Can I Foster a Baby If I'm Single? Should I?? - Weekend Wisdom

Question: I’m a single 38-year-old woman. I’ve always been interested in fostering, but I thought I’d wait until I got married. That doesn’t seem to be on the horizon, and I’m tired of waiting. Is it possible to foster as a single woman? Will it be too hard? I prefer a baby placed with me since I'm new to parenting.

Resources:

• Becoming a Foster Parent
• Fostering as a Single Parent
• Self-Care for Foster Parents

Transcript

Please pardon any errors, this is an automated transcript.
Welcome to Weekend Wisdom by creating a family. This is our opportunity to answer your questions, so please send us your questions. The question for today is,
I'm a single 38 -year -old woman. I've always been interested in fostering, but thought I'd wait until I got married. That doesn't seem to be on the horizon, and I'm tired of waiting.
Is it possible to foster as a single woman? Will it be too hard? I'd prefer to have a baby place with me since I'm new to parenting. Well, first of all, good for you for not continuing to put your life on hold while you wait for Mr.
Wright. So I'm going to start with the fostering as a single person and then talk about fostering a baby. So the answer is yes, you can certainly foster as a single mom.
In fact, some kids will do better being placed in a foster family with a single mom. If you have a bedroom for the child, you should definitely consider it. As to fostering a baby as a single mom,
the answer is yes, but there are a few caveats. First, many of the infants that come into care, especially newborns, because of prenatal substance exposure, are often accompanied by prematurity or low birth weight.
These kids will not be able to go into daycare very soon, so placement agencies are often looking for stay -at -home moms or stay -at -home dads. My suggestion is to be very up front with the agency you're working with and ask them,
how realistic is it for you to get a placement of an infant? Think about whether you'd be open to fostering toddlers or preschoolers or even early -school -aged kids. And remember that fostering is supposed to be temporary stay and not an avenue for an adoption.
So if you're open to different you'll increase the likelihood of a placement and you can learn what age works best with your life and your work. So tips for single fostering.
One gets a support system in place before your first child arrives. The reality of fostering is that there are a lot of appointments and visitations and things like that.
They didn't necessarily tell you about that, but there is a lot of driving to appointments and visitations. So you need to realistically see how much flexibility you have at work and for taking off from work and you can stress to the placing agency what you can and can't do as far as taking off from work and that you need to be up front about with them.
So good luck. Fostering can be such a rewarding experience. I really do wish you the best of luck with this. Before you go, let me tell you about the interactive training our support group curriculum for foster adoptive and kinship families you can find it at parent support groups .org we have 25 different curriculum each on a different topic and with almost no preparation you can run a high quality training or support
group each curriculum comes with a video a facilitator guide a handout and an additional resource sheet If you need certificates of completion for CE credit, you can get that too.
It's really terrific. The topics are excellent, so check it out at parent supportgroups .org. And thanks for listening to this week's Weekend Wisdom.
If you like it, please tell a friend and also send us your questions. See you next week.