born abroad. His grandma was strict but also reasonable; when we had our first students-organized dance (our HS’s students rent a local club a few times a year) and he asked to be allowed to go home later than usual, she said “n!.. wait… hm… what time are the other boys coming in? Let me find out” - and called the parents of his friends to set a collective return time, thus pre-empting a lot of “but Julio’s parents let him go home half an hour later!”-type arguments.
If his grandma had been a softer model (either a doormat or “Johnny can do no wrong, he’s such a sweet boy!”), or if things had gone wrong that first recess, the fostering wouldn’t have worked well. As it went and after one year, his family figured out that the best choice was to have him stay with Grandma and they drew guardianship papers for her (she hadn’t needed them to act as his parents’ representative with the school, but it made some things easier and allowed her for example to count him as her dependant, instead of being counted as his parents’ dependant); I understand it was a fast and painless process because everybody was in agreement including Carlos (who was old enough to have his opinion taken into account), she was added as a third “parent” with no loss of parental rights for the actual parents.
Every other case I know personally was family-managed as well: some short-term, some long-term, but always with minimal or no government involvement.