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Support Foster Parents and Relieve the System Crisis

WHERE DO WE BEGIN?

With so many challenges facing the foster care system, Foster Homes of Healing contends that stabilizing current population of foster children and families is the best place to begin resolving the spectrum of issues before us. Preparation, support services, parent skill-building, peer support, and training are what foster parents need to achieve stabilization. With stable placements kids in care will thrive instead of merely survive.

RETENTION

When we support foster parents appropriately, they stay. When foster parents stay, the whole system benefits from their retention.

Families who have consistently parented a foster child develop invaluable learned experience. They have enhanced skills and they become experts at foster parenting.

CASELOAD REDUCTION

Supported foster parents will be better equipped to handle the daily challenges of parenting traumatized children through positive parenting and de-escalation techniques. They will naturally require less time from caseworkers to address individual outbursts and disruptions. In turn, caseworkers will have more time to support each other, develop their own skills, build relationships with families and each other, identify and connect supplemental resources for families, and provide the crucial oversight role that helps keep kids safe and healthy in care.

RECRUITMENT

Foster parents who are connected to community and supported will share their positive experience with others. Positive experiences will draw more potential families to become foster families. Recruitment organizations like Every Child and Embrace Oregon will have a system to plug their recruits into that is better able to keep the interest of recruits, and follow through with their certification.

CULTURALLY APPROPRIATE PLACEMENTS

A higher volume of placement options will result in better opportunities for optimum placement of foster youth in culturally appropriate settings. When the system – foster families, caseworkers, trainers, certifiers, and service providers are not in crisis mode, proactive community building, partnership development, and diverse recruitment efforts can be undertaken and even more options for optimal placement can be achieved.

TRANSITION PLANNING

Better training and culturally appropriate placement will result in better cooperation regarding the child’s permanency or reunification planning. Transitions can be better coordinated, and a more consistent experience can be achieved for the child.

WHAT CAN I DO?

In the 2019 Legislative Session we will be hosting a day of foster parent advocacy at the capitol, contributing written and verbal testimony to Legislative hearings on foster care policy, and sharing the work by building awareness through social and earned media.

JOIN US!!!

Sign up for our newsletter to receive notifications to get involved as we plan:

  • Foster Homes of Healing Day at the Capitol
  • Attend a public hearing @ Oregon Legislature
  • Testify in support of foster parent training
  • Write to your legislator
  • Celebrate foster families
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If foster parents had what they actually need to help raise these kids, maybe more people would do it.

When my daughter came to live with me as a 10-year-old foster child, a common sentiment came from friends and colleagues, even strangers sometimes.  People would say things like “wow, I could never do that.” Or, “I have thought of doing that but I couldn’t.”  There was a sort of reverence for my being a foster parent in the way people would talk about it.  Sometimes it felt nice, but it wasn’t necessarily deserved.

I would think, “I’m no saint.”  I do not have any super-biological ability to care for children, nor do I have an innate, intuitive grasp on how to support a traumatized child.  I do not have any special training or background, they too could be a foster parent.

While there was nothing in my past or upbringing that made me any more or less likely to become a successful foster parent, I did have one quality that came in handy: tenacity.  My stick-to-itiveness meant that I was determined to keep my child safe and in one placement during her time in care if it killed me, and it almost did.

By the end of high school, my girl was causing so much trouble that she was not considered safe in most youth settings including respite care, youth groups, group therapy, or recreational groups for peers.  She required “eyes and ears on” parenting 24/7, and when her behavior started jeopardizing the safety of others, I was put in an impossible situation.

Parenting my kiddo had come to mean that I could hardly have a moment without her.  Even school days were marked by a near daily call or email.  Despite the fact that our little family had individual and family therapy, help at school, and support services, it wasn’t getting better.

Keeping her safe meant also keeping her from committing the type of incident that would land her in the justice system. Unfortunately, because our system is one of punitive reaction and not prevention, my tenacious parenting prevented us from contracting with judicial services. Including programs that may have helped her do the inner work, as well as the behavioral work, that I believe could have made it possible for her to remain safely in my care – possibly even through college.  But, that was not to be.

Spring of her junior year, on her second visit to a respite provider we had finally found to take her in for an entire weekend once a month, she committed such an egregious error that it became impossible for her to safely return to my house without jeopardizing the safety of the other members of our family. After 6 years as her mama I had to call DHS and report that my girl could not return to my home and my care, unless she had clinical help addressing these behaviors at once. I was devastated.

I began advocating for her care – I sought therapeutic foster care options, rallied the wrap team, looked high and low for inpatient and outpatient services, in and out of state.  I racked my brain day and night.  I lost sleep, my job, my sense of self, and became physically unwell.  And nothing.  “No therapeutic foster care options,” they told me.  “She can’t qualify for that program because her behavior has not escalated to a sufficient level.”  “That program is only for kids in the judicial system.”

They might as well have told me – there is no help for you to maintain her placement.  You have to do the one thing you have learned over and over results in devastation for kids in foster care.  You have to displace her.  In fact, we are going to do it for you.

The end.

But it was not the end.  The utterly inadequate solutions that DHS came up with and employed meant my girl would move three more times and become homeless by the time she was three months out of high school.  Now she’s pregnant.  No income. No programmatic support.  Living with a man who is not much better off than she is, in skill and ability, and all I can do is pray.

I pray, and I work, and I advocate so that other families have what they need to remain intact.  So that other people who aren’t saints can feel that they could become a foster parent too, and so that foster kids might remain in one placement for their time in care.

Join me.  Advocate for foster families to have what they actually need to care for kids in dependent care.