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Adoption
elissaann26
member
Overnight Babysitting for Foster Kids
elissaann26
member
in Adoption
I was curious what options were available to foster parents in other states for overnight babysitting. If you have respite care available, how does it work? Would your kids be familiar with them? Or would they essentially be complete strangers? Is there a process in place for your relatives/friends to be approved to babysit overnight?
In NC, approved babysitters are not allowed to babysit overnight. Our only option is to use Licensed Foster Parents. We can coordinate this care with foster parents that we know, or we can work with a SW for respite care, which usually means the kids would stay with foster parents that they have never met previously.
Since our foster kids have already had multiple disruptions, we do not feel that respite care is a good option. We only have one set of foster parents that we hang out with regularly and the kids are comfortable with. However, they have 3 foster kids of their own and do not have a vehicle that could transport 5 kids all in carseats, which presents a safety issue.
I sent an email to the SW who licensed us to see if there was any type of certification between Approved Babysitter and Licensed Foster Parent. My mom is willing to take the MAPP class, write a biography, and be interviewed. Since she lives out of state, she would only babysit overnight in our home since it has already been approved. I'm not sure if this is just a pipe dream, or if there is a chance they might approve this.
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Re: Overnight Babysitting for Foster Kids
I'm in Texas and our babysitters can take care of the foster kiddos up to 72 hours. But our babysitters have be first aid and CPR trained (and in my case finger printed since she lived outside of the state in the last 5 years). Because of the first aid and CPR even my mom can't babysit for me (she commutes back and forth between our city and another so she doesn't have time for the training), so I'll only have one friend to help me out.
Other foster parents can do respite care for up to 2 weeks. We have to contact our SW and they find a family that can do respite for us or if we already have a family we'd like to do respite care for us we let our SW know and they'll set it up. If we don't know any other foster families, the foster kiddos are placed with strangers. I'm like you in that I don't really think it's healthy to have them shuffled around so much.
With that being said, I did my first respite care a few weekends ago and I thought it would be hard on the boys (age 3 and 4). I was surprised that they had absolutely no problems spending the weekend with me and had so much fun. So I guess it depends on the child and what you think/know they can handle.
6 home inseminations=BFN
2 IUIs= BFN
3 IVFs=BFN
June 2012-Decided to give up TTC and started the process to adopt from foster care!
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Our state is a total PIA on babysitters - similar to yours. Foster kids can only sleep over at licensed houses (so pretty much only respite and/or foster family friends). You can have a babysitter watch the kids overnight at your house, but they have to go through the full babysitting approval process.
this caused us to miss out on a lot b/c we were never comfortable using respite.
its too bad you cant figure something out to fix the car problem to have a licensed family that knows the children watch them. Do they have 2 cars? Could you leave them one of yours so they could transport all the kids if needed (albiet between 2 cars)? Could you rent a large van for them for the weekend?
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Thanks for everyone's input!
I found out that they are in the process of changing the policy in our county. It will be changed to any approved babysitter can watch the child(ren) overnight in our house. If they want to watch the child overnight in their house, then a SW needs to visit for a abbreviated home study. I was SO excited to hear this development. And they expect it to be in place by the end of the year! Woohoo!
They do have 2 cars, but the concern is when the husband/dad is at work, which is far enough away to not be able to quickly return if there was an emergency. We have talked about renting a large van for them to use if any other situation presents itself where we have no other options prior to the policy change.