Politics

This here. My wife and I went through the process with a local agency that handles fostering for Child Protective Services. Sat through nearly two months of weekly classes, many hours of online classes. They spend a significant time making sure you understand what the situation is, and what your expectations are. For our situation, there were three options for being certified and licensed: foster, foster-to-adopt, or adopt.

For fostering, you could get a different child every night who's only with you for a night. You might get a family of 5 siblings at 2am who are gone in two days. A child might be with you for a day, a week, a month.

For fostering-to-adopt, they generally only place kids with you who seem likely to not end up back with bio-parents, or where the process for the child(ren) going back to the bio-parents seems like it's going to take a lot of time (maybe rehab, or some kind of lengthy court proceedings, etc). But it doesn't always end up that way. Since where I live you have to go back through the licensing process every 5 years, there were people there who talked about how they had been placed with a child who was with them for 2-3 years before ending up back with bio-parents. One foster parent had a child with them for almost 5 years and then the child returned to the bio-parents.

Yes, people who get into that understand what they're getting into. Time and time again you have to make it clear you understand. But when you have the idea that each new child placed with you could end up being permanent, and especially when the placement lasts for significant amounts of time, it's impossible for it not to hurt.

For people who are only interested in adoption, they don't do any foster placements with the parents. They only get to meet children who's bio-parents have lost all legal rights to them. However, the agency made it very clear about halfway through the program that this will basically never happen. That's what our goal was. They said "when you're done with the classes, we'll get in touch with you for home visits, etc. and then get you licensed, but our timeline for that is 6-8 months." They never got in touch with us, even when we and others looking to adopt in our cohort tried to reach out to them after not receiving anything. They only care about fostering.

Going through all this made it very clear that the entire system is fucked from top to bottom. The govt is far too happy to leave children in horrific, abusive, and terrifying situations, while also being far too happy to tear families apart who don't deserve it. There are far too many foster parents who only want to do it for the clout and to feel like they're saviors. And there are so, so, so many children in the system and it makes these agencies far too eager to recruit new foster homes. The agency worked with 5 different counties, and each time we met for classes, they'd say something like "just to help you understand the need, we took in 20 new children last night, and 10 the night before ..." and talk about how they didn't have enough homes for placing them.

Everything about it is fucked, but regardless of how tough it is on foster parents, the children are ones who really suffer for it. I have no idea what the solution is though. It's all a complete nightmare for basically everyone involved.