Prospective parents choose to foster because they find pleasure in parenting and they want to improve a child’s life. Appropriate training will help retain foster parents and enable them to do a better job for the children in their care.
Most people who want to foster or adopt children don’t begin with the skills essential to care for children who have been neglected and physically and sexually abused. These skills must be developed. And foster and adoptive parents aren’t clients who receive services but rather, resource families who need and deserve a comprehensive array of system supports.
This tool is about recruitment, training, and support of foster families. But it can also be applied to kinship and adoptive families, for preparation for one kind of family can and should include planning for the others. This is called combined recruitment.
What Foster Parents Want Their Agencies to Know: “A startling statistic: Almost half of foster parents quit within a year of their first placement. Twenty to 25 percent of foster parents quit each year and another quarter express uncertainty about continuing.” — Casey Foster Family Assessment Training Workbook
Why should we treat foster, adoptive, and kinship families like gold? Because without them, life is harder for the families and children we serve, for individual workers, and for our agencies. Without them, we have a much more difficult time keeping siblings together and placing children in their communities. In truth, good foster, adoptive, and kinship families are worth more than gold—they’re priceless.
