Being involved with
foster care for the past two years I’ve had many questions about it. They generally fall into three categories:
“Foster
care? How does that work?” (what are the logistics like),
“Foster care?
How do you manage?” (what is your home
life like now?),
and “Foster care? How can you handle doing that?” ( by which
people mean, how do you manage issues of the heart).
I’ve had so many thoughts stewing in my brain
as our first long-term placement comes to a close, that I thought I’d answer
these questions to the extent of our experience. Of course things can be very different in
other places, and each foster family has their own set of challenges before
they take on the unique challenges of each foster child in their home. But some general principles will be
universal.
But before I answer
any of the above, I’ve also had people ask “Why would anyone do foster care?” Our answer is simple—to adopt someone to
raise with Seth, as there’s a thirteen year gap between our fourth and fifth
children. We looked into all the options
(infant adoption is out for us for many reasons) and even started down a road
to international adoption only to have every door slam in our faces. In the past 8 to 10 years international
adoption has become extremely difficult and expensive (it already was, but now
it’s much worse), and we determined after extensive research that we had no
greater chance of being able to adopt internationally than from foster care. The children coming from overseas are
frequently just as traumatized as domestic foster-to-adopt kids but with foster
care you have the chance to do a “test drive” of the relationship. If after giving it a try you find that it’s
just not a good fit, you can decide against adoption--should that become a
possibility the agency will look for another permanent family. And though there is waiting period whichever
option you choose, we knew that in the case of foster care we’d at least be
doing some real good in the world in the interim, rather than just filling out
more forms and sending more money all the time, like you do in international
adoption. So we decided to go for it.
Our first step was to
check with our county social services department. They told me they weren’t interested taking
applications from foster-to-adopt parents, and when I asked how many foster
kids they had placed last year for adoption, they said six. Six isn’t very many in a county of a half
million people, and the training and paperwork you go through doesn’t usually
apply to other counties. But through
pure serendipity we found an agency that places foster kids throughout the
northern half of Virginia (if you don’t know that something exists you don’t
know to look for it). This way we have a
much larger pool to choose from—we get calls from our agency for children that
fit our criteria but are outside our county.
