Fostering 201

Living with a foster kiddo

I’m breaking this section into two posts, because it is incredibly long.

Part 1

I imagine that kids in general turn households into tiny (or large) storms. They are so entertaining, self-involved, impressionable, malleable, and naive that I can’t see how a household isn’t completely transformed by their presence. Kids take work, lots of focused, thoughtful work and scheduling, endless scheduling. 

I want to put foster kids and non-foster kids on the same page for a second: all kids need love and attention. They all need activities, hobbies, friends, and an environment where learning and sharing is encouraged. Kids take work; all kids take a lot of work. Foster kids have the added complication of not living with their biological families and having probable trauma histories, that they may or may not want to share with you. Kids take work; foster kids take extra work, and the ministry makes you fill out paperwork about all that work, constantly.

So, how does a child live in your home when none of you have ever met before. We went from one day having no children to the next having a teenager living in our house. It was an adjustment for everyone. One day at work I got a phone call from our Resource Worker asking if we could take a child. Sometimes this phone call will come in the middle of the night, sometimes during the day. The child could be removed from their parent’s home for the first time ever and come into your home, they could have been removed previously and this is their second or third time going into foster care, or they could be moving from one foster home to another.

When a child comes into your care you are supposed to be given Ref Docs (reference documents) that tell you the basics about them - age, number of siblings, type of protection order they’ve been removed under, their interests, school, medical or psychological diagnoses, family members they are able to have contact with and how. I personally wouldn’t expect these documents at all, nor would I expect them to be up to date.

There are two types of care orders: one is a temporary care order (TCO), where the child is in foster care for a period of time until the parent’s are deemed able to care for the child; a continuing care order (CCO) means that the child will never be returning to their parent’s care and is likely on the adoption track. In our experience TCOs are issued by the courts for 6 months, and are renewed as needed. The child’s social worker and the parents attend these court dates, and depending on the age of the child they receive a copy of all paperwork associated with these court dates, served to them by their social worker.

This whole ordeal, as you might imagine, quite trying for the child. Often when they are first removed, they are told that the order is in place for a given amount of time, and then it is extended a number of times. So, in their heads, they very well could believe that they are gone from their parents for only 2 weeks, and it is a constant period of loss, grieving, and confusion when they do not go back into their parent’s home. All kids love their parent’s. They could grow up to be adults and choose to remove them from their lives, or limit contact, but as tiny little humans generally no matter what they’ve experienced, they love their parents and being in foster care doesn’t necessarily make a tonne of sense. In that vain, it’s important that any opinions or judgements that you may have or develop about the parent’s remain in your head, or in very private conversations with your partner. The child(ren) have enough going on, and do not need to hear you trash talk or make tiny slights against their family - ever.

If the child(ren) are coming into your house from a previous foster home, there can be a transition plan put into place where you meet the child a number of times prior to them coming to live with you. This includes going to where they are and saying hello - it could be 5 mins or 1 hour, depending on the child. It also means them coming to your home to see their room, and meeting your family and pets. Here it is up to you to make the child feel welcome and to have honest conversations with the previous foster family about what rules the child had been following and struggling with. The goal is to have a continuity of care in a period of change. Some foster families are open to this and others are not, but it’s an important aspect to push for. At the same time, it’s helpful to remember that everybody’s emotions are running high: the previous foster family has likely built some sort of bond with the child and would like to be able to provide more for them, but for whatever reason are unable to (read feeling of love, guilt, shame and inadequacy here); the new foster family could be eager to get all the information they need, but know that they’ll never get all they needs (read feelings of uncertainty, excitement, anxiety, and concern here); the child often does not have much warning that they will be moving and may not fully understand why they must move again (read feelings of fear, angst, that they’ve done something wrong, and lack of place or home here). The child’s social worker should be involved in this process, but in our experience they are not.

On the note of social workers, the Ministry has a mandate to provide continuity of care for all children in the system. For whatever reason, at least in this region in BC, this is not the case. In the short time we’ve had a foster kid in our care, there have been three separate social worker for the child and four separate social workers for us. On any given day, we are talking to a minimum of two different social workers who likely don’t have the best communication. It’s quite frustrating, but luckily, the past month we’ve been lucky enough to be working with three very good social workers. My partner and I keep joking that it was good that we went in with the bar being set so very low, because now when someone does their job we’re amazed, and when someone does it well we’re forever grateful - not a very funny joke, but it keeps us going.

Part 2 of living with a foster kiddo to come soon.