Recently a couple in my ward accepted a foster placement of three young brothers. This week the state took the boys back and placed them with their biological mother. My friend was upset because she knew she was a better mother than bio mom, and it seems like it had been her understanding that she would get to adopt the boys. I’m not sure what gave her that impression, but she 
was dead set against taking another foster placement.
My husband and I have one daughter via in vitro fertilization. It’s a long story, but unless we ran into another $20,000 we are looking to expand our family via foster care/adoption. Back in 2006 we accepted our first placement of a Hispanic teenage girl who was with us for 9 months. Our second case was a brother and sister with two half-siblings in another foster home. We had them for about 18 months before adoption proceedings fell apart when they left our home and eventually were reunited with a parent.
After the failed adoption, we decided we needed a break. In our exit interview a caseworker came to our home and mentioned that our two cases were likely the most complicated they’d had in the past few years. It’s been five years since then and we are beginning our paperwork for licensure again.
Many people are interested in foster parenting, and for that I’m grateful. It’s a lot of thankless work and we need more good foster parents everywhere. We are by no means experts, that being said I have some advice for those considering foster care:
- The purpose of foster care is to provide temporary care and be a part of a team that helps reunite a family. Family reunification is always goal number one. It doesn’t matter if you are a better parent than the biological parents, the state is in the business of reuniting families as soon as a biological parent is able to establish a safe environment again.
- Do NOT love the children as if they are your own. Love them like you are their aunt and uncle; you can still love them dearly, but hope their parents should be able to take them back soon. This should make things easier on you and them as everyone works towards reunification.
- Sometimes foster parents (in my experience especially Mormons) can have a “savior complex” riding in like a white knight to save these children from their awful, evil parents. You have to support the bio parents’ success and progress. My sister has been in and out of jail over the past decade and it’s helped me understand and have empathy for parents who are addicts and in need of help.
- I would recommend that your youngest child be old enough that they know not to ever keep secrets. As a general rule I would also recommend the foster children be younger than your own. You can’t be 100% perfect in protecting your own child. You also can’t be 100% sure of what the other children have been exposed to, just because there is no record of abuse doesn’t mean they haven’t been abused and won’t act out. This is just not for the safety of your own children, most of the children available for adoption through the foster care system in the US have requirements that they be the only or youngest child in the home.
- You must be flexible. One of the children we had was booked every day after school: he was either with a PSR (social) worker, counseling with a therapist, or he had two to four parental visits per week. Again, I had a difficult case and this may not be the norm – but you should be prepared to meet their specific needs just like you would your own child.
- In our experience we had a more difficult time working with the department than with the parents. Social workers are incredibly underpaid and overworked, they can be hard to contact and work with. We had one caseworker who left the job run into us a year later and apologize for ly
ing to get a placement in our home. He said he was willing say anything necessary to get the child out of the group foster home.
I’ve heard too many horror stories of the damage that happens from abusive foster families. I would encourage everyone to consider being a foster parent, but do so with the right perspective. Are there any other foster parents out there with words of advice? Have you ever considered foster care or adopting through the system? Any other questions about the foster care process?
p.s. I have some other thoughts that are best saved for other posts I’ll have in the future. I can see this turning into a series.
Wheat & Tares 
I was one too. I did “therapeutic” foster care. My advice would be that you read a case file before accepting an indefinite placement. Red flags I should have been leary of were
1) “ODD” aka “Oppositional Defiant Disorder” and
2) 17 placements in 8 years.
RE: O.D.D.- that’s a often a kid who can be aggressive or even physical. In my case, I was a single parent of a 200 pound adolescent. I ended up having to deal with police calls to my home. In retrospect ITS OBVIOUS CASE WORKERS DOWNPLAY serious issues with clinical words not all parents fully understand.
RE: 17 PLACEMENTS IN 8 Years, the kid was the common denominator-meaningnot all those families were bad matches. I read victim of the system when I should have read major behavioral issues.
Regardless, he lasted 18 months in my ho.e, which was longer than other placements.
My hat goes off to foster parents. It seems like it would be such an emotional roller-coaster.
That last graphic irritates me, though. You think you know what it’s representing, and then it messes with you. 50% of girls in foster care end up pregnant by 19, 74% of former foster kids end up in prison at some point, 50% of foster kids end up in prison within two years of “aging out”, and 80% of foster youth end up on death row. Wait, wha?! Oh! It means 80% of death row were foster kids. Does that mean it meant 50% of girls pregnant by 19 were former foster kids? In the end, you don’t what the heck it means and you’re annoyed you bothered looking at it in the first place.
Those are really sad statistics. It gives you a different perspective on the whole nature/nurture argument. We really are so powerfully shaped by our environment. Those of us who turned out well shouldn’t take too much credit for it. We were just extremely lucky.
Martin, sorry for the Foster care statistics without context or explanation. I thought it would be helpful to just get a glimpse of outcomes of at-risk youth, and start to see a link between Foster care youth and our prison systems.
A future post I’m planning will go more into depth, and will review a new book “Letters to a Lifer” the story of a bishop’s wife in Pennsylvania and how she became involved with an inmate on life row (who, not coincidentally is a former Foster child). Through letters she has “adopted” him as a son and is now an advocate for the Campaign for Fair Semtencing of Youth.
Jenonator: that’s great advice as well. I think we were pretty naieve in just buying the story the caseworker sold us.
We did respite care for another family with a ten year old that was violent and the family often had to call police to restrain him. Just in case I had my husband take a half day off of work on Friday for the weekend we had him. It’s so sad how much damage can be done so early.
Jenonator is right, case workers speak in code and downplay serious issues. Read between the lines.
Also, be careful about the children you already have in your home.
We had more foster children in our home than I can count. When a crisis occurred in the ward, the bishop would call on my folks to take in kids. Sometimes the school or local social services would call on my parents to help.
It didn’t bother me, but I have a sibling who fifteen years later is still bitter and jealous about the loss of attention.
Here were our house rules:
1) Same-sex siblings. If the girls were living at home, they would only accept another girl, even if it meant sending the foster-child’s siblings to a neighbor.
2) Separate bedrooms
3) House rules (unchanged from the Victorian era)
4) We (the children) always out-numbered the foster children and we were always slightly older.
3) No sexually abused foster children were taken in until the other children were older teenagers or out of the house.
4) My parents were a “team” and rarely alone with the foster child.
5) We didn’t have much money, but they paid to help the children fit in (back-to-school clothes, prom dresses, school activity money, hobbies, music and sports, birthday parties, etc.) Things like special summer camps or activities were often paid for by social services, the bishop or ward members.
6) Children were expected to be children- apply themselves at school, participate in activities, service projects, etc. They kept their own rooms clean and if they didn’t like the mess, knew where the broom was.
7) The house was simplified. Guns, weapons, and anything valuable or sentimental was sent away or locked up.
8) Involve a lot people and keep the kids busy.
9) “Never sweat the small stuff”. Note: Nearly everything is “small stuff”. Pick your fights. Use reverse psychology. Don’t let your feathers get ruffled and laugh at the things that are done for “shock value”.
10) No violent video games, no internet (at the time), clean movies, etc.
God bless the people who are willing and able
My brother and I were in foster care for the first 7 yrs. of my life, then we were adopted by an LDS family. I would love to say it was all peaches and cream, but it wasn’t. We went from an abusive foster home to a seriously abusive adoptive home. It worked out for us – we were lucky to be saved by church members, teachers and others who stepped up to do the hard work of healing shattered children.
If you want to read about foster care and adoption (with an LDS twist) from the child’s perspective, I wrote a book about our story called, “Ezra and Hadassah: A Portrait of American Royalty”
Kristine A–
This is a topic worth pursuing. I wish you success. Your advice in many respects is dead, solid perfect; however I believe that couples committing to the process, particularly those who eventually want to adopt might not hear it with listening ears. My wife’s desire to be a mother, trumped many words of caution. Aside from the challenges of taking in an eight-year old who had been in 13 different homes in the previous four years (there were days when I didn’t know whether to shoot myself or go blind),if both biological parents have not relinquished rights (in our case, one had, one had not), it will be very difficult to truly adopt. The visitation process can be very difficult. The mixed messages for the adolescent who spends the majority of the month in a structured, orderly environment with high expectations along with bacchanalia-filled weekends with a biological family leads to great confusion. Six years into it, we see positive outcomes as a real potential but it has been tough. I’m not a novice parent like my wife; I have three adult children from a previous marriage in their 30s who put me through the normal paces but nothing that prepared me for the foster-not quite adopted process.
I wish you luck, too. I was only there for three years. My best advice for people just wanting to adopt is to become an adoption only home. If you can’t support reunification you can do more damage than good. But like living in Zion said, we need so families out there for when the parents can’t/won’t take them back…..