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Adoption
GingerBabyJ
member
Foster Care question
GingerBabyJ
member
in Adoption
My husband and I have been talking about foster care for over a year now. I called DFS and they are going to send me an application. I guess I'm just hoping for any sort of insight or advice. Those of you that do it, what are the positives and negatives. Anything will help!
also, our original goal was foster to adopt but here in Wyoming the child is reunited with their parents 9 times out of 10. The DFS person I talked to informed me that the chances are very slim.
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Re: Foster Care question
wow, thats a big question that i'm not sure how to answer without sitting down and having a 5 hour chat
simply...
the positives are the children. our foster children have inspired and fulfilled me in a way I never imagined. they are amazing and i'm incredibly blessed to know them.
the negatives are everything else! lol. its tough to deal with the system. its tough to co-parent w/ the bios. its tough to love them with my whole heart knowing someday i may have to say good bye. its tough to parent a broken child. ect ect ect
I will say, though, that although the negatives are more numerous, i would (and will!) do it over and over again because the positives far outweigh.
Blogs: Our Growing Family - CT Working Moms
Wow! What a well put answer! Let me ask you this. If you knew that you would never be able to "keep" any of the children, would you still do it? Would you still do it knowing that they would definitely leave your home?
We don't foster through DCFS and we only do shorter placements but the answer is yes. We never intend to (at this point) keep any children we welcome into our home. We have had 4 short term (around a week) kids and a longer one of 4.5 months. We wanted to keep him and his mom hinted at it, but in the end changed her mind. We still wouldn't have done anything differently even though it hurt like hell to loose him.
In the future when we leave the state we live in (and the program we work with won't be where we are going) we will work with the state foster care and we will do it never intending to adopt any kids. But we will still keep the door open for if it happens. In other words, we'll grow our family the way we "planned" (ha) and then see if any others end up in it.
Good luck!
Yes. In some ways it might actually be easier knowing.
Right now we are in a total flip-of-the-coin limbo w/ our placements and its very hard not knowing where they are going to be this time next year.
Blogs: Our Growing Family - CT Working Moms
We have had a really great time with DFS, the only cons I would say is having to deal with kids being reunified, although we have not had to deal with that. In our county we have a low reunification rate- our court has become a "model court" and is setting the standards pretty high for reunification.
Our goal also is adoption from foster care- I got to know the placement workers really well, and they new if they called me it better be a situation that was looking like it would go to adoption.
DD was 4 weeks old when we got her, we knew pretty much from day 1 that it would go to TPR- within 5 months TPR had been filed and we are just waiting for our court date- BM has been non existent for over 6 months now, and the goal is now TPR and adoption by us.
There were several couples in our MAPP class that we stayed close to and most of them were matched with babies straight from the hospital and are all heading towards TPR- so we have a good success rate of adoption.
What about looking into kids that are already legally free in your county to be adopted since it's hard to get one through the foster care system?
I don't know that having low reunification rates is always a good thing, though. If the court sets the standards pretty high for reunification, without the parents being offered the level of services needed, that IMO would be a tragedy. Reunification is in fact a "success" of the foster care system. To be sure, sometimes there are reunifications that don't work out, and sometimes reunifications might be ill-advised. But they are a success, a form of permanency just like the others (guardianship, adoption, alternative planned permanent living arrangement).
One thing that bothers me, working in the system, is seeing the bar raised as a case goes on. Over the course of a foster care case, the parents may make progress in many areas. If they'd been at that level at the beginning of the case, CPS probably wouldn't have removed their children. But then the court says it isn't enough to have the children returned to their care. It's an odd moving of the bar -- the standard is one thing at the beginning of a case, when CPS is trying to decide whether a child should be removed from the home, and the standard is noticeably higher when the judge is trying to decide whether the child should be reunified.
What does this mean?
Most counties have children that are legally free- meaning that parental rights have already been terminated and they are ready to be adopted. You can also check out www.adoptuskids.org they have listings of kids in different states that are up for adoption.
My husband and I are currently foster parents. We have a five month old that we've had since he was a newborn. We were orginally "adopt only" meaning that we only wanted to foster children who were legally free for adoption. Then came the call about the baby.... We've been trying for six years to have a baby w/ no success, so how could we say no. Honestly, I do not know if we made the right decision to foster a baby that might be reunified with his birth parents. We love this baby with all of our hearts, it's impossible to imagine not having him in our lives. If I had it to do over, I would probably stick with adopt only.