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...
I’m going to hit you with a quote from a foster parent parent right out of the gate this time: “Accepting help doesn’t mean that you can’t do this.” You guys…I’ve said this before and I will say it again. You cannot be a foster parent in a silo. Well to be fair…you...
It will surely come as no surprise that when you become a foster parent, your time ends up being split even more than ever. And so, you have to be careful in guarding your own time and the time of your family; to assist with that, you’ll need to set (or learn to set)...
For Part 3 of “What I Wish I’d Known” is one foster parent’s statement: Don’t have high expectations in the areas of DCS parental standards, biological parents’ behaviors, visit supervisors/transporters communication…ever! Keeping low expectations in these areas...
Every single person who has been a licensed foster parent has expectations of some sort. It might be the expectation of a placement being adopted, or the expectation of fostering teens, or taking sibling groups, or being “habitual foster parents” (meaning you have a...
I wanted to take the next few weeks and do a short little series of posts called “From the Trenches: What I Wish I’d Known”. To garner my information, I surveyed a pool of foster parents and asked them what things they wish they would have known prior to fostering....
