Parenting Time

Where do I start?

It’s hard. It’s hard to see a family split apart, and to be the person who consistently is a part of it week after week, month after month.

Parenting time is extremely important. It’s what helps to keep any bond or attachment that parents and their children have to remain strong. It helps children feel like their parents didn’t abandon them. It gives children a chance to be loved on by their parents. This doesn’t always look like what we think it should, but it’s not our place to judge it.

Children need this time with their parents, but it’s so hard to be the person who has to take them away from their parents once that visit is over. And although visits most of the time happen several days a week, to child that next visit feels weeks away. And when visits are not consistent, that just adds to how hard this all is.

There are so many things as foster parents that we can do to try and make this part of what we do easier. We can be a cheerleader encouraging parents that they can get through this, when it’s safe we can offer to supervise visits, we can help the children in our care make things to take to their parents on their next visit, or help them pick out a gift on the holidays to give to their parent. We can make sure we give parents photos of their children while they are out of the home, so they don’t miss everything, and so when the children go home they will have those pictures to look back on and see no missing pieces of their life as they were growing up. We can ask parents for advise on how they did things with their children so things feel familiar to the children and this also shows the parents that you are working with them not against them.

Kindness goes a long way. A sence of team shows children in care that we all care about them and we are working together to heal.

Visits are hard, very hard. As foster parents we see first hand the sadness that comes with them at every goodbye. The outbursts and hard behaviors after. Sometimes we hold these children while they cry, until they fall asleep, sometimes we are hated temporarily while their little hearts try to figure out why we would take them away from their parents. Sometimes we are are lashed out at, ignored, set aside, and it’s hard. But we do it, we show up everytime we are called to do the hard stuff, cause it’s whats best for our children from hard places.

And sometimes we see giggles and laughter and joy. And this is why we keep showing up!