Continued from previous….

Thinking of adopting through foster care? Check with your local agency to find out if the Family to Family Initiative is in place in your county…..

So why would you care about a Family to Family Initiative? How will it influence your foster-adoption plan?

The first thing that I noticed when participating as a foster family with this initiative was the involvement that foster parents are expected to have with birth family.

Not all my foster parent colleagues agreed with this tactic. Many who’ve been foster parents for years are used to the old way of doing things. Everyone is adversarial, foster parents and birth parents don’t meet, the caseworkers decide what is best for the kids and don’t include the foster parents.

I’m glad that is the old way.

With all of our foster children, both sets of parents were asked if they would like to meet the other set. We were not forced to do so, but encouraged. I did meet all of my foster kids bio-moms. Some were outright hostile to me and that is where the training comes in.

In the specialized class that I took, I was warned about hostile birth moms. Who could blame them for being hostile? In their minds the state had come in and forcibly taken away their children! The moms rarely take any ownership of loosing their children, but play a pretty good victim game. The class helped me to see these moms are scared.

Scared of addiction, poverty, domestic violence. Scared of their own childhood dramas and scared of not getting their children back.

The class helped me put aside my own judgment and see a human being on the other side.

Of course many of these moms abused their children. I never forgot it, but I was also able to be civil to the mom trying to find her way back to her children and out of the system.

Related Posts:
What is Family to Family?
Zen of Fostering

To Be Continued….