Tell me about foster parenting

We’re sort of vaguely starting to consider the idea of foster parenting. I’m doing some preliminary research, and wondered if there are any foster parents/foster kids on the Dope. So far the reading I’ve done suggests that the most important things for foster parents are:

Liking kids

Stable family

Lots of support

We have all three. It scares me about as much as the idea of actually having our own children, but we’ve managed that and have two sons so far.

Anyway, good stories, horror stories, general experiences?

As I understand it, that makes you a better parent than what most foster kids had before, so, y’know, there’s that. :slight_smile:

What do your sons think of the idea? Are they still living at home?

Some friends of ours have been fostering a 3yo boy, and it ended badly for them.

First of all, they’re wonderful people, with an terrific 5yo daughter of their own, and would NEVER abuse a child.

The bio mother of the boy apparently decided that she didn’t like them (my friend says she always went out of her way to bring the bio mom drawings the boy made and keep her updated on his activities and to just generally be as nice as possible), and told CPS that my friend and her husband were abusing the boy.

Now, you have to be pretty messed up to begin with for CPS to take your kids–he was definitely coming from an abusive situation. But CPS took the crazy, drugged-up mom at her word and put my friends through a full-out investigation, including an police-style interrogation in one of those one-way mirror rooms. Everyone involved was provided with a lawyer, except my friends, who were left to fend for themselves against allegations of physical abuse.

This was only supposed to be a temporary foster situation to begin with, but because of all this shit my friends gave the boy back early, rather than deal with the increasing stress of the situation. While they were going through all this, CPS asked if they would take in more children!

Anyway, if you decide to do it, get a lawyer.

Our kids are 2 1/2 and four months, so they’ll be living at home for some time yet. :slight_smile:

Okay, first horror story. We’ll add ‘think about getting a lawyer’ to the list.

Kudos to you for considering this. There are not nearly enough people who consider foster parenting for the right reasons (a lot of people do it as a source of income, unfortunately at the child’s expense).
Here is a page with some advice on ways to protect yourself from false abuse allegations: http://library.adoption.com/articles/false-abuse-allegations-adoption-and-foster-care.html

Usually it will be recommended that the foster child be the youngest child in the home, for the safety of the other children. Foster kids who have been neglected and/or abused (which is pretty much all of them or they wouldn’t be in foster care) will tend to act out on younger kids. With the ages of your kids, that leaves you with getting another infant. If that’s not too much work for you, it could work out fine. I would not take the chance on an older child in your situation, but you should talk to others who’ve been through it, and do not rely on the state social workers to look out for your best interests.

I really hope you look into it further, foster parents are badly needed. I have some friends who do it, one little chap they are keeping, he was treated like a little servant and they have to encourage him to go and play, he clears the table like a robot. Their own kids - well we wonder whether the younger one has been affected by the visitors, or is he just a normal bolshie teenager - hard to tell. They do say the money is good and that it’s important to be able to let go of the kids. One little chap they had was very difficult, on the autistic spectrum yet adorable, and got placed permanently, and we all miss him. We miss them all actually and have to try not to talk about them. They started fostering when their two boys were about 13/14 and have only had kids much younger.

Some of these comments amaze me. I know someone whose child was put in temporary foster care because she was arrested on a misdemeanor and had no one to watch the child.
I have heard numerous abuse stories, in fact, I believe the system is abusive. the foster family was told lies about the parent, the worker told the child they were never going to see their parent again (they were back in three weeks).

You forgot “the patience of an absolute saint”.

I was a temporary foster kid for, I dunno, fewer than six months, I think. I would think it would drive a person batty to have to deal with, first of all, somebody else’s effed up kid and, secondly, a kid they don’t know at all. How are you supposed to deal with somebody when you don’t know how they cope, you don’t know their problem-solving capabilities, you don’t know what makes them tick or their little warning signs when they’re about to have a meltdown. I dunno, seems messy to me.

My situation is a bit different from most as I was a foster kid through no fault of my own and no fault of my parents (no, really) so I had this whole bitter hate thing going, and I was older than the kids you’ll probably have (I turned 15 there) so there was teenage girl attitude on top of it.

I do think the social workers involved did lie to the foster parents (they truly pitied me, for absolutely no reason at all, and told me more than once they wished they could adopt me and “save” me from my parents even though my parents never did a single thing wrong) and they definitely lied to me, giving me the whole “You don’t ever get to go home” thing. That coupled with other experiences with social workers… I honestly cannot imagine working with these people for a living and, while they are probably not ALL horrible, enough of them are just in my own experience that I would never consider a job that put me anywhere near them. The foster parents themselves were pretty decent and whatever complaints I might have about them probably come from whatever lies they were told by the social workers, so I don’t really fault them for it.

I will say, if I ever considered being a foster parent (and I wouldn’t) I would never, ever do it while I still had children in the house. In my mind, that’s just asking for trouble, not just because the kids you foster may be troubled and dangerous, but you also run the risk of having to deal with either the foster kids resenting your kids because “you treat them better” or the other way around and the associated mess, which probably will happen regardless of how you’re actually treating anybody. My placement didn’t have any in-house children, so I don’t have any experience there. It just really seems like a bad idea.

I feel like such a downer for this post. Sorry. :confused: I think the system is flawed and I admit that my general disagreement with it may be coloring my opinion some. Even so, you wanted experiences.

I have a friend who does mostly temporary foster care – looks after small kids (I think the oldest she’s looked after was about 2; her youngest child at the time was 4) when they need someone for a couple of weeks. It’s difficult for her with her other kids but she loves it and really knows she’s making a difference for these poor babies. And she and her husband ended up adopting one of the foster babies which is going to make a huge difference in that girl’s life.

But yeah, you have to have some pretty awesome reserves of patience and practicality. That being said, talking to her makes me want to adopt out of the foster care system even though I’d never really thought about adoption before.

Lissla Lissar - There was a family in our parish who used to do short-term fostering for the 7-10 days between the time a birth mother gave birth and when the baby was handed over to the adoptive parents. They didn’t want to hand the baby over until the birth mother was ready to relinquish parental rights, so this family would take care of the baby.

One Sunday at Mass, it turned out that the adoptive family was also a member of the parish, and when it was announced at church that their adoption dreams had finally come through, the families realized this was the baby. There were lots of tears that day.

My brother-in-law’s parents took in several foster children, and adopted two, I think. These kids didn’t come free from trouble, but they were treated as part of the family and seemed to adapt. I say this not really knowing my b-i-l’s family well.

StG

Thanks for all the stories, good and bad. Don’t worry about being a downer. This is something we want all the information about possible.

How our kids would react is something in the long list of things I’m concerned about. They’re both very young, and therefore quite flexible, but still. It might help that we have an elastic definition of ‘family’- our kids have upwards of twenty aunts and uncles and cousins, none of them blood relations but definitely family. I’d hope that any kids we’d fostered would be treated as family. We’d intend for that to happen.

St. Germain, how amazing. Newborns are wonderful, but a lot of work. Okay, the no day/night concept is a lot of work, even if their needs are fairly simple.

StGermain, that’s what my friend does too, usually the newborns (though has had older ones on occasion as I said, e.g., over holidays when others are busy). Her kids seem to be fine with it, and I think it’s actually pretty neat for them to see their parents caring for others like that.

The cutest story she told was that she got pregnant when their adopted-from-foster-care daughter was two (they’d had her ever since she was a newborn, and have had other foster babies in from time to time since then). She sat her kids down to talk to them about where the new baby was coming from… and the adopted daughter and the younger bio son both were under the impression babies came from “Auntie S,” their foster-care worker!

This is a slight highjack in defense of social workers. We are not baby stealers. A responsible social worker (as I am) would never misrepresent a client to anyone. Most social workers work outside of foster care and adoption issues, and to paint us all with such a broadly negative stroke is insulting. Whatever flavor of social work you practice, it is a hard, often thankless job for which we are not paid well. Attitudes such as this are derogatory and demeaning to a profession as I see as proud and worthy.

Ok, end hijack.

I would also agree that only taking foster kids younger than your bio kids would be a good idea.

When my son was three years old and his father sued me for custody, I made a visit to CPS sometime after our preliminary “temporary order” hearing but before the final order had been set.

The reason I went is because I was giving Alex a bath and I had him standing up so I could wash his butt/legs. When I began washing his inner thighs he jerked away and said “Don’t touch me there!” Naturally, I was like “WTF?” and he looked right at me and said, verbatim, “My dad hurt my penis.”

The ONLY response I got from the guy I was set up with (after the woman at the pre-interview, or whatever, expressed disbelief because three year old boys “don’t say penis”; I’m not sure she was a social worker though) was “I know how these custody things get.” The implication being I made the whole thing up, with no follow-up, no in home visit to his father, no questions about why Alex would say his dad had hurt him, nothing.

So pardon me if you’re offended.

Besides which, I didn’t paint you all with anything. I said, right in the post you quoted, that you’re probably not all horrible. In my experience, which is what this thread asked for and which it seems you’ve wrongly assumed is limited to foster care/adoption issues, social workers aren’t worth a damn. IMHO, and all that.