Fostering Hope

Early on in my foster parent licensing process, I got directed to the  Empowered to Connect  website that contains a very comprehensive collection of resources to help understand effective ways to parent "children from hard places."  This website is devoted to the principles developed by researchers Karyn Purvis and David cross, now known as Trust-Based Relational Intervention (TBRI), in understanding the needs of children that have experienced trauma.  I'll give a very, very brief overview of some of the research that supports this parenting philosophy, but please know that I will do a clumsy job compared to the experts and that it is well worth it to spend some time going through the website.  TBRI is based on the idea that any behavior displayed by a child is the communication of the need.  Children that have significant trauma backgrounds, even if the trauma occurred during the mother's pregnancy and even if the child was placed with a non-birth parent ...

I'm not going to lie, the idea of being a foster mom was a little overwhelming, but I thought it would be manageable.  The reality of actually becoming a foster mom was much more intense.  I had gone from a single woman that ate cereal for dinner four nights a week to a single parent taking care of two children, one of which was a very intelligent teenage girl incredibly unhappy about being in my house. I was very fortunate in a lot of ways.  The girls were in another foster home prior to coming to me, so I had time to get to meet them a few times before they came to stay with me.  I had a month to prepare for them to live with me, not just a few hours.  I did not have to deal with immediate aftermath of them being removed from their home and being told they were being placed in foster care.  But it was still so, so hard. I was really prepared for the girls to be depressed or angry or whatever other down emotions you might imagine.  I was not prepa...

I have dabbled in blogging before, but it's always fallen away.  I hope this will be different.  Because this is the most humbling, difficult, beautiful, heart-wrenching thing I have ever done.  I have been a foster parent since August of 2018.  My first placement was with a sibling set of 13-year-old and 5-year-old sisters.  While the older girl needed additional support that she is getting elsewhere, the little one is still with us.  My husband and I are still very new to the fostering experience, and we learn daily about our own limitations and weaknesses.  But this is also an experience that is filled with grace and forgiveness and hope.  One of the questions I often get is how we decided to start fostering, so this is what I'll cover in this first post.  I hope to cover a wide variety of thoughts and experiences we have had throughout our limited experience.  My goal is to be as real as possible with communicating what our exper...