why foster?

[rey]

Sorry to be so very nosey but a group of us had been talking about the topic of adoption and this led on to foster parents.

I am really curious as to why people foster especially when the child is not a baby and comes from a difficult/troubled background.

I am not a foster parent but would seriously consider it in the future.

I think I am good at what I do (full time mum to 2dds.) Mine are very lucky, they are being brought up in a happy, safe and secure environment. Not all children are that lucky and that upsets me. I could think of few things better than giving a 'troubled' child/teenager abit of time, love and affection.

I realise I may have idealised views of what it must be like to take on a child who's had it tough. But, I'd love the opportunity to make a (small) difference to a childs life.

Thanks for responding Bobalina that's how I felt before having my own children, but I wonder how it is for real, how can people do it for real. (I say before having my own because now I see what's it's like to have children and how hard it can be at times and that's with your own.)

PIL foster. They used to foster older children because they felt that every one deserved a chance and some of those children had spent their livesin the system. They now foster babies usually from parents who have been addicted to whatever in their pregnancies or whose relatives are paedophiles. They foster because they feel they are too old to adopt but they feel they are giving those babies as good a start as they can have.

One of my aunt fosters. She adopted a baby girl from India after she and her husband had two sons - they had a stillborn daughter first.

But her children are long grown and she still felt the need to have children in the house.

They've fostered all ages but now take on babies who've been removed for abuse, neglect or drug addiction.

They just love children and babies and have the strength and energy.

They're also quite active in their church - they're Roman Catholics - and receive a lot of support from the church community.

Hello we are a foster family!!!! We do it becauase we want to make a difference!!To see a child that is presenting with problems change is great,to give a child a small time of a NORMAL family life is sometimes enough to help that child develop.It has also made our own children better & more understanding of others especially in todays selfish world!!!!!!!!! We all enjoy fostering and will continue to do so even after 15 years. xxx

rey, dh and I will consider fostering in the future - just now though we are expecting our fourth and our house is too small! But it is something we will continue to consider as time goes on. Dh would like to foster older children, I'm less confident about that atm but may change my mind once mine have been through teenagerdom!

We consider ourselves to be good parents and would love to provide other children a safe, stable environment.

Our location may go against us though, we live in a very remote area.

My ILs fostered and SIL was adopted from foster care when she was 4.

Can I ask Mum75, don't you want to keep them all? I imagine that I would be distraught everytime one of my foster children left to resume their old life. As I said earlier, I do have an idealised view of fostering but I'm sure I'd love them and would never want to let them go.

bob, they don't resume their "old life", many go on to have new fantastic parents. Others go back to their birth parents with extreme supervision

ok, I was thinking of children who are teporarily taken away from the family home due to, perhaps parents going to prison or to hospital. You know their life is not like what you are providing but it's their family and they will go back eventually.

Bobalina--Yes i do want to keep some (if not all)of them,but we do this knowing that we are only borrowing them for a while.I do have 5 children(all still living at home!!)and the youngest 2 are adopted, so yes its very very hard to let go,but as adults doing a very hard "job"we understand this,and a little piece of me(us)always goes with "my" children when they leave xx

I fostered for 11 years, kids aged between 6months and 15 years of age. 3 went for adoptions from me so had them for about a year to 18 months in total, some of them from very small.

I did it because I wanted to make a difference to these kids' lives, to show them what a loving, caring, stable home felt like. Also to help the parents be better parents (not possible in many of the cases - I realised this was quite idealistic and naive in the end).

Fostering has gor very beaurocratic (sp?) in recent years which would make me think twice about doing it again in the future. Perhaps though when me younger two are in their late teens, I may reconsider.

I second what QE says about beaurocracy(sp?)
The amount of paperwork we have to do as carers now compared to when we began fostering almost 20 years ago is staggering.

We began fostering sibling groups to keep families together when they came into the care system. Very often we found that if these children were being offered for adoption they had to then be split up, after trying very hard to find them a family where they could stay together and failing, social services had no option but to separate them in order to give them a chance of finding a family.

We found this heartbreaking and so moved on to taking one baby at a time. This has been the right thing for us, but any family approved to foster will have something different to offer children.

My dh and I have been fostering for 18 months now so are real newbys. we are in our 30's and can't have children of our own. We thought long and hard about adoption and fostering and which road to take. IL were foster carers and also have 1 adopted daughter. We finally decided to become foster carers. We have with us at the moment fd of 6 and in the next week we will be introducing fd of 16 months to her new parents but hopefully we have given her the good start she deserves.

Thank you to all of your for responding to my noseyness. It is really good to read and to see that there are very good people in this world of ours. I know that there aren't enough foster parents in any areas and this is obviously an area of unsung heros that keep the backbone of our society from disintegrating.

Hi I would like to add to this thread from the view of a foster child. I was fostered by my dear, dear foster parents at the age of 8. Up to this time I was in the care of my abusive mother and would be beaten almost every day. My foster parents gave me back my life and my childhood. They are the people who made the person I am today and I am in constant contact with them even now. They are my family and my continuing support system. Our plan, one day is to become foster parents and give back what a very loving family gave me, alot of love and support which is on going. To all the foster parents on here, thank you for the job that you do and the ones that take on older children, yes they may be broken pieces when they get to you but we can be fixed. If I hadn't have been fostered by my family, I doubt very much that I would be here typing this now.