Class #2!

We attended our second training class Thursday evening. We got to meet a few new people and get to know some of their personal reasons for choosing to become foster parents. This week we started looking into what kinds of behavior we may see in the children we foster. We were asked by the instructor to say aloud what kinds of behaviors we think we can handle or that would be accepted best in our family environment. Most everyone, including us, were pretty much fine with the basic expectations of acting out, shying away, being slow developmentally or not able to voice their needs or concerns to the adults in their "new home" environment. I mean that is to be expected. Ourselves and a few other couples in the room voiced that we thought we would be able to also work with mild to moderately autistic children as well if that came up, and maybe some learning disabilities too. Well we have started to kind of realize that (in the nicest way possible...) you do not have to be the most intelligent individual or couple to become foster parents. Let's just say we don't expect everyone in the class with us to make it to the graduation since they seem to be expecting an honor student or model child to come into their home. But then again I suppose that is why there is a training class - to inform us all what we really will be getting into. My husband and I firmly believe that each child will have gone through a vast amount of pain and emotional damage - if not all from their bio family, a lot of it will be from being taken away from the only people they knew and shuffled around and placed with a new set of people who have different ways of life or different rules or different religions or whatever the case may be. To not know when your next meal will be or if you will have uninterrupted sleep or if you will go from a bad situation into a worse one - I would have to say that is an unimaginable fear they must experience. However, with time, love, patience, and structure - they will begin to thrive and learn and open up. This is the second goal of foster parenting. The first being to reunify the child(ren) with their parent(s).

When we were reading aloud our responses to the questions the instructor had asked us to answer about ourselves - we each had to tell what we thought would be best for our family as far as the "type" of child we would welcome into our homes. With most of the answers being the same, we came to one lady who stood to say she would like a child who would have a good attitude and good social skills. I promise every person in the room just looked right at her like "Ummm WHAT?!?!?!" The instructor quickly said "So, let me get this straight - you want a child with good social skills that is in foster care?" And the lady responded that yes, she would really appreciate that. I think she really didn't get the point to that exercise.... Anyway she also went on to say that she had a grandbaby that was a little girl and if that child didn't get along with her little girl then that child would have to go - because her little granddaughter was their baby and most important. That was probably a scary answer to all of the rest of us. I personally was wondering what the lady was looking for... and also if she went into the whole foster parent thing welcome a child into her home with conditions and levels for the child to "measure up to" then what would happen if they didn't meet those requirements? Not to mention if a child was put in a home where they were told or it was made known to them that the biological child was more important than they were and that they were expected to always treat that child as if they were on a pedestal - what would that do to that child's self-worth and self-esteem? What kind of emotional defect would that cause on a developing child? Oh Lordy....