My Chosen Children

My Foster Care Story Begins

I decided about a month ago that I wanted to do foster care again. I miss having children in my life. Two of my four children are married with children of their own, my youngest daughter graduates from high school this year and my youngest son decided to stay with his father rather than changing high schools when I moved last year.

This is something that I have been mulling over for awhile. When I did foster care 5 years ago, my youngest children were preteens and their experience with having a foster brother was not good. I had gotten a promotion which required longer hours and as I am a single mother, I made the decision not to take another foster child when my foster son was put back in residential care.

When I saw an ad in the paper for therapeutic foster care, I decided to look into it again. I live in a very rural area and the closest private agency is 2 hours away. I have been driving in to Pride training every week and sometimes twice a week.

The training has been excellent. The trainer spends much time discussing issues and going over scenarios. It has made me realize how inadequate my training was previously. I remember watching a couple of videos at home and doing a couple of hours of classroom training with one other family.

I realize that had I gone through this training then, I would have had a much better understanding of what my foster son was going through. I don’t know that it would have changed the outcome but at the very least I would have been more prepared to deal with his issues.

Over the next few weeks, I am going to have to decide whether I am going to do therapeutic foster care through the agency or whether I am going to work with my local DSS doing traditional foster care. My concerns are with the agency being 2 hours away which does not lend itself to being easily able to support any issues that might arise.

If I work with DSS, I will be working with younger children whose goal will usually be reunification with their families. The agency does some of this but it will usually be working with older children and teens who do not have that option. I have been considering the options over the last two weeks.

I contacted the local DSS and I have had several long discussions with the intake officer there. She is filling in for their foster care coordinator and we have developed a pretty good working relationship. They desperately need local foster families so that the children don’t have to go to residential care right away. The local kids are being moved all over the place which makes visitation with their families difficult at best.

I started this site to examine some of the issues involved with foster care from a personal level as well as to help other parents who might be considering it. I hope that I can provide some insight from a personal level as I work through my own decisions, questions and doubts now and the experience of actually being a foster parent.

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