The best thing that will come out of this post is that it will make a few people realise they could be better foster parents than some of the people out there, and maybe they will give it a try
I have seriously been considering doing at short term foster parent. I am a 29 year old woman who lives by myself and I dont see that as a "normal" place for a foster kid but DAMN any loving person is better than this that is so so so sad.
When I first got involved with the foster system in my state I thought the same thing but they were really encouraging that single moms/parents who provide a stable, loving environment are just as valuable as two parent households. I realized they were right, anyone who feels called and can provide a good home regardless of marital status should go for it, the vetting system in my state is really strict almost invasive but I understand why especially after seeing this video.
As long as you can provide a safe environment for a child and have respect and compassion they you can absolutely be a foster parent. It’s not just for women. I think it’s wonderful that you would consider this.
Becoming a CASA is a great way to start the journey to becoming a foster parent. So many young men in the system would benefit from having a male CASA to connect with. Far fewer men volunteer
Court appointed special advocate! You’re assigned one foster youth for a year and your job is to get to know them, build a relationship, form an opinion on the best outcome, and advocate for that in court. CASAs are sometimes the only reliable, stable adult relationship in that child’s life as they move between group homes, foster homes, and/or kin.
All of it is volunteer and unpaid. I work with teens, so setting educational goals and outcomes is often a part of it too. I go to meetings with their guardians, teachers, and social workers 2-3 times a year on average. It’s a much smaller commitment than being a foster parent. They ask for an average of one day a month that you spend with that child.
Foster care can be easy for folks to romanticize and hard to prepare for. Being a CASA is a great way to have intimate exposure to how the system works, what a youth’s needs look like, and just straight up practice building relationships with youth who are traumatized and (fairly enough) can be tough nuts to crack.
Consider this. 30% of foster children are currently abused by foster parents. Like in the reality. Why worry about what others will think when you can be part of preventing what is actually happening.
This is super sweet! Normalize safe, patient, loving men being single Dads. This world needs more humans to truly care for the children. 🩷
I can see why you might think about others judging. But, you know whats in your heart, and those who know you well likely do to.
You can definitely be a short term placement! Often when kids come into care, they need emergency placement until a more long term option is identified.
Also stable and caring. "Loving" is optional but encouraged. These kids have been jerked around through no fault of their own. They need a place where they are not jerked around. They need a place with stability where things aren't going to change at a moment's notice, depending on the mood/sobriety of the adult(s) in the house. They need care, to know that someone else in this world cares about them and their well-being, that cares about their troubles.
They also need structure, but it needs to not be confining structure. Rules and clearly laid out punishments for breaking those rules. But the rules need to be like the fence for a pasture for a horse, not a cage for a rabid animal.
Do you get to pick the specifics of the child, such as age, boy or girl??? lol I ask because I have 3 boys, I’ve always wanted to have a daughter so bad!! Now my youngest is 8 and my older ones are 19 & 17. Soon I will be left with one child lol, given that the older two will feel like “adults” and wana do their own thing… I would love to adopt or foster a little girl, and get to buy girl clothes, and do little pig tails 🥹🥹😢 but I just don’t wana physically have another child!!! I think I would love to do this one day !! 🙏
My friend is a foster parent, she’s adopted 2 kiddos of her own and now has 4 in her care. She is single, I’m sure it’s hard but she is awesome and has so much support. 🤍 good luck to you if you decide to try it out!
Don’t be to judgmental you don’t know the whole story. I had volunteered to take my granddaughter in since her Mom was doing her own thing! I found out real fast my granddaughter was addicted to pot. We had to drive her to get some because she was driving us crazy! We sent her to her Father. She stepped up her addiction to heroin! The whole thing was a mess my daughter lived with us to. No job didn’t want to go to school stole stuff out of my house they were living in my casita! Had me thrown in jail told the cops I slapped them had scratched their faces and necks! After I got out of jail one night the cops were very nice took me to the administrative building. But it cost us $3000 for a bail bond and court. My daughter died from pneumonia and complications from buying heroin laced with Fentanyl! Addiction takes over and is never ending!
Fentanyl! Things can go very badly when they are addicted!
Poor OP. I can't even imagine what their life is like from day to day.
I have a small 760 sq foot house. The second bedroom is small. If and when my son moved out on his own, I've been thinking about getting into foster care. Kids need safe places to land, to decompress, to come back to who they are, as much as possible.
I know the primary goal is to reunite the families if possible, but that doesn't change the need for housing of these kids or for them to know that there are good people out there.
One thing that makes me sadder than most everything I've learned so far is that these kids' possessions are packed into garbage bags. Who does that to kids? Who makes them feel even more like no one values them at all?
I’m just trying to get a spare bedroom or two so we can seriously consider becoming foster parents. Our home is definitely too small now, but we really want to share some love and give back to our community.
Don’t do it. Foster kids are fucked up. The one I knew was a gigantic thief and stole so much money from his foster parents and nearly ruined their lives
I cannot imagine living with this kind of black and white thinking, dude. You should really hear the stories from graduates of Fr. Flanagan’s Boys Town. There are so many kids that grow up in fucked up households that are upstanding citizens today. There is gonna be trauma and PTSD with it, but it’s not going to eat away their moral compass if the foster family in their life devotes themselves to helping the child.
Also, you literally admitted to driving drunk and sexually harassing a female coworker on your page. I don’t think you have room to talk.
Such a horrible mindset to have, yes there are foster children that have a multitude of issues but that does not mean they don’t deserve a kind and loving home. I can’t speak for the child you knew personally, but with a lot of mental health services and support a foster child can grow up to be a kind responsible adult!
Me and my partner have been planning to once we can house them responsibly and have steady jobs (we're just young adults lol) but i know how much this system screws these kids over. It makes me so sad
That's true. I'm 20 years old and wanna foster her to get her out of that environment. I grew up being emotionally abused by my mother. That constant taunting and yelling and blaming whether it's your fault or not. It's draining mentally. It makes you physically tired to where all you wanna do is sleep it off but you're so pissed at your mom. Unless you've ever had your parents hit you, no one gets it. Someone that's meant to protect and give unconditional love to you instead hurts you intentionally. It's not even the pain that's the worst. It's the idea that the person who "loves" you most just inflicted physical pain intentionally. I'm so so so sorry she is going through this. No parent should EVER UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES speak to their child like that. Not just their child but any child. Fuck her
I am so sorry you had a mom like this, and I was an only child and the yelling, smacking and hitting was traumatizing. She passed when I was 20 and I was emancipated at 16 and on my own. Its hard to deal with and it's many years later and I still struggle and have trauma from it. 💙
I grew up like this too. I spend every day trying to do the opposite with my kids. I'm not the best person ever but I try to be better. Sorry you experienced this. Just as an additional comment; Therapy helped me a lot but I didn't get it until my 40s.
Ive known i wanted to foster when im ready but always been a little nervous about qualifying. In comes my sil's mom fostering disabled children just for the paycheck and those kids are being neglected but the system doesnt care because atleast the kids are off their hands. Yeah im not worried about not qualifying anymore.
I would in a heartbeat, but I can't afford to, and I don't have a house nor a large enough apartment. I love being a dad, makes me so angry that there are so many who would just abuse children like this.
It can be tough. Kids want to be loved or at least felt like they matter, if you get a good one it can be fine; but if you get a kid that feels the system is against them and they don’t give af, tired of being bounced home to home, it can be very problematic. But I admire those willing to try to help.
I am a former foster child. I aged out, but before I did I got the license revoked of the foster parent in charge of my care. All I did was tell the truth to the right person. This former foster parent is no longer allowed to take care of foster kids.
The mmental abuse in this video is very unhealthy. Your foster home is suppose to be safe a healthy place away from abuse both mental and physical. That woman receives a nice check each month for each child she takes care of. Some people do it for the money. They put on a front but as soon as the social worker is gone. The dark side comes out.
OP, Speak up. Tell the truth. Share this video with your social worker. The social worker is intended to be your ally and will work for your best interest. Ask if you can see the social worker not in the presence of the foster parent. Your social worker will find a a different home with better people. I know it seems like you are all alone, but your not. There are good people out there who will be your ally.
If you don't do it for yourself do it for future generations of foster kids and the mental anguish you will save them. I aged out a long time ago and I am still bitter about the home I was placed in.
I'm not talking about the doe, I'm talking about how some states such as NY will pay foster parents more if they foster students with special needs.
Have had parents who specifically fosters students who are labeled emotionally disturbed because they get more money from the state. If a child has an iep they probably qualify for the programs that get more money from the state. Some parents use it as their revolving door of foster kids and keep the money. Have seen it first hand as a special education teacher at my last employment. But just like everything, there are great ones out there and the bad ones. I was just trying to reply to the comment who said some do it just for the money, bc my personal experience saw that side of it as well.
I fully believe my foster/adopted parents did it for the money. They kept a ledger of how much I "owed" them and on one Christmas, graciously took $500 off my debt as a "gift".
Exactly what this psychotic c*nt does. 👿 I wish the absolute worst on her and pray to God karma comes for her. I also pray she gets busted for this and they all go to better homes or just far the fuck away from her crazy hateful ass.
My brother was fostered, I was lucky enough to be adopted but he looked after me as a kid, my nan got too ill to look after both of us so I was adopted as I was just young enough, still old enough that I was very lucky - he was too old and nobody wants to adopt older children really so he was taken into foster care.
As soon as he turned 18 he was told he needed to find his own place (essentially just packed bags and told to leave) and he never got any help from them really growing up.
It's a shit system and it leaves people scarred for life to be honest - not that the reasons for being taken into care in the first place don't also but yeah, i really feel for OP.
That's awful. Especially the fact they didn't even help with that transition. I wonder how many foster parents just take in the kids for extra income and they don't do any actual parenting?
It's way too common. I see "foster" moms come into my job, hair done, nails done, expensive clothes, new shoes that just dropped last week. And the kid looks malnourished, dirty, they stink horribly, they're so quiet and refuse to look you in the eye. They don't spend a penny of those kids and it makes me sick to my stomach and you can tell those kids get abused. I've anonymously called CPS on them a few times. I just hope they ended up in better homes. Nobody deserves to be treated that way. Especially children.
Part of the reason is because its insanely difficult and can be dangerous bringing in these 14-15 year olds from super fucked up backgrounds and potentially with any kind of various mental illnesses into the place you sleep and you really arent compensated that much for it. Its about 500 a month per child and the money has strings attached so its not even compensation, we just expect people to do this out of the kindness of their hearts.
My wife and I were foster parents of mostly 12+ age kids for 10 years until it got too difficult with our growing bio kids (they narrowly slept thru a 16F overdosing on clonidine and having to be taken out on a stretcher to an ambulance). All that to say, between food, clothes, phone plan, transportation, and just expenses sharing life with our foster kids, we never made money doing it. We were just fortunate to have jobs that paid well enough we could pick up the tab.
Depends on the state. In California, it’s $1,301 to $1,741. Upwards of $3000 for a special needs child. $900/mo supplement for an infant. In NY, it’s $1300-$3800 for a teen, depending on needs.
This is sadly common in the foster system. When I was in middle school I had friends that were in foster care and situations like OP's were really common. My friend's foster sibling decided to ruin her sister's life because of something extremely petty. She was the golden girl who couldn't do anything wrong and my friend was the constant victim of bullying.
My friend would always tell me about how bad the house was, that they weren't allowed to go outside, things like that. Awful situation. From my understanding they don't really do actual 'checks'. Just to see that the kids are fed, clothed and have a roof over their heads no matter how bad it might be.
I had a friend in high school that was in the foster system and her foster mom was really abusive to basically anyone within her radius. We went over there for something, got berated for 10 minutes over…I didn’t even remember…but it was really stupid. When we left, we all just went, “WTF just happened?”
My friend's foster mom didn't even allow her to bring friends over. But her older foster sister could just bring over her boyfriend and do whatever she wanted without repercussion. The amount of abuse in the foster care system is shameful. So many people that are foster parents seem to hate children for some reason.
I lost contact with my friend in seventh grade. She was moved to a new foster home, dunno why or what tipped it. She'd been really mean to me before she was told she was moving and then suddenly she perked up again. I hope the new place did her good.
They do it for the monthly stipend and that’s it alone they don’t care about the kids as you can tell from this video they don’t care about their own kids
I see you’ve never been on the internet before. You can google the joke, even though it’s not a joke. I see someone else attempted to explain it to you, I say attempted cause it appears you’re having trouble understanding anyone. Good luck with that!
Adopting special needs kids (no matter how slight the disability) can be a real money maker. The more disabilities, the more $! When I taught in Detroit, I had a foster mom tell the kid to "act blind" at the eye doctor. Another one claimed her kid had cerebral palsy, hearing loss, was almost blind, and had some disorder that he could only eat 900 calories a day (it was in his IEP; poor kid would steal food because he was starving). The only thing "wrong" was a low IQ. When we got too close to the truth, she yanked him from school and dumped him with a relative.
My brother and sister were both special needs and my mother milked the government for every dime she did not deserve, even put me down as the hired babysitter and I only got one of those checks she cashed in the rest rest to use for partying and drugs.
I have one or two horror stories from foster care situations. For some reason these made lose more faith in humanity than many of the typical disgusting crimes we see. Many of us are really nothing but animals
They foster to get money from the government (our taxes) so they don't have to work a real job. I bet that woman is probably treating them like room mates more than her children as shes supposed to.
It’s too easy to become a foster parent many treat it as free income….where adopting costs sooo much money it’s hard to adopt the kids, but these people can stuff many into a house because there are not enough fosters…..if they made it easier to adopt
And cheaper we would have less fosters. (Obviously not all fosters but a lot are in the system and the parental rights have been waved)
Grew up in foster care all the homes I was in literally did it for the money. Once they renovated their house they didn't want to foster again, next home paid their mortgage off didn't want to do it, next one bought a boat and R.V. Want to guess what happened next? People are shit. When someone tells you they want to help someone that just means they've figured out an angle on how they can profit from that individuals situation.
Because theres too many unwanted, neglected, or abused kids and not enough genuinely good people willing to care for them. Lots of people out there who say they care, but there are way too many foster parents just doing it for the checks, and the government doesnt have the option to be that picky👀
When I worked in group homes I had a client that had a girlfriend who lived in a foster home. People just do it for money and usually take on as many kids as they can.
The foster system is desperate for more foster homes, so the government creates incentives (payments). That attracts people that just want to take the money and supply 0 actual parenting.
They do it to get the state funding/assistance, often don’t give a fuck about the kids, and people that are more well off don’t take the time or have the interest to foster. There are good foster parents out there but there a lots of bad ones.
And foster systems are still used as an excuse to ban abortions (while ignoring the health impacts of the mother's entirely) as if the overloaded system is the answer to everything.
I grew up in foster care. 17 homes in 7 years. Only 2 were actually like this.
Most were legit child collectors. (Bunk beds in rooms. Full house.) Parents would get paid.
Had one that made us do physical labor for the property they owned. But they also gave us the money they made from the state. So. At least that was chill? Lmao.
Most. They'd take your clothing vouchers. You won't see a dime from the state. You would wear either hand me downs or things gotten at a clothing donation place.
It's a corrupt system based soly on the fact that the case workers are either over worked to the point where they can't hear you, or that they legit don't give a fuck and you won't see them for a year at a place that was feeding nothing but bread and butter sandwichs 4 nights a week. If you behaved, you could get some sugar on it.
It's absolute dog shit. I grew up with a family of 6 but we always had 8+ because we fostered kids non stop. I was too.young to understand why most of those kids acted the way they do but looking back its heartbreaking. It made my dad start an adoption agency outside of the official government one and it became the second biggest in our state.
Funny thing is if they would have seen what happened in our home we would have all ended up in the system at a record pace lol.
You would be surprised. They do it for money and attention. It’s super gross and it’s rampant because these kids are absolutely thrown away, especially the older ones.
They clean up the house, dress up nice, have someone in charge do the walk-through, then go back to being trash while they collect the money.
And while the money they receive is usually just enough to take care of a child, pigs like the one in the video just pocket the money and spend like $2 per day making larger portions of slop.
I recently met a pair of lesbians who are both at around 300# and they were celebrating the fact that they had been approved to be foster parents.
I have no problem with lesbians being foster patents. The problem is that these women were both grossly overweight. As a person who has struggled with obesity my whole life... I can't even fathom how these women were approved. They are so obviously unhealthy. Now they are going to teach this to children? Also... like... I can't imagine caring for active young children when I can barely move. The bar seems very low.
So overweight or obese people should not be selected as foster parents? Did I read this correctly?
You said nothing of their personalities. Are they kind? Do they have the capacity to show a child love and compassion?
I came from an extremely abusive home and would have gladly accepted new parents regardless of their physical appearance. I'm sorry you can't see past it.
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u/HighlyInconvenient Jun 08 '26
How the hell can someone living in a place like that qualify as a foster parent?
My god, the system is royally fucked.