Birth Children Speak About Foster Care

Back in this post I shared my personal feelings about how fostering could affect the children in your family.  

Here's a recap:

Q:  How would fostering affect the children already in my home?

I think there are probably a lot of families who are interested in fostering but they are concerned with how it would affect the children already in their home. It's a highly personal decision to make but I think I would offer up this bit of advice to any such families:

A:  If any of the children in your home meet the following criteria:

1) Have special needs

2)  Are very young in age

3)  Are not totally on board with the idea of more children coming into your home

. . . Then it would probably be best to focus on the needs of your own children first before trying to help anyone else's children.

With those thoughts in mind, I was impressed with the maturity and insights the kids in this video shared:

Birth Children Speak About Foster Care from Foster Arizona on Vimeo.

I also noticed when it showed their families at the end of the clip that all of these children seemed to be older than their foster/adoptive siblings which could be a coincidence or it could also be used to support the practice of not fostering or adopting out of birth order.  

On a personal note, fostering or adopting out of birth order is something I've been struggling with recently.  After much consideration my husband and I have come to the hard decision that we're "done" fostering babies or pursuing another adoption through a private agency.  The practical part of me knows that it would be easiest just to wait to foster or adopt any more children till our youngest (just 2 years old) is older.

But then there's my emotional side which just can't ignore the fact that there are so many "older" (as in not babies or toddlers) Waiting Children who need homes.  

And then my practical side debates about how fostering or adopting a child older than our oldest (now 8 years old) would affect our family and our oldest child in particular.  Although our oldest has said she's totally fine with the idea of not being the oldest anymore and would be thrilled to have an older brother or sister that's such a HUGE decision and not one to make lightly.