It may seem like a no-brainer to say that foster parents should be well paid. They are good people doing the hard work of raising someone else's kids. Right?
Fifteen years ago, I was one of those people. I took good care of the kids who had been placed in my home after being removed from their birth families for various reasons - usually neglect: once because of a severe spanking, another time for "rough handling on the way to the car" when a child was suspended from school. But I also shopped around for the foster-care agency that paid the best, and I took the harder-to-place kids for the same reason.
I justified my pay by saying it was just like my other profession, nursing. I enjoyed taking care of patients, did a good job, but I still expected a paycheck. It took one particular foster child to show me the big difference between nursing and foster parenting.
I don't say "I love you" to my patients.
Michael moved in with me at 9 and at first just enjoyed the benefits of my financial status. He settled in, began to trust me and believed me when I said he was a great kid and I was proud to be his mother - if only temporarily. Kids in foster care need love, acceptance and affirmation even more than our own kids do. But try convincing them you were sincere when they find out how much you were paid for your parental love. They don't stay 9 forever. Some foster children stay with a family for years, and eventually they are old enough to question where the money for the vacations and the second car came from.
I'll never forget the look on Michael's face when he returned from a visit with his mother and asked me, "Did you, like, inherit money or something? 'Cause my mom works all the time and she only has two pairs of shoes. You hardly work and you have about 100."
I didn't have 100 pairs of shoes, but I was well paid for raising him, while his mother would have paid anything to have the opportunity. But she had nothing to pay. She had lost her kids when, at 18, she called the state for help after her husband deserted her. She had no family to fall back on, as she was a former foster child herself. Her poverty cost her the right to raise her own kids.
It seemed wrong to Michael because it was wrong. Money can put blinders on you, but since I took mine off and adopted my last two foster kids, I can see many reasons why it is wrong to pay foster parents too much.
¢ It creates a disincentive to adopt.
¢ It creates a conflict of interest when a foster parent has to report on how family visits are going.
¢ It makes kids look down on their own families.
¢ It attracts people who don't even like kids.
¢ Worst of all, it deals a blow to the child's self-esteem when he learns someone had to be well paid to love him.
Some foster parents are now complaining that they are not paid enough. A coalition of advocates for foster families in California, for example, has filed a federal law suit alleging that what the state pays is less than what it costs to board a dog in a kennel. At first glance it seems that we, as a society, must care more about dogs than kids. But boarding dogs is a "for profit" business. Taking foster kids should be a calling.
I'm not saying that foster parents shouldn't be paid at all. Most are middle-class families that don't have a lot to begin with. But how can foster parents say, as some do, "I love him as if he were my own," if they are not willing to make some sacrifice?
But if there aren't enough foster parents who will do it for just a little financial help, maybe we should look back to the people who already love the child, without conditions - the birth family. Yes, there may be cases, such as an abusive parent, in which a child cannot be returned to his or her family. But in many instances, such as Michael's, pay the birth family the amount that would be paid to foster parents to help them stay together in the first place.
And if it is still necessary to have a stable of "professional parents," such as I was, they should be labeled that. The children should know them from the very beginning - not as foster parents but as paid parents.
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denak (anonymous) says…
Usually when something is written about foster care, it is either heavily slanted towards the naive, overly optimistic "oh all these children need is love" side or the "foster care destroys children" side.
I think it is pretty clear as to which angle this writer is going for. I almost can not write this because I am blown away by what crap this letter is.
First of all, lets get it out on the table just how much foster parents make. It differs from state to state but in Kansas for a "regular" child, a foster parent gets 18.67 a day tax free. For a child with special needs or a particularly difficult child, it can go up to 35 dollars a day. This isn't considered pay. It is considered reimbursement for expenses and when people start adding in all the expenses that a foster parent has to pay for to take care of a foster child, it quickly become apparant that $18.67 a day does not allow the foster parent to "live the good life."
As for her reasons as to why a foster parent shouldn't be paid a lot, allow me to challenge some of her statements.
1) Reimbursement does not create a disincentative to adopt. Most people who adopt through foster care get an adoption subsidy. This can range from zero dollars to the amount of a child's SSI if the child would get SSI. I know quite a few foster parents who have adopted their foster children. I have wanted to adopt three of mine.(a sibling group of two brothers and a girl) Unfortunately, the agency wanted the girl adopted with her brother and her brother's needs were such that they wanted a two parent family. "My boys" reintegrated to their mother.
2) It doesn't create a conflict of interests when foster parents have to report on family visits. First of all, most families have to have some type of monitored visitation before a parent can have unsupervised visits. If the social worker is seeing one thing, but the foster parent is saying another thing, then the social worker is going to look at the motives of the foster parent especially if problems seem to always come up. As a foster parent, you have to decide whether or not you are going to be an ethical foster parent or unethical and what you choose has little to do with that 18.67 a day.
denak (anonymous) says…
3) The reimbursement is not so extravagent that it provides for a luxurious lifestyle. There are foster homes where people have pools, and a lot of amenities that the child would not have at home. But these things are usually paid for through the foster parents jobs, not the reimbursement. I have had foster kids comes to my home from foster homes where the foster parents were well-to-do and have been disappointed. Kids are kids. And they like nice things. Again, as a foster parent you have to be ethical. It is unethical to blow the whole reimbursement check on the child. Most foster parents put the reimbursement check into the family pot and pay for the child's expenses out it. As the child gets older and is about to age out, I've known foster parents that save the reimbursement check or a portion of it, to give to the child for when he or she gets out.
4) As for it attracting people who don't even like kids. Yeah, there are some but they usually don't last long. Trust me, with all the stuff that one has to put up with some of the kids, if you don't like kids or you don't believe they are worth it, you are going to burn out very quickly. However, again, it isn't the reimbursement that is the fault. You find people who become lawyers or doctors simply because of the pay. Like foster parents, they don't last long or they are miserable.
5) Without sounding cold hearted, most children's self-esteem is in the crapper already. If the worst thing that ever happened to a foster child was that they were disappointed to find out that their foster parent was reimbursed for caring for them, then that child would probably survive it. Obvioulsy dealing with a parent's abandonment or sexual abuse or physical abuse is going to have more of an impact on the child's life than whether or not their foster parent was reimbursed.
And that is what we need to remember here. These children are in foster care not because their parents are poor. These children are in foster care because their parents raped them, or sold them into prostitution, or was cooking meth in the living room, or was beating them. There are parents whose childrens are wrongfully in the system. But in the four years I've been foster care, I have had foster kids who have lived through some of the most heinous things imaginable. I have heard of things that are almost incomprehensible.
These children need homes. And considering the wide of things that foster parents have to deal with, 18. 67 a day, doesn't even come close to what foster parents deal with. Psychologist, social workers, judges, lawyers, etc all deal with foster children. If foster parenting should be a calling for foster parents, then it should also be a calling for these individuals. Its not thought, because foster parenting itsn't just a calling. It is a job. And a very demanding one at that also. And 18.67 a day doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of what it takes to be a foster parent.
Dena4
El_Borak (Bill Hoyt) says…
California must really pay foster parents well, because I get less per kid per day than I make in an hour of work, and I make less than my wife. And out of that comes not only diapers and food and gas and clothing (though I do receive an extra couple hundred a year for that), but in some cases (like one of my foster daughters) the costs of putting her in a private school small enough that she can thrive.
It's a truism that those kids who can go home should. As a libertarian I'm not keen on the ability of the government to take many kids from homes in the first place, though I understand the necessity in case of real danger to the kids. But that's a matter of courts and law, completely unrelated to those who change diapers.
But the "naming" creates an interesting argument, because if paying foster parents makes them but parents for hire, wouldn't giving that same money to the real parents make THEM parents for hire? And if paying foster parents creates an incentive to keep children in the system, would paying the parents not create an incentive to have more kids, even as they prove that they cannot care for the ones they have?
Foster parenting is not unlike nursing in one respect: foster parents are providing a service that the state demands based on its own laws and courts and ought to pay for. But did she as a nurse never love a patient (I'd be amazed), never care for that patient above and beyond the level of her paycheck? When she got a 4% raise, did she care for them 4% better? What a sad, selfish approach to meeting the needs of others.
And it's all well and good that foster parenting should be a calling. There are a lot of shoulds in the world. But I would argue that anyone who deals with what foster parents do, nursing abused children back to some semblance of physical and emotional health, holding them when they scream in abject terror for several hours every night until they finally fall asleep from pure exhaustion, dealing with the nightmares and the crapping on the floor and the screaming and the hitting and the stealing and the lying (not just from the kids, but from the parents and the social workers as well), who take time off from work to drive for an hour each way to hearing after hearing that is continued because the court could not find the parents to tell them their parental rights are being severed, are obviously not in it for what they could earn working an extra afternoon every week.
tangential_reasoners_anonymous (anonymous) says…
I can't compete with these lengthy posts.