Frequently Asked Questions About Foster Care

 

Hello! We’ve been wanting to do a post on frequently asked foster care questions for a while. We’ve both noticed that people often don’t know much about the system, and we want to help change that!   After asking around, 10 people had various questions that we did our best to answer. If you’re one of these people, thank you so much for asking them! They’re all really good questions, and some of them were hard to answer. We’re so sorry if they aren’t answered exactly the way you were picturing. With this topic, it’s often hard to answer straight-forwardly. If anyone has more questions for us, we’d be happy to answer them in a future post! Just leave them in the comments. We’d love to hear them! Thanks for reading! 

Lily: Hello everyone! We’re so excited that we get to answer all of these amazing questions! Here’s a bit of background about my foster care experience before we begin. I told a lot about this in my Finding Joy in Grief testimony, which is a separate post that you can find here. Anyway, my family has been licensed as a foster family for about a year. Over that time we’ve had two placements; the first for three weeks and the second for two months. We’re licensed for baby boys ages 0-3. Besides any foster children we have in our home, I also have two younger siblings who are ages 10 and 8. We’re all still learning about what it means to be a foster family, and I’m excited for the next path God has for us, and can’t wait to be able to help more of these kids. It’s been such an amazing experience! 

Alayna: Hello! Here’s some background on my family’s experience with foster care. We fostered for about six years and stopped after we adopted my little sister Talitha (we call her TES after her initials) last summer, right after she turned 2. Before that, we had had five placements- all of them were baby boys! The time we had with them ranged from a week to six months. We were licensed for children aged 0-5.  We have multiple close friends who have fostered and adopted as well. The story of how we got connected with TES’s first family is long, complicated, and beautiful. To be honest, we’ve had a lot of experiences with the system that were just awful, but God has always been with us. Sometimes I miss our babies, but I’m so incredibly glad God chose to bring TES into our life!

Caleb: How do you get licensed, and why do you do foster care?

Alayna: The process of getting licensed is like a very, very in-depth background check. My parents joke that the system knows everything that there is to know about them! You also are assigned a social worker, you get your house checked over, and you go to lots of classes and training.

We adopted and did foster care because we felt called to and because that’s what Jesus did for us. He paid the price for our redemption and adopted us as sons and daughters into His family, even when we could do nothing to deserve it. (Ephesians 1:4-9) My little sister has a hard past and could never “earn” our love, but we love her anyway because she is created in the image of God, and He loves her as His daughter too. (“Reckless Love” by Cory Asbury is one of my favorite songs because it’s a beautiful picture of this concept.)

Also, not everyone is called to foster! Just because Lily’s and my families do or did it does not mean that you should! God has a specific purpose for everyone and if you surrender your life to Him, He can do amazing things through you- foster care is just one possibility out of many.

Charity: Do you like fostering? How were you introduced to it?

Lily: My family was introduced to foster care quite a while back. Before we did foster care, we were part of an organization called Safe Families for Children. Safe Families is a program that assists parents in crisis by matching them with host families to care for their children. This way they can have some time to get a job, deal with homelessness or domestic violence, etc., to put their lives back together in order for them to be able to better care for their kids. Through this organization, the parents could take their kids back whenever they wanted, as opposed to foster care. Then our family moved to Michigan, in an area where there was no Safe Families program near us. So we decided to minister to families in a different way: through foster care! It’s been an amazing, sad, incredible journey, but I wouldn’t give it up for anything! There have been joyful times and depressing times (and much more of each is most certainly yet to come for our family, as we are still licensed for foster care), but it’s all been worth every minute of time we’ve spent with these wonderful kids! God has blessed us so much with the gift of fostering. 

Hailey: What’s the best and worst part of it?

Alayna: I would say the best part is knowing that you’re making a difference in these kids’ lives, even if they don’t remember us. We get to show Jesus to them and love them for as long as they’re with us, and we still pray for them after they leave.

The worst part is seeing the brokenness and trauma in their lives and knowing that we usually don’t have any say in their cases. I’ve had a few friends who are foster kids, and they were amazing. It was awful when they were moved and I lost contact with them. Now, all I can do is pray for them and hope that they’re in a safe home.

Evin: How did doing foster care affect your family’s mental health and mentality?

Lily: It’s been a rough road sometimes, that’s for sure. Both of the times that my family has had to say goodbye to our foster child have been very emotional for us, and really just heartbreaking. But it’s also been really eye-opening to the things that God has done and is doing for these kids. The joys outweigh the sorrows by a lot! I just keep thinking about the ways in which God has let us help these kids, and how much of a blessing it’s been. We are licensed to foster ages 0-3. Even though that age range of kids is too young to fully learn about the gospel and the truths of Christ, it still opens doors for us to get to communicate with the children’s family members, invite them to church, or even just to talk with them and tell them that we’re praying for them! 

Anise: How does it feel having a foster kid in your home and what emotions go through your head at the time?

Alayna: Before we adopted my little sister, we had had five placements at different points, each ranging from a week to six months long. When we would get a call telling us that we were receiving a placement, it was always so exciting and crazy as we rushed around getting everything ready! It always took quite a while to get adjusted to having a new little person in the house. It was amazing to hold this tiny human, but sad to know that we have no control over their future and that they would never remember us. We really had to trust that God had control over their lives, and not us! 

It was always heartbreaking to see them leave us, especially when we felt like the home they were going to was not a good place for them to be. On top of that, our county doesn’t treat foster parents very well. Once they only gave us an hour to say goodbye.

Laken: What if a parent doesn’t want their child in foster care? Can they say no, or do they have to send them? 

Lily: Foster care is run through the state. When kids go into foster care, it’s almost always for abuse or neglect. Children are only put into foster care when it’s unsafe for them to stay in their current location. So no, for the child’s safety they must be put in foster care. Once this happens, the parents have no control over their child(ren) and normally only get to see them through supervised visits. When the state’s requirements have been met on the parents’ side of things, only then do they get their kids back. It’s a very sad situation because the children are taken away from the parents without their consent, but it’s always for the kids’ safety. 

Kyria: How many kids can you foster at a time? Does the situation differ depending on the state you’re in? 

Alayna: The short answer is yes, it differs greatly between states. (This document gives you the variations for each state.) In Ohio, there are a lot of rules and regulations for the number of children you’re allowed to have in your home, but in Delaware, for example, you just need to have five children or less in your home, including biological children.

Avery: Does a foster child usually stay with one family consistently or is he/she moved between different families?

Lily: So, it really depends on the certain child’s situation. With one child we had in our home, he had been moved several different times already. Once to another relative’s house, and then that situation was possibly unsafe so he was moved to a foster home. Then something happened and they were unable to care for him, so he was moved to our house. But with our other foster placement, he was moved directly from his home to ours, and then directly back again once the state said it was safe. Sometimes, if the child is moved out of his original guardian’s care multiple times, they will go to different foster homes than they were in before. If the children are in the state’s care for many years, then it is very probable that they will be moved around several times. 

Victoria: Are the children usually happy?

Alayna: This is a very hard question to answer in a paragraph or two. For babies and young toddlers of course, they don’t really know what’s happening at all. Preschoolers understand just enough that they often get really scared when they’re moved. It’s… more complicated for older kids. This article is excellent, and it explains it better than I could. 😉

Kyrie: How long was it from the time that you heard you were fostering to when the foster child arrived? 

Lily: When we first decided to foster, it took us about a year to get licensed. Normally, it shouldn’t take that long, so the situation depends. We had several things that delayed us from getting our license much earlier than we did. After we were licensed, it was about a month until we got the call about our first placement. It was only about an hour after the call that he arrived at our house. The situation really does depend, though, and with different situations come different time frames for these things. 

We hope this was helpful to anyone who’s had questions about how all of this works.