Search Results for: looking for foster parents

Foster Parents

When a child is in the foster care system the foster parent’s role should be pretty straight forward. You open your hearts and homes to children that have been removed from their biological families care. You offer these children a safe place to live in a caring family environment. You care for these children as if they were your own, with the knowledge that this is a temporary place for them to be. Most foster parent’s go into position for all the right reasons, to give an innocent child unconditional love and a safe place to call home. However, there … Continue reading →

Prospective Parents’ Health Status: What Effect on Chances of Adoption?

A reader recently asked two excellent questions about persons with serious health conditions adopting. I am paraphrasing the essence of her questions here, as I understand them. 1) Are agencies really allowed to ask about all this? What about health privacy laws? Most, if not all, of the forms I’ve seen will ask this question. (As well as questions about your debts, your marital communication, amount in your bank account, how you get along with your parents and many other things that wouldn’t be legal in a job interview, at least not in the U.S.) 2)Does having a serious medical … Continue reading →

Kinship Foster Care

My last two blogs defined kinship adoption and discussed its advantages and disadvantages. This blog is about the related topic of kinship foster care. Some estimates say that nearly half of the children in foster care are living with relatives. This is very hard to measure, as many families may be taking care of grandchildren, nieces or nephews informally. As with kinship adoption, the major advantage of kinship foster care is that the children are with someone familiar instead of being further traumatized or frightened by being placed with strangers. Many children also find living with relatives to be less … Continue reading →

How About Donating Your Kids’ Old Stuff to the Foster Care System?

It seems when it’s time to get rid of our children’s old clothes, outgrown toys and equipment and other paraphernalia, we may just think of taking it all to the Goodwill or other thrift store, or having a garage sale. But, you may not realize that you can donate these items to your local Department of Human Services or Child Welfare office to be used by foster families. Many foster care agencies keep equipment and furniture on hand like car seats, baby gates, cribs, strollers, bedding, and other furniture for foster families to use and have access to. This saves … Continue reading →

When Foster Families Adopt

Posted on by

There are many advantages for everyone concerned when a foster family makes the decision to adopt a child that has been in their care. It is a win – win situation for everyone involved. The foster family is well suited to provide a permanent home for the child. They already have an awareness of the child’s background before he came to live with them. They also know the bad habits that the child has. If the child has to go to a new home, then all parties will probably have a difficult time for a while. Several of our Gotcha … Continue reading →

Family & Marriage: Grandparents Day

Today is Grandparent’s Day, a day that we pay honor to the parents of our parents and those that mean so much to us. When my daughter heard that was what today was, she great very excited and wanted to make a card and get presents for each of her grandmothers. I listened to her exciting chatter and my husband and I both had to smile. Of the two of us, he has two grandparents still living – his grandmother on his father’s side and his grandfather on his mother’s side. His grandfather celebrates his 96th birthday this November. My … Continue reading →

Grandparents Parenting

A growing number of America’s children are being parented by their grand parents or in Grandfamilies. This phenomenon has many different causes-some of them being divorce. If something happens to the head of a single parent household, another primary caregiver is needed. Sometimes the non-custodial parent is unwilling or unable to raise his or her children. This leaves the grandparent (often a single parent him or herself) to raise another generation of children. Between 1970 and 2000 the number of grandparent headed families raising children under the age of 18 has nearly doubled. Many Grandparents rescue their grandchildren from foster … Continue reading →

Disclosure Meeting and “The File” For Adoptive Parents of Foster Children.

When families adopt an older, special needs or waiting child from the United State Foster Care system they may assume a great deal of testing and evaluations have been done for the child they adopt. The truth is we are dependant on the system and the people who have cared for our child to pursue these evaluations. Many times children have had very little evaluation or identification of medical or mental health issues. In most cases a child’s records and files are considered confidential until the pre adoptive family has been selected. Foster families generally do not have all the … Continue reading →

Pre-Adoptive or Straight Adoption of a Baby or Child From Your State Foster Care System

When a family has decided they would like to add children by adopting a baby or child from the state foster care system there are a few things to consider. Most state offices will encourage a family to consider becoming a foster care resource and provide a child with a safe stable home while the state determines if the biological family might be able to reunify with the child. As I have written before Foster to Adopt is the highest risk placement an adoptive family might be asked to accept however, Foster to Adopt is not the only choice a … Continue reading →

Taming the Preschool Beast

Nothing unleashes a preschooler’s inner beast quite like extracting him from a fun environment without advanced warning. When my daughter was 4 years old she had an epic outburst at a children’s museum in Chicago because I failed to give her proper notification of our departure.  In doing so, I robbed her of the gradual transition I knew she needed in order to calmly exit the building. The fit she threw nearly got us thrown out of the museum. Looking back, my preschooler’s tantrum, which included tossing her shoes down a slide, was simply her way of staying true to … Continue reading →