How Has Fostering Affected My Children? – Foster Care Q&A Series

Welcome to week two of this Foster Care Q&A series!

If you have any questions you would like me to answer throughout this series feel free to leave a comment or send me an email.

 

 

Today’s question is one that I wondered about before we started and I have had a few people as about.

While we felt like we were being called to foster we also knew that we didn’t want to do it at the expense of our children.

 

How Has Fostering Has Affected My Children?

And just like the first question in this series, there is no straightforward answer.

I find there are two ways to answer this: 1) on a placement by placement basis and 2) overall.

There have both been some hard and some good things that I have seen come as a result of our foster care experience affecting my kids so far.

 

The Hard

Honestly, our first placement was quite hard on our kids. It wasn’t all hard in a bad way, hard things make us grow, but there were some negatives to it.

It wasn’t until Buzz and Woody left us that I realized Ephraim’s funny personality had been gone for the three months they were with us. Part of this was because of the responsibility of no longer being the youngest and part of it was because Buzz kind of smothered him – always following him around playing with (and breaking) Ephraim’s toys. It was a major adjustment to add a 2 & 3 year old into our family and Ephraim definitely felt it more than Raeca because he spent more time with them.

This was not all bad at all. Ephraim is extremely extroverted and thrives around people, he still misses Buzz and Woody and playing with them but it was an adjustment since it hard for him to ever get any time for himself, something he wasn’t used to since he lived with three pretty extreme introverts for the previous five years.

It was because of this that we decided to change our range of acceptance for the foreseeable future.

 

 

The Good

Most of how I have seen fostering affect my kids has been very good.

They are learning to take take of younger kids and be more responsible.

They are learning that not everyone has as easy of a life as they do.

They have developed some major compassion.

They not only love on the boys that have come into our home, they are also rooting for their birth parents (even though they also hope the kids will stay here forever).

They also appreciate the time that they can play together more.

 

All in all there have been hard moments but the good far out weighs any of the hard moments. We haven’t been fostering that long yet, I have a feeling they good list will continue to grow as time goes on.

Curious about our foster care experience? You can check out our fostering timeline here.

If you foster I would love to hear how it has affected any biological and adopted children you have.