Are you considering becoming a foster parent?
Are you wondering what the process is like to get licensed?
Disclaimer- This post is my based off of my individual experience and contains my opinion. This does not reflect any business, anyone else’s experience or option but my own.
I want to be up front with you. My husband and I never talked about being foster parents until about one year before we started taking classes. Naturally having kids was looking like It wasn’t going to happen for us, so we began looking more in depth at other options. We have been licensed since 2016 and have had one placement and have done respite a few times.
Although I am usually a go with the flow kind of person, I like to know what to expect when doing something like this, and I had a hard time finding material on the actual process. I am by no means an expert, but I hope that this post will help you in making your decision.
We were so scared when we said we wanted to take the classes, we were scared when we took the classes, and we were scared waiting for a placement. Why you may ask? We feared failing and we feared getting hurt. We quickly learned that we were being selfish, once we got our first placement, we realized that these children need us more than we need them.
From what I can tell, the process seems to be a little different in every state, where we live the licensing process goes like this….
Introduction seminar
You go to a group meeting for an hour or so where they give you some paper work to fill out, finger print you to start the background check process, tell you about the process, and answer any questions you might have. We got our hopes up by thinking that it would be a quick process, so we left disappointed when we found out that it would take longer than we had expected. Honestly, I’m not sure what we were thinking, I wouldn’t want them handing children out as we left the meeting. We ended up emailing them a few months later and had a worker come to our house to answer some of our questions. That’s when we got on the list for the classes we had to take.
10-week class
We met once a week for 10 weeks for a class called PSMAP, (something like that) there were 10-12 families with us who were any were from relatives needing to get licensed to care for a family member, to people who wanted to do respite care. This class really started to open our eyes to foster care. All the stereotypes we had heard were blown away. It tugged at our hearts and made us come out of our comfort zones. There was homework for this! The only down side of this class for us was that it focused on older children and we were looking to foster in the 0-2year old age range.
Home Study
This part was the one of the most nerve-racking things for me. I had searched for blogs telling me what they were going to do when they came into my home and inspected it. I found anything from, they didn’t even look around, to my fire extinguisher was in the wrong place. I was immediately in freak out mode, my house has never been so clean as it was for that first visit. Here they made 3 visits, which they spaced out during the 10-week class. Turns out the home study wasn’t as bad as I had worked myself up for, your home doesn’t need to be perfect, they like to see that it is indeed lived in, so it is okay if it looks like someone lives there. They took a tour of the house on the first visit, it was like a tour I would have given my friends or a family member after I bought a new house. On the first day of our 10-week classes we were given a very large packet of paperwork to fill out for our home study, after we had filled them out, our home study time was spent going over the questions from that packet. The questions were about your upbringing, your parenting style, and your preferences for children you would like to foster.
The call
By now you have completed a bunch of classes, filled out way more paperwork than you knew existed, and completed your home study. Assuming you have passed your home study your license mostly likely in the mail. Once you are officially licensed you anxiously wait for the phone to ring, I started answering every call, which all ended up being telemarketers … ugh! The waiting was painful, once I settled myself down and back into my everyday life, the calls started coming, of course the first one was when we were out of state. You do not have to say yes to the first call, or any call. I urge you to make sure you have a list of questions that which are important to you to ask before you give an answer. We had a few calls before we said YES. There has never really been any pressure put on us to say yes when we get a call, but I will tell you, it will be hard to say NO!
Placement
No placement is the same, sometimes they need a home ASAP, sometimes you will make arrangement to get the child days later. In our case a state worker brought the child to our house with in a few hours, a lot of information was thrown at us at once. I recommend you take some notes while the worker is there. In our area, we have a support worker from the agency that did our home study who made a visit to our house within a few days to help us with any questions we might have and to make sure everything was going well. Visits with birth parents start right away, appointments may need to be made, and in some cases school or daycare will need to be arranged. There may be court dates coming up you would like to attend. I strongly suggest you go to any of these things that you can. I suggest getting yourself a planner, I had a Create 365 planner (Not and ad) it was big and bulky, but I was able to write everything down and take notes right in it. If you are more of a technology person that is completely fine too, just be sure you have some where ready to keep everything straight and in order. A binder or folder to store all the documents given to you about the child is another helpful suggestion.
I don’t know when or if we will get another placement, either way, I will never regret being a foster parent and I will never quit being a cheerleader for anyone involved in the foster care system.