Foster Parents

This blog is to discover Foster Care issues and possible conversations on solutions. It is a place where Foster Parents can come and vent and know their identies will be safe! We hope to be able to include conversations from different Foster Families including those with many years under their belt and those with only days! IF you are interested please read and comment on the postings on this site!

Being Foster Parents means so many different things; we must be strong, weak, capable, willing and able to laugh, defiant, defensive, flexible, able to easily laugh, cry, let go, hold onto, love, listen, talk straight talk, give our opinion only when it is asked for, network, create bonds with the unlovable, play by rules that are as foreign and Europe, deal with Judges and Social Workers who are stuck in the mentality of 1950, a doctor and a nurse, a teacher and a friend.

It means loving the most vulnerable in society and yet protecting them from themselves and their birth family if necessary. Hopefully - the system will receive enough out cry and changes will continue to occur to allow the laws to change to better protect the children they sought out to originally protect!

Foster Care for my husband and I has been exhilarating and hard. We have had good and bad social workers and Judges. We have had both good and difficult children in our home. We have loved every single child that came into our house and life! There have been a few that were harder to love than the rest. But for the most part these kids come to our house; scared, alone, hurting, feeling unloved, hungry, and very very unsure of their future.

We try with every kid coming into our home that we give them a space that is just theirs, room for their clothing no matter how little they bring with them we try and have extras at our house, food no matter what time of the day or night they come in, hopefully a bath depending on the reason they came in (if physically or sexually abused we may wait until the next day to bathe them), and always take pictures of the night they came in. Some of the kids are really in bad shape coming in and others look normal and healthy and just needed a place to be for the moment.