After a year of preparing for foster parenting, we felt as ready as we could feel.  We knew our first time placement would be exciting, difficult AND come with surprises.  We got tips from our agency and more experienced foster parents, but nothing prepared us for the strange slew of feelings, questions, and problems that would come our way.

Based on our first experience, here are some tips to keep in mind if you plan to become involved in foster care.

Before I begin, here are a few common words we’ve learned since we began fostering:

Subsequent Placement: when a child moves from one foster home to a new foster home
(as opposed to an initial placementwhen the child moves from their birth parent’s home to a foster home)

Disruption: Any move the child makes from one foster home to another. The goal is always consistency – each move causes the child more trauma.

CASA worker: The Court Appointed Special Advocate. This person volunteers to dig into the child’s case and spends time with the children and foster families involved. We had an amazing CASA who saw us or the kids 2-3 times a month.

Ad Litem: The attorney assigned to the foster children.  They can have some pretty good insight if you need to call for support, but in the end, ours advocated for the opposite of what we thought was best.  Our Ad Litem saw the kids and us very few times, yet their opinion is one of the strongest when it is all said and done.

We signed up to take ages 0-10.  After waiting several weeks for a call, we finally got one!  We had a laundry list of questions prepared, but in the excitement of it all, we asked maybe one.  A 4 and 9 year old brother and sister needed a place to stay fast, as an emergency required them to leave their previous foster home of 3 months. We wanted to help,  and we loved the ages… but later we found out more about their background and diagnoses and realized we were not well informed or prepared to meet the children’s needs.

Ask all the questions you’ve prepared beforehand.  When you are in the heat of the moment you may not remember them.  Based on our experience, before you say yes to a placement, it is important to know:
(especially with subsequent placements)

Had I asked all of these questions it would have saved us (and the kids) a lot of pain.  There are four levels of care for foster children – beginning with basic and becoming more challenging as you go up levels.  After 3 months in foster care, the agency could have answered the questions above, and we needed to know the answers.  We were only prepared to take “basic” kids – albeit, sometimes the level of care isn’t clear yet when the kids first enter foster care  – but since the kids came from another foster home, the agency should have been honest with us about some of the issues I listed above.

Our main concern was that these kids would have trouble falling asleep the first night.  Not a problem!  After a few days they even started calling us mom and dad and things seemed fine. We expected a short honeymoon period before reality set in.  Soon after, the team (CPS, agency, casa, ad litem) visited us for our first chat about the kids.  We were informed that our 9 year old girl spent 8 years in a home with drugs, neglect, violence AND abuse and left her old foster home ‘because of something the foster mother did.’   In hindsight, I would have asked more about what the CHILD did, so I would know what to expect in my interactions with her.  Any one of these traumas is huge on its own and she had them all.  Her meltdowns were epic and scared us very much as new foster parents.  From the beginning, we knew she belonged in a home with much more experience than we possessed.  We kept trying our best though, and as her counseling sessions increased, her episodes also increased.

We learned that counseling presents a double-edged sword.  The children are experiencing healing as they work through their past, but they are also expressing their sadness, anger, fear and anxiety through the process.  Sessions don’t decrease behavior problems like we expected.  Too many times I would call the counselor during a scary moment with the girl and she would tell me something she “should have told me before.”  Trial by fire for a month and a half continued, until our girl did something that led the counselor to suggest we take her to a mental hospital. She did not come back to live with us after she got out of the hospital because she had moved up to the 3^rdlevel of care in the time she’d been with us and needed to go to a more specialized home.

Her little brother became a new little boy when she left, and the evidence convinced us that they needed to spend some time apart.  Keep in mind that your opinion and experience have no bearing on the matter when it comes to this issue.  The children’s attorney had the final say even though she spent next to NO TIME with the children in our care.  We are called to be these children’s advocates and get to know them surprisingly well in a few short months, but our experience and opinion didn’t matter.  We were livid when they took the 4 year old boy, (who had done a complete turnaround in 1.5 months,) and returned him to a new home to be with his sister.  We can only assume he went back to the constant chaos of PTSD triggers and mimicking his sister’s behavior.  Back to daily fits, screaming, throwing and who knows what else.

It’s all out of our hands and we can put this under our belts as an experience to learn from.  During our first placement we learned some tricks that will help all future placements be much easier.

We expected them to come into our care knowing and acting in certain ways.  We knew trauma would have an impact on their development, but I know we will be better informed next time and start off on a stronger foot!  Training will only get you so far – it’s immersion that teaches you the most.  I wish someone had told me some basic tips like these before our first placement, so I hope you can learn from our challenges.

Lastly, let me encourage you, if you find yourself in this situation, please don’t give up.  If you’re considering fostering, and the scary stories you hear are making you doubt whether to take the leap, give it a chance. In our training and interactions with other foster parents, we’ve heard more positive stories than negative.  During our first placement, we were faced with a challenge we did not expect, but we have personally become better people through this, and will be better foster parents to future kids.  These children are worth our effort – they did not do anything to deserve their trauma or ask to be dealt their cards in life.  Asking the right questions can help children get into a home that is the right fit for them, creating consistency and preventing moving from one home to another.

I’d love to hear some of your most impactful experiences and lessons with children, and hope the lessons we learned can help you be a better and more prepared foster parent.