Foster Care Options

There are many ways for people to participate in foster care. Some foster parents specialize in shelter care, which is short-term care while the state searches for a more permanent placement. Other foster parents offer respite care, which is basically overnight babysitting so that foster parents can get away. Some people are peer parents, who meet with and teach the birth parents basic parenting skills. Some people do standard longer-term foster parenting, and others are focused on fostering to adopt.

Even within normal foster care, there are multiple options. We have spoken to several foster parents who focus on taking care of teenagers. Apparently, this pays better than taking care of younger children, and some parents really enjoy it.

We have focused on children between the ages of zero to two. There is a lot more competition in this age range, so it takes longer to get a placement. Everyone wants to adopt a baby.

We optioned for shelter care, foster care, and foster-to-adopt. When a child is placed with us for shelter care, often the caseworker does not know whether the child will be returned home, placed with a family member, placed in foster care long term, or become available to be adopted. If it is either of the latter two options, we generally get first pick, since the child has already gotten used to living with us and has started to bond with us.

We also chose to have up to two children placed with us at a time. This may have meant that we were overlooked for cases where there was only one child to place, but there is a lot less competition for sibling groups. We might have been willing to take a larger sibling group, but doubling the number of children in our family in one blow already seemed hard enough already.

The hardest families for social workers to place are ones with lots of kids. They generally have to break them up into ones or twos, because so few foster parents are able and willing to add that many children to their family all at once.

I know for us, just taking in two was difficult. But if they had asked us to take two, and we found that there was a third sibling that would be going to another home, we would have wanted all three to be together with us. More than that, and we would have prayed really hard to know what course to take.

As it stands, the two we have fit into our family very well. We can’t wait to finally adopt them. And once we get everything squared away and life returns more or less to normal, we will probably open our home to still more foster children.

After all, there are still a lot of children out there who need a good home.

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