There are so many extra services that foster parents and special needs adoptive parents need for their kids. Learning how to help your child or how to help another family can be critical to making an adoption successful.

Child care – This may seem very basic, and a need for all parents, but for foster and adoptive parents the need is different. Many of our kids don’t trust just anybody. They’ve been moved far too many times, and the people that were supposed to protect them are the ones that hurt them. The high school kids that can babysit for a “normal” child won’t work for our kids. Our kids will see them as too young to protect them, and the high schoolers don’t know about traumatized children unless they have lived with one. They are not prepared to handle the issues that our kids have. In addition, most foster parents are not allowed to use child care that is not licensed without getting an exception. This limits the people who can watch our kids and the chances for us to get out.


Respite care – This runs along the same lines as child care but with a slightly different twist. Parents use respite care when they are stressed or exhausted from dealing with a child’s issues or may want to take a vacation. One of the keys to respite is finding out what the parent is looking for. Is it just to get a break from the child for a little while, or is it help the child appreciate what they have at home? Not everyone can or is willing to provide “boot camp” respite. Finding a qualified provider is key to helping parents.

Therapy - I have blogged in the past about finding good therapists that understand trauma. They are not an easy bunch to locate. Sharing resources when we find a good therapist or psychiatrist is so important.

Advocacy – Finding out who can and will advocate for our kids is another difficult task. Sometimes we need advocates for legislation, sometimes for services, sometimes it’s for educational rights, and the list just goes on. Most of the time we have to be the advocate until we find the right person to help us. Julie is a great example of being a wonderful advocate, as well as finding people to help you get services.

Residential or in-patient treatment – It is a sad reality that our kids sometimes need to be out of our homes in order to get the best treatment, or to keep the rest of the family safe. Have you ever tried to find a residential treatment center or a good psychiatric placement without any help? It’s not a pretty sight. When we first suspected that Sammy might be headed for residential placement, I began to do my research on different facilities. I had also started to get an idea of costs for an article I had written about a year before that. Most parents are not that fortunate. When we had his psychiatric hospitalization three years ago, we checked with a few people, one of whom was a friend of ours at Children’s Hospital in Milwaukee. She gave us a great recommendation and we found a wonderful center, but without her help it would have been trying to find a needle in a haystack.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many services that are needed. If you haven’t adopted already, find out about the services ahead of time so you have a game plan when you needed. If you have already adopted, talk to other adoptive families to get information about the services they are using and where to find resources for your own family.

Photo credit