How Long Will a Foster Child Stay In My Home? - Weekend Wisdom

Question: We have two boys, ages 10 and 12. We’ve been told that if we become a foster family, the foster children will have to have a room to themselves. Our boys can share a room for another year, but then we want to separate them. Can we just foster for one year? How long do foster kids usually stay?

Resources:

• Becoming a Foster Parent
• Raising Foster Children
• Working with Birth Parents for the Child's Best Interest

Transcript

Please pardon any errors, this is an automated transcript.
Welcome to this week's Week in Wisdom by Creating a Family. We are here to answer your foster adoptive or kinship questions. So send your questions our way to info at creatingafamily .org.
Today we're going to be answering a question about how long a foster child will stay in your home. Here's the question. We have two boys, ages 10 and 12. We've been told that if we become a foster family,
that the foster child will have to have a room to themselves. Our boys can share a room for another year, but then we want to separate them. Can we just foster for one year? How long do foster kids usually stay?
Well, the answer is yes, you can foster for however long you want, but it can get complicated. So there really aren't any simple answers to how long a foster child usually will stay.
And every child's experience is unique, and there are many factors at play. The goal of foster care is almost always to get the child back to their family as fast as it can be done safely.
The length of time varies anywhere from, honestly, a few days to a few years. The federal report that tracks this is called the adoption and foster care analysis and reporting system.
And as with everything in the government, it has an acronym, Afghars. The latest Afghur report says that the average length of time that a child stays in foster care is 22 and a half months.
The problem is if you just want a foster child for 12 months, the problem is that it might force the child to move to another home at the end of the year, and each placement disruption is hard for the child.
So my recommendation is to talk with your licensing agency and explain your hesitancy with the length of time and be honest with them.
The truth is we need foster families. I don't know of a single jurisdiction that is not looking and actively seeking foster families. But I do think you need to go in with the realization that if you have a hard and fast cutoff at one year,
it could put the child in the position of having to be forced to make a move. And I wouldn't want to do that unless it's absolutely necessary. Anyway, I hope I've answered your question.
I wish you the absolute best of luck. Fostering can be so very, very rewarding. Also, creating a family has a wonderful new training slash workshop.
It is for parents to understand prenatal exposure to alcohol and drugs. It is a four and a half hour training over three sessions. bitly slash prenatal dash exposure dash training that's b it dot l y slash prenatal dash exposure dash training and thanks for listening to this week's week in wisdom if you liked it please tell a friend to subscribe to the creatingafamily .org podcast the weekend wisdom will automatically come
when you subscribe see you next week