Connecting Prospective Foster Parents to Foster Care Professionals
Today is Giving Tuesday in the US and start of the Holiday Giving Season.
If you think about it the entire community of professionals i.e. social workers and foster parents are “giving” people – throughout the year and not just on Giving TuesdayWe salute the entire Foster Care Community for the great work they do every day. Many in this community are involved with non-profits and fundraising. So here is how to figure out when Giving Tuesday falls every year:
Broadly there are two categories of foster kids. Traditional Foster Care involves caring for children who are “normal” kids not dis-similar to kids from a regular biological household in terms of behavioral issues. Therapeutic (or Treatment) foster kids are kids that need a higher level of care and attention to help resolve the trauma that they have suffered. Naturally, the therapeutic foster parent has a more difficult task. These parents are additionally trained and given additional support by the coordinating social worker representing the state, often through a contracted agency. Here are six things to know about Therapeutic Foster Care.
May is National Foster Care Month. And this year the focus is on kinship care and reunion with bio families (biological or birth families) where possible. Kinship This post explores the idea that neighbors can be considered as kin for the purposes of “keeping families together.”
We are delighted to celebrate the first anniversary of StartFosterCare.org and the May 2022 National Foster Care month. Kinship connections and stronger families is a focus of this year’s foster care month.See the Children’s Bureau and Child Welfare Information Gateway website.In this post we explain why culture is important to the foster child.
The foster parent recruitment process involves compulsory foster parent training. It is after training that a foster parent becomes a licensed foster parent in a US state. This is an important professional credential for us at StartFosterCare.org. As social work/foster care professionals always explain at StartFosterCare meetings, there are different levels of needs of foster kids. These levels of need included, levels of therapeutic or treatment care. Different levels of Foster Parenting can require different kinds of training.
According to academic research and our experience here is why Foster Parent training is so important:
Happy New Year 2022 to all our dear readers!
Frankly, we can’t believe that COVID continues into 2022. The foster care community including should not allow COVID to freeze them into inaction.
Life needs to go on and foster kids need to be cared for, even more as COVID continues into 2022.
We are so proud that Dr. John has put out a recommendation for us to Foster Care professionals in both US State Governments and Foster Agencies across US States. We specialize in the front end of recruiting quality prospective foster parents through technology. And its important for foster care professionals and foster parents to know that we understand their challenging but rewarding work. Thank you Dr. John for putting out a good word!
There seems to be a lot of expectations from foster parents. And the trouble is that these expectations can be unclear for both foster parents and agencies.We urge foster parents and agencies to have a one page checklist (see the Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande) of parent expectations for every child because the child’s situation can be very different.
For those not deeply familiar with the Child Welfare System there is a common confusion that Foster Care is somehow similar to Adoption. Multiple website’s content from different folks often use the terms interchangeably. Since this adversely affects the recruitment and work of foster parents we wish to clarify for all prospective foster parents out there: