PRIDE

Parent Resource for Information, Development, Education

This is the class I teach sometimes to train incoming foster parents. I love this class for a number of reasons...I love to teach, I feel like I get something new out of it every time I teach it, and I like meeting new foster parents. The entire course is 27 hours, broken up in 3 hour sessions, and I usually teach 2 or 3 sessions. Last year there was one round when I was the only foster parent trainer fully available to teach, so I got to teach 6 of the 9 sessions. That was great!!

But I have to say, I have one pet peeve when I'm teaching this class. I get very irritated with those people who come in thinking they already know all there is to know and are only going through the motions so they can get their license and move on. First of all, NOBODY knows everything, and people who act like they do are usually the people who know the least. And I have to say, I believe that is true in EVERY situation, not just in foster parent training. Second, even people who've been working in the foster care system for 10 years will learn new things at every training, even training they've been through before...like I said, I get something new out of it every time I train it! And third, why are people so afraid to just open their mind and absorb rather than try to look like they already know all there is to know...and again, I feel this way about the way people behave in every situation in life.

One time I was talking about the grieving process, and all the stages people go through and explaining that people don't just text-book follow the process and be done with it, but people bounce around, and often hit certain stages more than once, going back to denial or anger, or bargaining every so often. And also that people never really stop grieving, that especially in children as they develop and grow, they revisit their losses and often go through stages of the process again and again. Mr. Know-It-All in the back started arguing. He said he used to teach this process in an adult therapy group and that it is a clear-cut process, he would explain to his clients that they would go through it, in order, blah-blah-blah. Whatever, I don't believe it. I've worked with a number of kids in foster care and seen them go through these stages in whatever order their brains go through them, and I've seen them re-enter a stage they've been through before, often a number of times before. I'm not just talking out my butt when I'm training this class. I use my experiences as a foster parent in my training. Mr. Know-It-All will never be successful in fostering until he opens his mind.

So why am I talking about all this? Because we're in the middle of training a new group of foster parents, and for the first time in 4 years, we have an entire class full of people who I really like. They all seem to have open minds, and are eager to learn. There are several in there who have different kinds of experience with kids or the law or are already taking care of relative foster children, but none of them are claiming to know it all. They are all there ready to learn, and willing to look at things from a new perspective. The discussions in this class are important and their questions are insightful. This is exciting to me, it gives me hope that we will get a lot of really good new foster homes! And we need them.

Not to change the subject, but here's just a little perspective: the number of children in foster care in our region of Idaho has doubled in the last year, but the number of foster homes has stayed the same. That means all our homes are full to bursting, and we have no beds for incoming kids. We've had to have social workers check into hotels with kids for the night while an available foster home was found, or kids and social workers sleeping in the office at Health and Welfare, or even social workers taking the kids to their homes for a night or two. Kids are having to be put in group homes who don't belong there just because there is no other place to put them. And this is an epidemic being experienced all over the country. If you've even thought about becoming a foster family, now is a really good time to finalize that decision and go for it! It's already traumatic enough for kids to be pulled out of their family, but then to have no place to go from there is even more traumatic. Having to sleep on a couch in an office, or stay in a hotel with strangers only adds to the damage being done to their psyche...call H&W up, do it, kids need you!!

Thanks for reading!!