The sad reality of what can happen if foster parents don't get help 

This applies to so many areas of care labour. You cannot take care of anyone else if your own needs aren't met. Look after yourselves, folks. You deserve it.

This was painful to watch, like a match burning up. Thank you for highlighting the need for support for foster parents.

As a single working mom of four, two autistic, I ended up with stress induced heart failure. This is real folks.

Not a foster parent, but a mental health worker going through burnout. One of the most challenging lessons I’ve learnt is that you can go into something to help with all your heart and good intentions, and the more you give, the more the world takes from you until you get sick 😔 and sometimes when you advocate for your needs, you might be treated as the bad guy

I like how compassionately you framed the caregiver in this situation. It is not their fault and not their failing. 🖤 The dwindling support from friends and family is especially painful during all manner of tough times.

Thank you for the realistic portrayal shown. Support definitely dwindles. The village loses interest or moves on. We, the foster parents, are left holding the line when caseworkers leave and bio parents are a no show. Its us and we're alone. I make it clear from the beginning: I can do this as long as caseworkers transport for and supervise all visits. It is their job to do so.

Man, this is me. I'm not a foster parent, but I'm a caregiver and I am so, so burnt out. I don't even want to try therapy because I can't imagine them telling me anything other than the standard "remember to take care of yourself!" WITH WHAT TIME AND ENERGY? I'm getting less than 4 hours of sleep per night as it is!

In your example, it really outlines the importance of having set boundaries regarding your time (and schedule for the foster child), and not allowing others to overstep those. If mom, dad and siblings were not able to visit at the same time, maybe each visit needed to be stretched out to fit into the schedule. And so important to have good and continuing support.

I have severe insomnia. I could go 48 hours with absolutely no sleep and be fine. I ALWAYS volunteer to parents to do overnight watches for kids who have trouble at nights. I have a 6 year old little girl, her mother died and her father was abusive, so you can imagine how hard that is. She has trouble sleeping without me, but she’ll usually end up wetting the bed. I’m trying to get her by herself, but she gets absolutely petrified. She is very well behaved, and its rare to see a tantrum, so I’m not worried about that, instead she will sob, and its not a sob for attention sob, its a scared sob. She always will say shes scared she’ll “wake up and never see me again” Which makes me scared if she ever gets placed somewhere else, even though I’ve had her since march, i’m nervous. I wish all the luck in the world to moms who don’t have insomnia like me, and need some sleep.

I think when it comes to a child with higher needs especially, respite care should be a mandatory part of their plan before they are placed in a single foster home. The child goes like a weekend a month to respite care to give the primary foster a break. So basically they would need two foster families. It would be harder to place but it may help the burn out.

Everyone warned me about this and I didn’t really think about it. Sadly, I plan on closing my home as soon as this placement reunites with family. I’m so overwhelmed… and honestly disappointed

Brilliantly illustrated how things can slowly slip away from you, applies to all areas of life!

The father, mother, and siblings all having different visitation schedules sounded super difficult to manage. I'm not sure what I'd do in that case (not a foster parent).

Whenever you board an airplane, and the flight attendants are going through the safety briefing, they always say "put on your mask before helping others". If you pass out because you don't have your mask on, you can't help anyone else either. The same is true in life: you need to take care of yourself and make sure your needs are met before you can take care of others. If you constantly prioritize everyone else and your needs are diminished, you will lose capacity to help others or yourself, and then it's often too late

This is hard to watch. Thank you so much for putting this out there and all the content you make to advocate for improvement to the care system. ❤

Thank you very much for your videos. I'm currently not ready to be a foster parent, but it's really nice to be able to already inform myself and think through things before possibly getting started.

Yep. I've been there. Most frustrating part is when I wasn't told the truth about her history and violence.

Thank you for putting out the good the bad and the ugly. I am not a foster parent but I’ve worked with foster children and I have plenty of adult client now who were foster children and were often abused. I wish every foster child could have a foster parent as trauma informed and kind as you.

There needs to be more consistent, genuinely helpful support for foster parents. "You're doing great, keep it up!!" is not enough.

My agency wont offer me respite despite the fact they advertise respite for the foster carers. Since November I've not had any help from the LA.

This is why I've promised myself that my future husband and I will get some amount of therapy while we're raising our children. Whether it's once a month, once every other month, just whatever we can afford. Taking care of little humans is hard, and they deserve the best, most emotionally available parents possible.

It's a combination of too much going on and everything being on you. Night time respite should have been sorted as a priority. There should have been support to facilitate visits and fewer of them. That sounds harsh, but three or four a week with several different people is too much. Reduce it to once or twice a month and you allow more consistency and time to breathe.

Worst was having a social worker, when I was trying to fill in the gaps of care between a baby being in crisis care and going into long term foster, she just told me “You can’t save them all” and the kid was 18 months old and was sick and we had to wait to get him allowed to have medicine and bc it was a crisis care level care with a private agency, they just terminated the visit and took him back in their care. Mom was going to jail and we didn’t know this and I think the agency didn’t know. She asked us if we would take him for her and we weren’t legally allowed to via our contract with the agency we worked for. So 18 month baby boy was going to be transferred sick with what appeared to be bronchitis immediately back to the social worker care and on to state placement. It burned me hard on taking kids. We took several more but had to end bc the kids were getting us sick (license was for birth to age six) as they were mostly toddlers. I felt bad stopping the care but knowing the social worker was so jaded made me so sad for the kids. You really have to be able to find solutions in caregiving that still fall within the rules. Example being we used steamy bathroom for that child while he was coughing a lot and unable to sleep. Sleep issues are a huge unspoken drain to the kids and foster parents' energy and capacity to provide the quality care that they came to foster care to offer. I find it a super difficult situation in so many ways. Saddest thing is that ultimately the child and their primary caregiver slowly break down in their own ways and kiddo doesn't get their needs met or parent burns out and stops fostering or terminates a placement.

At what point does the social worker step in and say this isn't a good fit when a situation like this arises? Or is this a precursor to a child who slips thru the cracks bc the social worker also has other kids who would be considered "high maintenance?"

Oh gosh. That was very real. I’m cutting back work starting this week. Seeing a therapist for burnout.

I took on a lot as a single foster parent and only later realized the level of chronic stress I had been under. I am practicing saying "no" to proposed placements right now until I feel very confident (still have one child but am licensed for more). It's hard knowing that there are always kids out there needing placement/ home. But if I burn out, I won't be good to anyone. A lesson in self love and reality testing.

Jeez man. I would love love love to foster/adopt kids one day. I have a biological child but that hurted so I wasn’t gonna be doing THAT again, but I love children and I have the patience of a SAINT. It’s my favorite thing about myself. I feel like they make it so hard for regular people to get into fostering/adoption. God was awesome to put you in the lives of so many kids - directly and through these videos that reach so many of us. I use your advice and apply it to my bio kid. You are a blessing. 😊

This. This looks more like my family’s experience with fostering. 😢

This rings hard and loud. We just had to back out of a long term placement simply due to lack of help from worker and services and escalation of behaviors and needs for the child. Just couldn't do it anymore. It was affecting my bio son, my job, my ability to manage my home and my marriage. Burnout is very real and resources and help are very minimal if best. At this time, I don't think we will be fostering anymore either :(

Just getting out of a placement like this. The only things I feel like are missing are one of the foster parents being covered in bruises and a licensor making up her own rules

I am somewhat relieved that other too found this a tough one to watch, not just me. Just going through the fostering set up process now and this channel has been so informative. Thanks.

This was possibly your best video yet. Thank you for your incredibly insightful storytelling.

I really want to foster, but the truth is that besides my father, who I have breakfast with once a week... I really have barely anybody in my social circle who would be willing to help me. It would be really hard for me to foster as a single man, even with my work-from-home job.

It's not hard to see why: This is abuse. Just because they're abusing the foster parents (who are adults) doesn't make it any less abuse. Why are foster parents expected to bend over backwards for the bio parents? If the bio parents want to see their child, it should be incumbent on them to pick up some of the slack. Foster parents are basically expected to do all the parenting work without any rights at all, and bio parents are treated like helpless victims at all times. When I was a nurse in a medical foster home for disabled children, we had kids who had VERY high care needs, but we also had 24/7 staff. We also had parents who were genuinely going through a hard time but did their ABSOLUTE best for their kids under extreme circumstances (homelessness, needing to use survival sex, etc.) and so they had custody and we provided respite care only. Other parents could not have been bothered and would starve their child even when that child was tube fed and all they had to do was push a button. Those kids got removed but given back MANY times. All the tantrums about "Kids get taken away for nothing" is frankly untrue. The system is way too overloaded for that. Make the bio parents PARENT. Require them to take over some of the care tasks for the foster parent such as facilitating visits (safety permitting). All I see in the foster system is healthy, functional adults and innocent children being at the mercy of neglectful, abusive people and no one seems to have a problem with it. They just keep making excuses about "It's not the bio parents' fault, it's the system." The SYSTEM enables this behavior.

Sobering.

The sad part is, there arent enough people to rely ON, if there were, fostering wouldnt be like this.

So how would you resolve that once the kid is in the home?

as a foster child that aged out of the system this is heartbreaking. I actually had something similar happen where a group home decided they were done with foster care and just got rid of all 5 of us. his reasoning was it was gods calling for him to do something else. i will never forgive that man. nor does he deserve to be.

Ooof I can so relate

😢

it takes a village ❤️‍🩹.