Hellobee

When Mr. Lion and I started talking about becoming a foster family, I began immersing myself in reading about the topic. There wasn’t a ton out there, but one recommendation that came up over and over was that families should really only foster or adopt children younger than any birth children in the home. Some feel this is necessary for the psychological benefit of children, so that they don’t lose their “place” in the family. Some feel this is necessary based on concerns for safety.

Mr. Lion and I considered these points, but knew that this would mean our foster journey would be years off. We had (have) a deep desire to help keep sibling groups together. It is the reason for our involvement in foster care. If we were to wait until our bio kids were old enough to foster sibling groups that are all younger than they are, it would be a very long time before we could be involved.

That’s a lot of years with an empty room, and a lot of kids that we would miss out on loving in the mean time.

So we decided not to blindly take that recommendation, but to consider what we could do to lessen any risk and still be involved while our children are young.

First, we considered whether or not having older children in our home would psychologically affect our bio kids. With them being so young (3 and 5) they haven’t spent a ton of time aware of their own birth order anyway, and they both really love older kids. While you can never really know how children will respond to a situation, we decided that the sooner we started foster care the better off our bio kids would be, because this would just be something that we do…something they have always known. Also, if you think about it, any time you add a child to a family you change the dynamic of the family. There is never really a way to predict how things will roll out. But being a foster family means being flexible, and we felt this was a worthwhile life skill for our bio children to develop.

More importantly, however, was safety. Our bio kids are young, and not quite old enough to verbalize if something is going wrong. Any time you are dealing with children who have experienced trauma, there is a risk of children working through that trauma through play with other children, or by taking out aggression on other children. While this is definitely the exception and not the norm, it was still something that it was important to me that we consider.

So we talked to everyone we could, trying to really assess the actual degree of risk. I talked to a woman I worked with who was an expert in child abuse prevention. We talked to our social workers. We read a lot about childhood trauma.

What we determined was that there were some safeguards we could establish to simultaneously protect our bio kids from potential harm, that would still allow us to care for children who are a bit older. In our state we are able to define what our capacity as a foster family includes, and at the recommendation of those we spoke with, these are the boundaries we set around our family for now, at least until we feel more confident that our bio kids are old enough to speak up for themselves and to have harder conversations with them about the life experiences of their foster siblings.

1. Our bio kids would have their own bedrooms– It was recommended to us that foster children not share bedrooms with bio children who are younger than them. This might be different with older bio children, but because ours are so young, this is a firm boundary for now.
2. We could not care for children who were coming into foster care due to physical or sexual abuse – While you can never fully know the extent of the experiences children have had, if there was a known history of these types of abuse we have decided that for now, this is not something we feel comfortable with. Most children come into care due to neglect/substance abuse, so we felt like we could still be open to helping many children even with this boundary in place.
3. We will not take additional training to become a therapeutic home – Some children in foster care need a higher, more specialized, type of care due to severe trauma or very difficult behavior concerns. If it was just me and Mr. Lion, we would probably feel comfortable with this type of care, but with our littles we feel like it isn’t a good idea for now.
4. We will enforce clothing/bathroom privacy – Before becoming a foster family our littles would often run through the house undressed to find us to help with clothes after using the potty, or would use the bathroom with the door open. Since becoming a foster family we have had a lot more discussions about privacy, about private parts, etc.
5. Play will be supervised – While we let the kids go upstairs to the playroom alone for periods of time, they are never out of earshot. With the large age gap between our kiddos, it is important to us that we are able to hear conversations when they are all playing together. Through no fault of their own, many children in foster care have been exposed to more than they should have in their short lives, and we like to catch these types of things when they come out so we can help guide discussions about what is/is not appropriate to share with the little kids.

With these boundaries in place, we feel very comfortable taking older children into our home. Our experience so far has been wonderful, and I have never feared for our bio children’s safety. In fact, I think it has been a huge benefit to our children to have older “siblings” around. It gives me so much joy to watch the way they play together and take care of each other. The big kids can do some things that the little kids can’t do yet, and they love to help the littles. Mr. Lion and I have never questioned our decision to foster out of birth order.

Waiting for our muffins to bake