Is Foster Parenting for You?

Foster parenting is motivated by empathy and a desire to provide safety, security, and love. The key question is not only whether love is available, but whether parenting practices will change. Foster parenting involves shifting paradigms because children in care often have different starting points shaped by separation trauma, abrupt losses, neglect, abuse, placement instability, and disrupted attachments. Behaviors may appear defiant, withdrawn, aggressive, controlling, or rejecting, but they can be survival responses to past experiences. Traditional discipline methods such as lectures, consequences, time-outs, shame, reward charts, and power struggles can backfire when fear organizes the nervous system, since trauma affects brain development and triggers reactions before reflection.

"However, the question is not only, "Do you have love to give?" It is, "Are you willing to change how you parent?" Foster parenting is not traditional parenting; it's parenting differently and shifting your paradigm."

"Children in foster care have often experienced separation trauma, abrupt losses in caregiving, food or housing neglect, physical or emotional abuse, instability of placements, and/or disrupted attachments. Their behavior often looks defiant, withdrawn, aggressive, controlling, or rejecting. But very often, what we are seeing is not "undesirable behavior.""

"A foster youth's behavior is a way to survive the future because of the ghosts of the past. Or, as I often say, what appears hysterical is often historical. You cannot parent these children like other children because their starting point is different. It is not that they won't behave; they can't behave like other kids their age."

"That is why traditional discipline, like lectures, consequences, time-outs, shame, reward charts, or power struggles, backfire when a child's nervous system is organized around fear. Trauma reshapes the developing brain, making children react before they can reflect. Consequences escalate behavior, rewards lose power, lectures"

Read at Psychology Today