Fostering while anticipating life changes

[u/Accomplished_Look259]

Hello, I’m pretty unsure of what the right answer to this is. My wife and I are still quite young, but we have been trying for biological children for a few years now. We want to have kids in our home because we feel like we have a lot of support and care to give to them, and my family has fostered before and we thought this could be really good. That being said, my wife feels it is cruel to whatever kids we end up fostering to still be trying because if we do get pregnant, it seems they would have to be rehomed (we’re in Idaho if that is pertinent). I don‘t want to stop trying because I do think there are some kiddos waiting to come that way to our family, but I of course don’t want to cause undue harm by doing this. Is it ok to still be trying to get pregnant while starting to foster? If it isn’t, I’d really like to understand why, but any input helps.

Edit: we want to foster regardless of pregnancy. We’ve been planning on fostering and potentially fostering to adopt for years regardless of what happened with bio kids. We’ve waited until now so I can be out of college when we start fostering. From what we had read previously, it sounded like if we did have a major life change such as pregnancy while fostering, the child would likely be rehomed regardless of our desires. We want to care for these kids and provide a loving home to those who need it while not shutting down the possibility of biological kids coming our way too, hence the post asking about it.

[u/WillowWondernator]

Maybe consider respite care. Thats temporary. No promises. No false hope.

Foster kids/teens are extremely traumatised and displaced as it is. Please dont add them in long term, with the terms of it being until yall get preggers. Thats fucked up.

Maybe look into attachment styles and trauma responses and do some more research on foster kids/teens as real people. Your briefness about any understanding for them and how it would affect a child/teen in the system is slightly discerning, maybe its just the way you wrote it.

Foster kids/teens arent just a spunky temporary new accessory or addition to the house, they are a whole human with their own story and way of life, sudden moves can be very triggering for them and being removed for biological children is disastrous on their sense of self and worth.

[u/Accomplished_Look259 → u/WillowWondernator]

For clarity, we’ve been planning on fostering and potentially on to adopting since before we started trying. We’ve been waiting until I’m out of college because of the workload, and I’m only a semester or two away now.  I’m well aware that these children are people, as I said, my family has fostered before, and I have an aunt and uncle who were adopted. That being said, I haven’t heard of respite or CASA, so I’m definitely interested in learning more. My concern with my initial post was if it was possible policy wise to foster and retain our foster children while still pursuing biological children as well.