People sometimes ask us how hard it is to become a foster parent. Getting licensed to become foster parents was a time commitment and a whole hell of a lot of paperwork but it wasn’t difficult per se.
We first had to submit an initial application, which was reviewed to determine our basic eligibility. I think we had a phone interview? I don’t remember exactly because once Seth and I decided that we wanted to become foster parents we wanted to be foster parents right away. We didn’t want to wait. So once we submitted our application we were rather annoying with follow up calls and I can’t remember if there was an actual interview that we did or if we just harassed them a lot. Heh.
Once we passed that initial screening we moved on to taking classes, which were several hours in the evening one day a week for 11 weeks.
In the course of those classes we had to fill out a ream of paper worth of forms. I’m not actually exaggerating all that much. A literal half ream perhaps. It was insane. And all very important stuff.
They did background checks, and fingerprinting, and we had to list every address we had lived at in the last 30 years, which took some digging let me tell you. I didn’t remember my address from when I lived in England, or in college, and Seth didn’t remember any of his addresses except for his childhood home. I wound up digging through boxes of old letters to find what my address was when I was in college and studying abroad. The reason they asked for all those addresses was so that they could confirm there were no reports of child abuse or sexual abuse at any of those addresses. A couple of folks in my class said “oh this is easy, we’ve owned our home for 42 years!” Seth and I had pages and pages of addresses. Apparently we get around.
We filled out forms about what kinds of issues we would be accepting of. Would we take a child with severe autism? Developmental delays? A child who had a history of sexual abuse? Mental health diagnoses? A child who broke things? A child who had a history of killing animals? You name it, they asked it. Since Seth and I don’t have children of our own, we were able to check that we were willing to except a huge variety of behavioral issues. Where we drew the line was aggression against animals, since we had made a commitment to all of the pets we had adopted too. We have since refined our criteria, and would no longer take a child with severe autism because we understand some of our limits better. Our personal property we are fairly “meh” about. And some of it has indeed been broken by kids. Whatevs. It’s all replaceable.
We had to demonstrate what our finances are, and that we were able to support a child. We had to have a spare room with basic furnishings. We had to provide veterinary records for all of our zillion pets to prove that they were up-to-date on shots. I remember at one point providing our marriage certificate, but I think that was for the adoption paperwork rather than fostering paperwork – we completed both. We filled out a lot of forms asking things about what methods of discipline we would use and how we would handle different types of situations that might arise.
We had to convince someone to do a fire inspection of our home which was a pain in the neck. Our local fire department declined to do it, which left us relying on village officials, one of whom graciously agreed to do the inspection. But it took us a while to figure out how to get it done. We tried home inspectors, too, but they all wanted to charge us a ridiculous rate for a quick walk-through, so it was quite a relief when the village official agreed to do the walk-through for us.
Oh, because we have a wood burning stove, we had to have a chimney cleaning and inspection done too.
Ultimately once we completed the classes we had to have a home inspection done by someone at the agency. The home inspection is to make sure that things are clean and sanitary, and to check up on all of the safety requirements. We are required, for example, to have smoke detectors in every bedroom, and a fire extinguisher in the kitchen. We had to have an emergency escape plan posted in our house. We had to have a locking medicine cabinet. Cleaning products had to be stored safely with cabinet locks. This home inspection was done by our home finder, who is basically our social worker. She wanted to see the bedrooms and make sure that each one had a bed and a dresser and a closet.
Once we were certified, things got a whole lot easier. We still have home visits although at present because of Covid they are video chats rather than in person. Back when we had actual monthly home visits, Seth and I would always frantically clean and organize the house before the caseworker would arrive. We probably didn’t need to. We have been told before by caseworkers “you wouldn’t believe the things I see, you’re fine.” They come in and chat about the case for a little bit, and then ask to see the child’s room to make sure everything is fine there, and then they leave.
Home visits are really not a big deal, though I always get anxious beforehand because our house is always just one chaos level away from pandemonium.
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