While adoption can be an exciting, learning experience, raising a foster child is different. It’s for the short term, so you have to be ready to let this child go to his or her birth parents or permanent parents. What does it take to be a foster parent? What help can you get? Let’s find out.

Are you ready?
Fostering is not easy. This may put an immense strain on your family. Yet there are rewards for parents who help a child along in his or her journey.

The important thing is to not go into fostering blind. Be prepared for situations, for stress, and to ask for help when needed. You should always have a strong support system in place to help and protect the foster child. For example, if you or your spouse are gone on a regular basis for a job, how will the foster child handle one parent being gone? Who can watch over the child when both foster parents are incapable – a family member or friend? Plan for these eventualities. An agency can ensure you have a professional support system, but you do need help from loved ones.

Can you support this child?
Instead of support via money, you may consider how you support this child emotionally. In many cases foster children are past their toddler years, have had both good and bad experiences, and will need you to be patient, to show love, to teach, and to listen.

What attitude does the child have?
By emotionally supporting the child, you may have to address previous issues. For example, an older child who’s been in and out of the system may have abandonment issues (which is much more complex than we can go over). The child may treat you, initially, in a mean way, or be the opposite – start out as happy as can be and then turn resentful. There are as many situations as children on the world. How you learn to handle this child’s attitude toward you is crucial.

How do the rest of the family feel?
If you already have children, how do they feel about you bringing in a foster child? Before you even get into this process, you should of course discuss the issue with any others who live in the home. If you have children, you need their opinions and concerns. If your spouse is unsure of fostering a child, you need to sit down and discuss it. As this child needs to be treated fairly, it’s important to remember everyone else in the family too.

Are you considering adopting?
Some foster parents end up wanting to adopt a child instead of fostering them. You can find many children in the foster system open to adoption. You have other means of adoption too. If you are ready for a more permanent addition to the family, consider adopting. But fostering a child is unique in how you help in the short term, remembering you have to eventually say goodbye.

The search for a personal sense of identity is normal among adolescents. However, to the adoptee it comes with the adoption process. Alternatively, it comes with the foster child that is placed in a foster home.

They wonder the same things. They ask themselves the same questions:

• Why did my biological parents not want me?
• What is so wrong with me that they did not want me or want to fight for me?
• Was I a bad child and they could not handle me?
• If I had been a better-behaved child, would they have kept me?
• Was it because I was not smart enough, pretty enough, etc?
• Am I just trash that is to be thrown away?
• What could I have done different to make them change their minds?
• If I had been born a girl/boy would that have changed their minds?
• If my biological dad had been there, would my mom have given me up for adoption?
• Was I that much of a burden for my biological parents?
• Did I disappoint them in some way?
• Am I less valuable than the biological child that is raised by its own parents?
• What do people think of me when they find out that I am a foster child or adoptee?
• Will they hold that against me?
• Will they just pity me?
• Do my new parents just feel sorry for me or do they really love me? And why?
• Do my new parents have expectations that I will never be able to fill?
• What if I mess up, will they send me back? Will they regret adopting me or taking me into their home as a foster child?
• Why do other parents go to any lengths for their children, but mine could not.
• If my adoptive parents/foster parents really knew the true me, would they still want me here?
• How can I test them to make sure that they really love me? How far can I push “the envelope” with them?
• If my birth parents are so immoral and despicable, does that mean that I am also?
• Is that my future and I have no choice in it?
• Why do I have these persistent feeling of shame and guilt even though I know that it was not my fault that they did not want me?
• Why do I let myself be defined by being an adoptee/foster child?
• What will the other kids at school think of me as a foster child or of me, if they find out that I was adopted?
• I want to trust my new foster parents/adoptive parents, but why is it so hard for me?

Because of these and many more questions, these children may need help from therapists who offer treatment for identity disorders.

Adoptive parents and foster parents always need to check their own attitudes about foster care or adoption. This will enable the foster child or adoptee to understand their efforts to help.