The Mt Kenya Times 
By: Wanjohi. P. Mugambi
Worth Noting:
- Foster parents receive stipends to defray the costs of providing foster care, but these stipends often do not cover the costs of raising a child and many foster parents must subsidize the cost of providing care to the foster children in their home. Foster parenting is a unique and, even as we write, changing form of parenting. Foster parents provide parenting to very challenging children.
- They parent infants with drug addictions or AIDS and children and adolescents who have been severely abused or neglected. Many children and adolescents in foster care have experienced little parenting continuity, and some have been moved from home to home repeatedly. Many foster children have significant behavioral or emotional problems, are medically fragile, or have physical or developmental disabilities.
Foster parents provide care to children who cannot remain with their families by bringing these children into their homes. Although this care is meant to be short term and temporary, many children remain with their foster parents for several years and become important members of their foster families. Foster parents are recruited, trained, and supervised by public departments of social services or by private agencies that contract with departments of social services to provide foster care.
The characteristics of foster parents in the United States tend to reflect the characteristics of parents throughout the United States. Fifty to sixty years ago, foster parents were primarily middle-income couples, with a mother who often did not work outside the home. Today, foster families are much more structurally and culturally diverse.
Although most foster parents today are married, many single women and some single men are foster parents. Foster families come from a wide range of cultural groups and incomes. Many have both birth children and foster children in their families, although others have become foster parents in order to have children in their home.
Adults interested in becoming foster parents usually get in contact with local agencies or may respond to recruiting drives. They often must receive legally mandated training, and their backgrounds, current living situations, and parenting practices are investigated. Agencies then decide whom to accept as foster parents, although, as subsequently described, the current shortage of foster homes encourages many agencies to accept all those who are qualified.
Foster parents receive stipends to defray the costs of providing foster care, but these stipends often do not cover the costs of raising a child and many foster parents must subsidize the cost of providing care to the foster children in their home. Foster parenting is a unique and, even as we write, changing form of parenting. Foster parents provide parenting to very challenging children.
They parent infants with drug addictions or AIDS and children and adolescents who have been severely abused or neglected. Many children and adolescents in foster care have experienced little parenting continuity, and some have been moved from home to home repeatedly. Many foster children have significant behavioral or emotional problems, are medically fragile, or have physical or developmental disabilities. The principal difference between foster parenting and other forms of parenting is that the foster parent–foster child relationship is expected to be temporary.
Foster parents are expected to be warm and nurturing and to form a growth-promoting relationship with their foster children, but not to be too warm and nurturing or to create a relationship that is so close that it makes it difficult for the children to return to their birth parents. Another difference is that foster families are open to supervision by child-welfare agencies and possibly to involvement with the birth parents.
Thus a primary right of parents in the United States—to rear children without interference from the state—is missing for foster parents. Negotiating the extent to which foster families, child welfare agencies, and birth families are to work together while parenting a foster child can be difficult. Despite the challenges faced by foster parents, most express satisfaction with their roles. We explore the experiences of foster parents.
We start with a description of the foster care system—exploring the system’s history and its current state and describing what we know about the characteristics of foster parents today. We then explore the issues that make foster parenting unique. We do this by exploring three types of relationships that foster parents must negotiate: relationships with the placement agency, with the foster child’s birth parents, and with the foster child. We pay particular attention to the role of attachment in the relationship between the foster parent and foster child. We then explore issues related to factors that promote successful foster parenting.
Unfortunately, the research on foster parenting is minimal. Although research on the experiences of foster children has increased over the past two decades, a similar increase of research on foster parents has not occurred. Some existing research involves reviews of agency records, and these records are often incomplete and may contain little specific information about the foster parents.
Much of the other research involves surveys mailed to foster parents, with the typical low response rates associated with mailed surveys and subsequent concerns about the representativeness of the data. Consequently, although we do know something about the experiences of foster parents, additional research will need to be conducted before we have more than a rudimentary knowledge about them and their families.
Until the 1970s or so, foster parents were seen largely as caregivers. They were expected to provide a healthy home life and a good parenting example for children who were generally stable, but whose parents were temporarily unable to care for them. If specific educational or psychological services were needed by a child, they were supplied by other professionals. Children with significant medical, behavioral, or emotional problems were often cared for in an institution. Over the past three decades, the role of many foster parents has changed to that of an active member of the team delivering services to the foster child and to the child’s birth family.
Foster parents are expected to be knowledgeable participants in behavioral therapy or psychotherapy received by the child, to actively participate in remedial or other educational programs in which the child is enrolled, to help the child’s birth parents create a home environment to which the child can be returned, and to facilitate the continuation or improvement of the relationship between the child and the birth parents . Of primary importance, foster parents are now often seen as partners when decisions about the child are made. These new roles create conflicts between the interests of the agencies and the foster parents in some cases. For example, the agency is charged with supervising the foster placement and removing children from inadequate foster homes, yet the agency depends on the families that i must supervise to provide needed (and sometimes, desperately needed) homes. Consequently agencies may modify what they believe would be best for a child in order to avoid angering the foster parents and thus risking disruption of the placement.
For example, some caseworkers have felt pressure to reduce contact between the child and the child’s birth family because the foster family found the contact to be troubling. Another potential conflict occurs when foster parents are asked to work as partners with the placement agency in promoting the development of the child’s birth family and in making decisions about the child and the child’s placement, because the foster parents’ positive or negative feelings about the child may influence these decisions.
Some foster parents who have developed a warm relationship with their child may be hesitant to recommend reunification with the child’s birth parents, and foster parents who have developed a conflicted relationship with a child may be eager to have the child returned to the birth parents before it is appropriate to do so. Negotiating these conflicts can be tricky, and when they are not confronted in a forthright manner, they can have a significantly negative influence on the care given to a child.
Similar Posts by The Mt Kenya Times:
- Kenya designates JKIA Gate 16 for Ebola high-risk arrivals in sweeping border health overhaul
- Mbadi warns Kenya’s KSh3.6 trillion revenue target is out of reach
- Modern women are not falling out of love — they are falling into their senses
- The Chinese century: how Beijing is reshaping the world’s technology, industry and influence
- Omtatah petitions JSC to probe judges over Kenya-US health deal ruling
About the Author
