A Tale of Two Babies

Imagine you're a new foster or adoptive parent. You've filled out a mountain of paperwork, taken all the training classes, prepared your home to welcome a child, and finally reached the point where you are officially licensed and waiting to welcome a child into your family! It's an exciting time for you, but as the referrals start to come in, you begin to notice something troubling: most of the children referred to you have a lot more special needs than you were expecting. You begin to wonder - why are they calling me for all these special needs kids? Do they think I'm some sort of super parent?

This scenario repeats itself over and over again with our families, and we completely understand why. It can certainly be jarring and heartbreaking to hear about children who have high levels of needs: a five year old who is nonverbal and not toilet trained, a 14 year old who is on four psychiatric medications, a one year old with seizures and a feeding tube. You hear about specialist appointments, behavioral challenges, and special education services and you can't help but feel overwhelmed. Suddenly, the dream of the "perfect" family you had feels out of reach.

You're not alone. Across the board, the needs of children in care are increasing and foster parents are feeling the effects. In fact, this week an urgent message went out from one of the county Children and Youth agencies to all of its contracted agencies, including The Salvation Army, stating that "It is essential that [agencies] ensure their caregivers have a realistic understanding and awareness of the range of behaviors and circumstances that they will need to manage and are aware of the adequate supports to help ensure that they can meet the unique needs of the children and youth in their home."

We couldn't agree more. Over the past year as we have discussed how to better prepare families to meet these unique challenges, we have revamped our Family Preparation Training curriculum to help families understand not just the needs they might see in the children they care for, but why those needs are present. As part of this new curriculum, we developed a video to help new families begin to understand why our population of children can present with so many extra needs.

Because this is such an important topic, we thought we would go ahead and share it publicly here as well, for two reasons:

1) Because foster and adoptive parents deserve to be well-informed and well-prepared, and

2) Because ALL children (regardless of their level of need) are precious and deserve to be given a chance to have a loving, safe family - so hopefully this video can help remove some of the fear surrounding caring for children with special needs and lead to more children finding amazing families.

Check out the video here:

If after watching this video, you would like to learn even MORE about children experiencing foster care and how to open your home to them, we would love to connect! If you live within a one hour drive of Allentown, PA, are at least 21 years old and not receiving SNAP or housing assistance, we would love to have you attend our Family Preparation Trainings in person. Contact us to get the process started.

Want to receive helpful foster care and adoption-related content in your inbox every month? Sign up for our email newsletter here!