Over the past few weeks, I’ve received several really thoughtful e-mails and comments from people who read this blog urging us to become foster parents in an effort to more quickly become adoptive parents. The idea is that if you foster a child whose parental rights are eventually terminated and there are no other family members willing or able to take the child, you are generally given first chance at becoming his/her adoptive parents. As time goes by and nothing happens re: our home study being approved at the state level, it’s very tempting to consider fostering just so SOMETHING is happening.
Here’s why we won’t.
The state’s goal is always to reunite children with their biological parents. That’s one of the first things they tell you in foster/adopt class. Yes, those parents may have been abusive or neglectful, sometimes severely so, but the state believes that it is always in the best interest of the child to return him or her to their biological parent or family if at all possible. Yes, they may be removed to a home at a near-poverty level but “that’s their heritage”. As foster parents, O & I would not only have to be on board with that, we would have to ASSIST with it. The problem is that in most cases, we DON’T believe that a child would be better off taken from our home and returned to someone who abused or neglected them. Period.
Secondly, a foster parent should be rooting for a biological parent to “work his or her plan” and meet the criteria required to get their child back. Instead, I would be rooting for them to screw up time after time. That’s not very charitable but it’s the truth. I think that takes me out of the “being on board with the State’s plan” category, huh?
Then there is the fact that we don’t WANT to foster. We really admire and respect foster parents and might even want to do it ourselves someday but right now we want to add a child to our family permanently. Is there a chance that the first foster child who walked through the door might get to stay forever? Absolutely. But there would be weeks and months and perhaps even years of waiting and wondering if the next phone call was going to be a social worker telling us they are coming to take away a child we’d grown to love with all of our hearts. It happens time after time after time. I would be devastated, and frankly, I’ve had enough of being devastated. Thanks infertility!
Recently in our county, the police raided a home and shut down a me*th lab. A large number of children were removed from the home, including a couple of infants. Because the foster homes in our county are full, we would probably have been offered one or more of those children, perhaps even an infant. But then we would be responsible for transporting the children and possibly even supervising their visits with their parents – parents who had no problem raising their child in a home with a freakin’ ME*TH LAB. It may sound arrogant, but we don’t want anything to do with people like that.
The example from class that really drove home the fact that we shouldn’t foster was this: “You may have a child is your home who was sex*ually abu*sed by his parent. The state is going to want that child to have visitations with that parent, albeit supervised, and even if the child doesn’t want to go, you are going to have to make them go.” Ummmm, no we aren’t. Neither one of us would ever make a frightened child who had been sexually abused visit the person who abused them, parent or not. No possible way. (And yes, we realize that that’s an extreme example but it does happen.)
Finally, after seeing the comedy of errors we’ve gone through just to get this far in the adoption process, I would have very little confidence that we would be well supported by our county should we have problems with a foster child in our home. I can’t even get an answer as to where we should take first aid classes (ten days and counting waiting for that particular information). I can’t imagine having an urgent need re: a child in my care and how long it would take have that addressed. I can tell you that ten days would not be acceptable. No thank you.
So there you have it. We know that fostering can be a good way to adopt, but for now it’s a resounding NO for us. That being said, I really appreciate those of you who took the time to write us about it. It definitely started us thinking and talking about it again and while we’re happy with where we’ve landed on the topic, who knows? We might just change our minds one of these days.
