Evil, Evil Foster Parents

It is a rare thing for foster parents to be portrayed in any sort of positive light, especially in the media.

How many Law and Order episodes focus on evil foster parents living large with a house full of unkempt foster kids?  How many show foster kids being abused or worse at the hands of "the State"?  How many portray foster parents as doing it "for the money"?

I'm not saying it doesn't happen.  I'm not saying that every foster parent is a good person because not every person is a good person.  Some people suck, plain and simple.  This is not reserved for foster parents.

But becoming a foster parent is no easy process.  As I mentioned before, there are mountains of paperwork.  Despite what the media tells you, you cannot be unemployed and be a foster parent.  You have to have some type of income because it would be IMPOSSIBLE to solely live off of the stipend you are given to support a child, even if you were the most frugal person ever and lived off of ramen noodles.

We needed doctors' notes about our health and our sanity.  We all had TB tests.  We needed references and pay stubs (for me and my husband) and tax forms for the past few years. I needed notes from my husband's job saying that he worked out of town and couldn't attend the classes until a later date.  All three of us - my husband, daughter, and I - all had to be fingerprinted and our prints sent to the FBI to assure that we were not criminals or sex offenders.

I had to take the class from September to November, read a huge manual, take tests, act out scenarios, watch videos that made me cry...

Our home was inspected.  We had to have smoke alarms in every bedroom and a carbon monoxide detectors on every floor.  We had to have a fire extinguisher and a lockable medicine box to keep all meds in.  We needed baby gates and countless other safety precautions.  All this would be inspected annually. 

That seems like a LOT of work for someone who was just trying to collect the $18/day.

I'm not saying that a shitty foster parent doesn't get through the red tape and abuse a child.  It happens.  But sadly that bad apple overshadows all the good work that other foster parents are doing in the world... and that just sucks.