Training new foster parents - Adoption.com Forums

Quote:

Originally Posted by kaspoo3992 ....our foster parent trainer was very vague and sugar coated a lot of the information. ...I have see a lot of new FP families come in and they ...don't seem prepared; they get into a conflict and within 6 months they quit ... Has anyone else trained FP's before? What were your experiences?

I think you will be a great trainer!

Our county training was pretty neutral between sugar and bitter coating, but the state training was 100 percent bitter-coated. They only said bad things, to the point that one man in class asked if there was not any thing at all good they could say. It was horrifying. Plus they showed a movie about a grandmother who fostered her grandson and he set fire to the house, it was completely burned down, and she had to put him in a psych facility. It was all very depressing and scary. My daughter (adopted from foster care) actually did set a fire in her room once because a voice told her to -- I couldn't say I hadn't been warned in training! ha!

I never trained FPs but I was called in a few times to be an example foster parent to classes. I think the trainer was really good about finding foster parents to exemplify issues she wanted to teach about. For example when I was taking the training one of the foster parents she brought in to talk to us was a Moslem and talked about having a different religion than a foster child. And when I was brought in to talk to the class she encouraged me to tell them about the potential adoption placement that I refused to take simply because the child had a disability that while having normal intelligence, made her bad at math. So I guess I was to show that the county really wants foster-to-adopt parents to say 'no' to placements that they are not comfortable with. She also had an adoptive mom of fetal alcohol affected children talk to the class.

Editing this to add..one thing we did not get in class was a chance to talk to adults who had been in foster care. I love watching those kind of videos on YouTube, and when I first considered adopting from foster care and talked about it at work, I found out from a coworker that he was adopted from foster-care and that was really really nice because I knew what a great guy he was and how much he loved his adoptive parents.

---

Last edited by Howdy : Today at 11:32 AM.

Source: http://forums.adoption.com/foster-parent-support/400201-training-new-foster-parents.html

happy holidays norad how to carve a turkey how to cook a turkey yorkshire pudding larry the cable guy miracle on 34th street