Rewards And Challenges Of Foster Parenting by Mary Loewen

Foster parenting is certainly not for everyone. It requires a special gift – a gift of a true love for children, a gift of patience, and a gift of being an outstanding parent. Not all people realize that and that is why one often hears stories of people who abused their foster children. However, every bad foster parent there are scores that do a wonderful job raising their foster children.

Giving Back

Foster parenting is a way of giving back to your community. Foster children did not choose to be in a parentless situation, and if you have the gift and can make their lives better, then your contribution to the community is enormous. Foster kids are just like any other kids. They also need goals and dreams to become successful adults. Foster parenting should be acknowledged as one of those things that change the world for the better.

There are many testimonies by people who grew up as foster children of how the experience influenced and impacted them. Without being taken care of foster parents, many kids would have went into adulthood without structure and guidance and probably would have turned out at the bottom of society.

If you ever meet someone who is a foster parent, let them know how much you appreciate what they are doing.

Foster Parenting is not without Problems

The first challenge faced by a foster parent is the fact that the foster child arrives at the new home probably carrying a number of emotional hurts and scars. Those need to be identified, worked on, and solved. Many foster children get shunted from one foster home to the other. That leaves the child feeling redundant and unwanted. A child in this condition needs full time support with a family that will love them and make them feel needed.

One of the greatest accomplishments that a family can achieve is taking an out of luck child, turn around the life of that child, and make the kid a contributing and solid member of society. That is a great gift if it can happen with a family. Our busy lives rarely leave time or energy to spend on the special needs of someone who is not our natural born child.

A method of self-protection for many foster children is lying. When a child feels unwanted, it will resort to negative behavior to first of all attract attention and secondly to protect him or her from more emotional hurt. If a child is constantly being moved into new homes, the child will lie as a way to seek approval without sharing things that are negative. A child’s desperation to be loved often result in resorting to lying to succeed in that quest.

Money is definitely not the motivation for engaging in foster parenting. On the contrary, foster parenting can be very taxing on a family’s budget. It has to be done for bigger and better reasons for it to be worthwhile.

About The Author

Mary Loewen writes parenting advice for http://ParentPlaza.com (http://www.parentplaza.com), a site dedicated to helping parents with their solemn task of raising their children.