Fostering a child may very well be the most important and noble thing you’ll do in your lifetime. There’s no better act you can do than give a child a home to stay in when they had none. Yet, fostering a child requires sacrifice and hard work. It’s not just about having an empty room in your place and thinking you have parental instincts and therefore are ready for this. There’s so much more to fostering that requires you really think it over more than once before coming to the decision of fostering. The best way to learn about fostering and its demands and sacrifices is to talk to someone who’s been there, a person who fostered a child before and had gone through all the ups and downs of this challenging journey. There’s an approach to doing this right, and it starts with preparing yourself mentally and emotionally. These are some points and questions you’re going to have to work on before becoming a foster parent.
Forget the ad you saw
The first thing you need to do to prepare for fostering is forget any ad you saw on TV or heard on the radio. The problem is these ads will paint an unrealistic picture of the requirements of fostering a child, making you believe all you need to go forwards with the procedure is an empty room. While you obviously will need an empty room to foster a child, there’s just so much more to the process than the empty space. You’ll need experience and wisdom in life to help you guide a child in need of fostering. It doesn’t make sense for you to foster a child if you’re a 22-year-old with not much experience in life to offer that child.
Can you communicate properly?
This is probably the most important question you’ll need to ask yourself, and more importantly answer honestly. Do you have it in you to communicate effectively with the foster child? There will come a time when you don’t see eye to eye on everything, and it’s then when you need to exercise caution in communicating with a foster child. While you may care and love them, and believe you know what’s right for them in life, you’re going to have to let them make mistakes in life so they could learn from them. At the end of the day, what really separates a good foster parent from a poor one is how they communicate with the child and how they find mutual grounds to work on conveying their points of view without jeopardizing the entire relationship.
Patience
The ability to communicate properly doesn’t mean much if you don’t have the patience required for a journey like this one. There’ll be times when you feel like giving up or like your foster child is becoming a burden, and truth is these are feelings even normal parents experience. It’s how you handle these emotions that counts. It helps if you collect all information before fostering a child that might help you anticipate their needs and setting a plan on how to work through any potential problems. Patience also means you’ll plough through any obstacles you face along the way including how society views a foster child –– expect to be met with people who will say something provocative like “they’re not really your child.” You have to find it in yourself to have the strength and patience to handle all these nuisances in order to get to the next phase of the child’s development.
Can you afford it?
This is a question many foster parents to be neglect to ask. As we said earlier, fostering a child might be the noblest thing you could ever do, but nobility and good intentions simply don’t pay the bills. What’s the point in fostering a child if you can’t provide a decent life for them? For some people, fostering a kid might be the ultimate goal in life, but you can’t let that blind you from the fact that you have to be financially able to take that step or else you’d have done the child more harm than good.
Are you willing to change as a person?
Truth is, no matter what person you were before fostering, you’re going to have to change in order to become a decent foster parent. Your old ways will need to alter and you’ll need to grow as a person. Developing a certain level of empathy and understanding is a must for a foster parent. Gone are the days where you would yell your way out of an issue or problem, and it is communication and mutual respect that has to take over in order for your foster child’s life to be uncomplicated. You’ll also need more humility in your life to admit when you’re out of your league and require assistance in a matter, that assistance can even be from the child themselves to help you with something you’re unable to do yourself.
Respect
You have to respect your child enough to give them space when they need it and room to grow. Your feelings for them might make you overprotective, but you owe your foster child the respect of letting them make some choices in their lives and making mistakes that would help them grow. This is basically the most important thing you’ll do for them so that they could feel like something more than a pet project of someone with an active conscience. The more you respect them, the more they will grow as individuals.
Block out the negativity
While fostering a child is an ultimate act of selflessness and nobility, you’ll still find naysayers and people willing to tarnish your hopes of fostering a child. It’s your duty to ignore the negativity and block out any unkind things that might be directed at you for taking this decision. The negativity might come from the people closest to you, thinking they’re protecting you, but you still have to put that aside and make up your own mind, because at the end of the day, it’s your life and your decision. It’s you who have it in your hands to change a kid’s life, and what an achievement that would be.