Foster Parents

Blsd4given

We have our first meeting scheduled with a social worker to discuss becoming foster parents.  The meeting is at our house.  What sort of things are discussed?  Will she want to look around the home during that visit (which is, I assume, why she's coming over)??

ctbride08

At our initial meeting there was a very brief home inspection (basically just a quick peek around to make sure the house was safe and we were normal people).

Then the rest of the time was spent explaining fostering and adopting from foster care, answering our questions, and us answering some basic interview questions (discipline style, types of children we were open to, types of legal risk we were open to, community supports, ect).  

It was pretty high level and more informational than anything.

elissaann26

Our social worker toured our home to see where we planned for the foster child(ren) to sleep.  We talked about our beds (1 crib and a twin trundle bed) and what ages that would accomodate.  For example, the trundle bed was not considered a permanent bed, so we can't permanently have a foster child sleeping on the pull-out mattress.  Also, if we were willing to put a crib in our bedroom for a little one, we had enough space in our nursery to have two other foster children in there if we had another twin.  She also noted silly things like what kind of floors we had and how many people could sit at our dining room table.  I don't think any of this matters, but they included it as part of our home study.  We also showed our child proofing.  This was NOT required at this point, but we wanted it noted so that they wouldn't have to worry about looking for that in later home visits.  This part took at most 15 minutes.

Our dog was "interviewed".  She asked over 20 questions just about our dog.  Everything from when his last shots were to how he behaves around kids to if he could do any fun tricks (I don't think that was an official question).  But she did have to collect certain information for each pet in the home.  Nothing was hard to answer and we gave her his vaccine history from the vet at the next visit.

The rest of the visit was as the previous poster explained.  We talked about the foster care process.  We asked quite a few questions about things we didn't understand of things we were worried about.  The social worker asked some questions about our background to get to know us better. 

I remember reading blogs and asking friends what I needed to do to prepare for this visit and everyone said nothing.  I didn't listen and cleaned my house top to bottom and installed some child proofing.  I didn't need to do any of this.  There was no white-glove check and the child proofing wasn't needed.  I would just suggest making a list of questions to ask, but besides that just enjoy the progress of moving along the process.  I hate the waiting, so I was always happy when something was happening getting us closer to having a foster child in our home.

lilmufish

If you go back to the beginning of my blog, I did a fairly good job of rambling about my experiences in the beginning stages of fostering. 

If I had to think back a 3 years...I would say that the first meeting was just a "get to know you" type of meeting, explaining the process, walking through the house to let us know what we needed to change/add/alter, and setting up an action plan. 

Good luck!