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. 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.