Category: Foster Care Research
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Why plan a party: May is National Foster Care Month
May is National Foster Care Month. And it’s a great idea for Foster Parents to plan a party with Birth (Biological) Parents of the foster child. This can work wonders for foster kids where reunification is a possibility. Reunification is a core goal of the 2022 National Foster Care Month.
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Why Foster Parent Training Matters
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…
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What are the expectations from Foster Parents?
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…
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What Motivates Foster Parents?
Foster parents are kind and caring people. It takes a good heart to step up and care for a child unrelated to you (foster care) or even related to you (kinship foster care). We found a great piece of research on what motivates foster parents by Tracy E. MacGregor, Susan Rodger, Anne L. Cummings, and…
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Who Enters Foster Care in the US?
We were fascinated with the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis Reporting System (AFCARS) data that provides a great overview of the nationwide foster care challenge. Here is the table from the AFCARS data for 2019 reported in 2020 . This is for children entering foster care in 2019. Since this table is useful to both…
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Foster Child Stability: Is Authoritative or Authoritarian parenting better?
We had a very successful first virtual meeting on May 19, 2021 between prospective foster parents and foster care professionals. Some of the parents had a lot of knowledge about foster parenting and had new questions that sparked spirited discussion. One of the questions was between authoritative and authoritarian parenting.
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Kinship care or Foster care : Which is better?
Kinship care refers to a relative (including grandparents) who takes care of the child with the inability of the parents to do so. Kinship Foster Carers can be paid or unpaid by the State Government/County depending on policy,funds available, and preference of the kin or relatives. Foster care is when a non-related,unknown family takes charge…
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Predictors of success: Therapeutic Foster Parenting
It’s easy to imagine that a child who goes into foster care is different from a child who is in a normal stable biological family home. Just because of the instability at home. A trivial example, that our kind reader would recognize, is that a predictable cup of coffee in the morning gives a lot…