There will be difficulties, conflicts, and challenges, and just like any other challenging task, it can be done. Working parents care for their own biological kids every day. The difference is that most foster placements have some specific needs that you will need to take into consideration.

Age matters when fostering!

No, not your age (mine is growing at an alarming rate).The age of the kids you are fostering will determine the amount of time you need to have free for caring for their daily needs. However, all kids will need you to make sacrifices in your schedule for them. If you are acclimated to taking a few golf outings per week, you may need to scale back your “me” time and find a way to create “we” time. 

Most of the kids who come into care need quality time with a positive role model. That means a time commitment, which you have obviously signed up for when you decided to foster in the first place. This is your place to shine. The role model you need to become does not mean you have another full-time job, often it is just a matter of modeling the behavior that you are already doing.

Most of the time just getting up and going to work on a regular basis is a foreign concept to them. Having a regularly planned bedtime that doesn’t involve passing out after a drug or alcohol induces stupor is a new experience. 

These are the lessons you are unconsciously teaching to kids of all ages. 

Fostering Teens

When considering foster care you should already be thinking about the age of children that will best suit your temperament, skill set, and lifestyle.

Teens require less attention on a daily basis to handle basic care. They are usually pretty good at being sure they bathe themselves and cover their basic needs.

Tweens are going to be a little more intense but usually can handle a lot of the mundane tasks that the older crowd will handle by themselves. You may need to remind them that showers are not a luxury (why are boys of this age not able to smell themselves???) and that finishing homework is a necessity. In large part, they are becoming self-sufficient and don’t require huge time blocks on a daily basis.

Fostering Toddlers

The younger they get, the more needs you are going to meet for them.

Toddlers are undergoing so many developmental changes that it is hard to actually quantify the amount of brainwork that is going on at any given moment; especially considering that even a normally developing 2-year-old seems to act like a serious alcoholic on any given day. Seriously, how many times have you had to remind a toddler that pants are a necessity to go outside and play in the snow?!?

Add in that children who are in foster care are at a much higher risk of having experienced some sort of trauma and the brain dysfunction that comes as a result of that trauma. There is current science showing the damage that trauma causes for a child who has endured early trauma.

This is going to take time and patience to work through. If you are going to become a foster home, be prepared to spend a bit more time dealing with issues related to trauma-related care. 

With the trauma-related stress comes trust issues, which when exacerbated can become problems as severe as Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD).

All of this is not intended to scare you away from fostering toddlers. In fact, some of the most memorable experiences we have had were with kids in this age group. One of the tightest bonds we have develope was with a sibling group of 2 that was RAD diagnosed. It was an amazing adventure to have watched the change in these kids as they began to form appropriate attachments and develope in an age-appropriate fashion.

However, this all takes time and patience. You must be willing to sacrifice some of your time to the practice of giving normative life experiences to these kids. Most of us are wasting a LOT of time every day to mindless practices and have the bandwidth to achieve the necessary daily tasks to make a difference in the lives of children. It just requires us to take an honest inventory of where we invest and where we waste our time.

Fostering Babies

Now let’s talk about the babies! Everyone loves the babies! 

Ask any worker and they know the easiest kid to find a home for is an infant. 

Now, admittedly there are a few outliers like my Dad that want little to nothing to do with anything in a diaper. But, by and large, babies are the easiest placements for social workers to find homes for. 

Don’t let yourself be fooled by their adorable little cheeks. Some unfortunate little souls get to deal with addiction and withdrawal as their first experience in this world. It’s not all doom and gloom If you listen through the podcast “Standing with Turtle” you will hear about a kid that came through addiction and withdrawal as an inspiringly healthy kid. 

It’s kind of like getting a puppy. Everyone forgets how much work is involved in raising a puppy until they have a puppy. 

Babies are amazing, even when they have special needs or addiction issues to deal with. 

Making it work

The truth is that there are very few things that we can’t make work in our lives. If you are pulled or led, or if you feel driven towards helping a specific group – you can make it work. I am not saying it will not be hard. Most likely it will not be “Mother Theresa ministering to the dying souls of Calcutta” hard. Doing things that are worth doing are almost always hard, but the reason we do hard things is that it is worth it!

One little trick I have learned is to stop listening to people telling me what is important to them. People will tell you what they want you to think is important to them so you will be impressed. 

If you want to know the truth about others, and more importantly, yourself; you need to look no further than your schedule and bank account.

If you have no time or money to do something meaningful, so instead you sit on your couch watching ESPN 6 for hours on end – the answer is that you value the cable subscription and tv time higher than anything else. 

That isn’t a bash on tv time or cable subscriptions. It is just a simple and honest evaluation of how you value your time and money. Those two resources alone are the ones valued above all others. 

Be honest with yourself and decide where your priorities lay. If changing the world is not one of those, that is ok. It’s all good, enjoy your life. 

If your soul begins to burn when you think of giving your strength to the collective “weakest among us,” and you are still sitting on the couch, I suggest you get about the business of doing what is meaningful to you. 

If it is foster care, welcome to our crazy little clan. If not, go be amazing in the place you were meant to be.