Foster Care Meetings 7&8

The last two foster care meetings were excellent. We finished our classes the Monday before Thanksgiving, and then everything has been a little crazy for a while. Between NaNoWriMo and some family concerns, the blog kind of got put on hold for a while. I'm hoping to do better from now on...but I have said that before.

Goals are good to have anyway.

Meeting 7: Long Term Separation; Adoption Issues for Families

This was a very interesting meeting. One of the primary reasons that we are looking to do foster care is because we would like to adopt some children. However, the main thing that we've learned through all of our classes is: if children can safely be with their parents, they WILL do better with their parents than with you.

In this class, we learned why. For the first part, a teenager in foster care came and talked to us. I can't go into any detail about her situation or most of the things she said, but it was really impressive how far she'd come and how well she was doing. We were supposed to have a larger panel, but the other teenagers weren't able to make it, so it was just one girl. It was really neat to hear things from her perspective though.

Here are my notes from this class:

• The only way you adopt a a child through foster care is to have their family die. (Literally or figuratively. This was a tough one to hear. You want families to succeed, so in order for a kid to join your family, their family had to be so broken that there is no way they can return to their biological parents.) This point probably had the biggest impact on me.
• When teens start creating their identity, they want to know where they come from. 
• Plan how you're going to help your adopted children deal with their search for their bio parents.
• We DO NOT talk to the children in foster care about adopiton until reunification is NOT POSSIBLE.
• All questions and issues usually boil over during adolescence. 
• Validate children's feelings. Don't dismiss the things they feel or say. Especially teenagers. 
• Have open communication before an adopted child gets to the adolescent stage. They need to know EVERY aspect of their adoption story: the good, the bad, and the ugly.
• If you lie about anything, to them, you lied about everything.
• If possible, and healthy, allow them to talk to their birth parents. Continue communication. Base your decision on what is best for the child, not you.
• Don't push the kids to say "I love you," and don't make them call you Mom or Dad. Let the relationship progress at the child's pace. 
• Don't be afraid to talk about their parents with them. 
• Treat them like your own children. 
• Children will test us to see if we really care. Don't give up on them, NO MATTER WHAT!
• If someone asks about foster children, don't introduce them as foster kids. Just say, "These are my kids."
• We are going to mess up. Just don't give up.
• Let the children guide the discussions. 
• Honesty is ALWAYS the best. 
• Don't wait for the kdis to bring things up. Talk about everything. 
• Foster kids ARE different. Celebrate the differences and help them feel accepted BECAUSE of their differences. 
• Adoption Loss is the only trauma in the world where the victims are expected by the whole of society to be grateful for it.
• Children will go through the grief cycle. It may happen at any time adnthe children willtry to figure out what happened to them. 
• What would it be like to never finish your process of self-creation? To never know the final piece that tell you who you are, and why you act the way you do? What would it be like to have no idea where you came from?

It was a really eye opening class for me. Life after adoption isn't cake. Even when children are infants, there are consequences that come from trauma. 

Open communication is so important for children who are in foster care and who are adopted. I think a lot of these things apply to children who are adopted through other means as well. The fact that they want to find their birth parents, doesn't mean they don't love their adopted parents. They are just trying to figure out who they are, and your biological parents are a big part of that. 

Meeting 8: Transcending Differences in Placements

Our last class was essentially about culture. The way we do things in our home is a culture, whether we recognize it as such or not. When children in foster care enter a home, they don't know how anything works, and everything foreign is another reason to feel uncomfortable. We need to try and incorporate our children's culture into our home when it is safe and appropriate to do so. 

• What does your child like to eat?
• Reunification, tell yourself they're going home. 
• Build a relationship with bioparents. Ask them questions about what their children like and how to help them.
• Don't focus on the things you don't have control over (like the court)
• Save clothes receipts (Around $45 of the monthly reimbursement HAS to be spent on clothing.
• People shouldn't be able to distinguish between your biological children and your foster children by how you treat them. 
• Try and incorporate children's culture. 
• Teenagers throw everything out that they've been told, and then they begin cherry-picking and forming their own identity. 
• When children are given food they don't recognize, the brain's first reaction is to tell the child it isn't safe. 
• Ask the children what they like to do with their family, and what their family does for things like birthdays. When a child comes into your home, everything is new. Have a flexible culture. 
• Ask them what they want to do for their birthday, and then do it. 
• What matters to them, needs to matter to you.
• Am I aware of and sensitive to their culture?
• They will be thinking literally. Don't expect them to conform to your culture. 
• If you allow yourself to give up in team meetings, you eliminate your ability to help. 
• What you don't talk out, you'll act out. 
• Kids spell trust "t-i-m-e." 

For the very last thing that we did in our foster class, we watched the following video. The idea behind it is that "every child is just one caring adult away from being a success story."

I would highly recommend watching the video. I think it's applicable to everyone, even if they're not doing foster care. 

Here's the link: 

http://joshshipp.com/one-caring-adult/

What next?

We've had a few people ask us what happens next. Our goal is to have foster kids by Christmas. We can't do our home inspection until we get our background checks done, and we can't go in any sooner than our appointment next week. Until then, we need to get our CPR/First Aid class done, and try and get our home ready for inspection.

We've had some pretty neat miracles. For example, we finally found someone who would haul away our hot tub and other garbage for free! It is so wonderful to have the junk that was left by the previous owners out of our home.

Here's everyone loading up the trailer.

Here's the backyard without the hot tub!

 Things seem to be going well. Both brother-in-laws are trying to find an apartment out of our home too. We're not sure how everything is going to work out yet, but I know the Lord is involved in it, so if we're supposed to have children from the foster care system in our home by Christmas, we will.

Foster Care Meeting 1

Yesterday night, we went to our first foster care training meeting. I was pretty excited about it, even though it was supposed to be four hours long (and it was). 

The instructor was pretty hilarious. He was entertaining and the time went really quickly. It was a lot like the first college class period. He told us what to expect for the next seven classes, what his goals were, and what he expected from us. 

One of his biggest points was that we needed to make sure that we were doing this for the right reason. It wasn't supposed to be about us, it was supposed to be about the children. He talked about misconceptions and told us that generally foster kids aren't out to murder our pets. In fact, he'd never heard of a single case of that happening. 

We watched a video about a young man who had "aged out" of foster care. That means that he turned 18 while still in the system and was never adopted. Even as a successful business man, you could still hear the pain in the man's voice as reflected on his feelings about why he had never been adopted. It was pretty sad. He told us that children who age out of the foster care system nearly always struggle with feelings of self-worth. No matter how successful they become, they always wonder why nobody wanted them.

He asked us to keep an open mind about the ages, genders, and circumstances of the children that we are going to be helping. 

Grig pointed out that foster care is a bit of a paradox. You are supposed to bring the kids in your home, agree to potentially adopt them if things don't work out with their birth mom, and yet put all of your efforts into get them reunified with their birth families. We're not sure how that's going to work out yet, but we're still feeling good about the path we're on. 

He brought up two chart that showed reasons that people decide to foster. The first chart were the good reasons that helped to make foster care effective. All of our reasons were on this first chart. It was things like: infertility, desire to help the children, have a bigger family, and adoption. The other chart were reasons that didn't really work. These were things like: income (hoping that foster care would earn you money), a playmate for your child, or because your family was pressuring you to have children. 

He also talked about parenting techniques. We didn't go into too much detail, because that will be covered in another class, but the things he said have already helped me to be a better parent today.

A few weeks ago, Kevin was melting down all the time. He would just cry and scream for an hour or two. Last night, the instructor told us that punishing a child, or disciplining them for acting out is ineffective unless you solve the reason WHY they're acting out. A tantrum is nearly a way of expressing a deeper problem. 

Kevin hasn't done that in a few weeks, but today after preschool, he suddenly had a major fit. For nearly an hour, he screamed and cried. I kept my cool pretty well, but after trying everything, I finally began praying and I remembered what the instructor had said. Kevin had only eaten a little for lunch, and he had been playing hard ever since. I figured out he was probably hungry. (Candy doesn't fill you up after all.) 

I began to cook food. He screamed about everything I was doing, but when I handed him a meatball, the crying ceased. As soon as he was done eating that and the rest of his food, he was a different child. My happy little guy was back. 

We sure love this kid.

I'm pretty grateful for the things that I've already been learning. I'm hoping to be a much better person, parent, and wife after I finish the training. Even if we weren't doing foster care, I feel like these will help me improve my parenting style. 

Kevin had a great time playing with some friends while we were at the meeting, and he fell asleep at their house. We brought him home and he went right to bed. It was a successful night.