Adoption Support at Forever Parents

Keeping In Touch With Former Foster Parents

I’ve blogged about the great relationship we have with our children’s former foster parents. They’re such great people and we get together with them a couple of times a year.

Some of our adoption forum members spoke about their relationship with their children’s former foster parents:

1~
Yes, we have a very open arrangement with the previous foster family. We had to cut back contact right after the kids were placed with us, because the children were having difficulties moving on. And for a long time, both of my kids were very angry at their foster parents for not adopting them. Now that almost 6 years has gone by, they enjoy visiting with them, and we try to invite them to events as much as possible.

2~
Our son is finally willing to interact just a bit with his old foster dad, who only lives two streets from us and used to be a very good friend of ours. The kids do not talk at all. There was a lot of anger at him and with us for him leaving that household and coming to ours. At the time we did not understand it at all. Now that I have had him for 4 years, I know that he had deep rooted RAD and his foster dad knew that he would not adapt to a family life, but we couldn’t hear that back then. We get it now. Our friendship is slowly being renewed.

3~
No we do not keep in contact with the former foster people. I still can not and will not refer to them as “parents” because they did not behave as such for our children. Other than putting a roof over their heads and feeding them, the people did not work at parenting at all. My boys were often yelled at for typical behavior and then were taken to the doctor so many times to be put on ADHD meds when they were not ADHD. These people also put our daughter in services she did not need. In addition to that, they did not in any way attempt to make our children feel like family -even to the point of not allowing them to be in family pictures b/c our kids were not “their real children” and they would tell this to my children’s faces.

The only other child who lived with our children in the foster house was the foster people’s adopted 4 year old son. He was a terror and had a million of his own issues, but these people treated him as if he was a king in that house and whatever that child did wrong was blamed on our youngest boy. Sure, our son is no perfect child, but I also know that he didn’t cause all the problems.

Frankly, it was a relief to take them out of that house and not look back. Our oldest son was a bit bothered by the separation and once asked if he could go back and live for a month with them. We asked him if it made sense to go and visit for any length of time with people who were not nice to him and were terribly hateful to his younger brother. It took some explaining, but he finally understood that these individuals were not the “happy family” he had imagined they were.

4~
We never have kept in touch. My son lived with his FP’s for a few years, yet when he moved out, they just didn’t really want any updates or contact, not even at first. It hurt me and made me wonder how they felt about or treated him if they could just walk away like that after years.

5~
We send a Christmas card with letter and picture to our daughter’s foster family. She was with them 2 months and they took excellent care of her.

6~
We are the former foster parents…

We fostered four babies and one teen mom of that baby which was our first placement…I’ll call them L and LA.

LA lived with us twice. The first time for a month before her mom joined us and they both stayed with us an additional 3 months, and the second time for 4 months without L. This the the family that contacts us on occasion to let us know how things are going. I think that we could have been even more involved in LA’s life had we wanted after she went back but we chose not to be b/c it was very painful to us seeing some of the decisions made for her that we didn’t agree with and wishing she was ours.

The second…a little boy was with us for 9 weeks and came to us straight from the hospital. Again, we thought he would stay forever until the bio father popped up, did a paternity test, and was awarded custody in court all in a little over a weeks time. He was kind enough to send us pictures of him for the first year and gave us his number to call anytime b/c I was heartbroken. He was a kind man. I didn’t answer his second letter and he never sent more. I was ready to let go.

The other two girls came and went quickly to family and the only thing we received were pictures of one from the family through the social worker and a thank you for all we did and for taking such good care of M. She wanted to stay with me and didn’t want to go with her grandparents and I could tell that day they felt sad for that but in the end were grateful she had fallen in love with me so quickly.

As a former foster parent I always wonder, I pray for their safety and happiness and hope that one day a few of those babies will find us when they are grown. We will happily open our doors and arms to them and share with them how special they were to us.

7~
Yes, we still keep in touch. If we’re not able to keep in touch with the child him/herself, we call the caseworkers a few times a year to check in how they are doing, if they know.

Related Posts:

1. May Is National Foster Care Month
2. Treat Dad To Frosty And Help Children In Foster Care
3. May is Foster Care Month
4. My Children’s Former Foster Mother
5. Adoption Connections