As I have mentioned previously, as a foster parent licensed through Children’s Bureau, for each case you will have a DCS family case manager (FCM) and a case manager from Children’s Bureau. So why the overlap? Or is it overlap? There is a bit of overlap but the...
The thing I would like to share with you today is something called The ACE Quiz. “ACE” stands for Adverse Childhood Experiences and an ACE score is a tally of different types of abuse, neglect, and other characteristics of a potentially difficult childhood. According...
So, let’s talk for a minute about kids from hard places dealing with death. Clearly, any child in foster care has experienced loss…simply by virtue of the fact that he is no longer with his biological family. The removal, in and of itself, is a loss and it is...
So…one of the things you may have heard (or experienced if you’re already a foster parent) is that kids in care will probably need therapy of some type. I won’t lie…I’m 99% certain that virtually every child entering foster care will need therapy at some point. The...
So some of you out there who are new to foster care, or even just considering it, might be wondering how you decide what kind of placement to take. Honestly, it often depends on your comfort zone, your experience and your available space. But there is so much more...
So here’s the thing: if you are looking for lots of pats on the back or praise and accolades, being a foster parent (or any job in social work, actually) might not be for you. To be fair, it’s not that no one sees what you do or that your time, energy and effort are...
This is the last blog in this series (which was supposed to be small but ended up being about 6 more posts than I anticipated) …because there are just so many things about which I want you to be aware. I want your eyes as open as they can be. And even though you’ll...
So…court is one of those things that, at least for us, there was not really much talk about before or while we were getting licensed. Oh sure…I might have heard a foster parent say, “They had court today.” But for whatever reason I didn’t really dive in to find out...
I touched on this a little bit already but want to emphasize this particular point: you need to be flexible when you’re a foster parent. This is always true at the initial placement, but this need for flexibility WILL, most likely, run the entire course of the case....
You guys…I realized that I need to pause in the middle of the series about “What I Wish I Knew” to share a little bit about what’s been going on in our lives and encourage those of you who may be struggling with the idea of letting a kid from hard places attend a...
