Reply to What is your experience adopting a teenager from foster care?

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[quote=Anonymous]Echo the part about finances.

My HS boyfriend was a foster kid and had the same foster parents all through HS.  Because they did not adopt him he was eligible for a lot of services and full financial aid in college.  The only trade off is that cps will monitor you more — I remember issues like he absolutely couldn’t get arrested (even for stuff like civil disobedience) because that would trigger a cps inquiry that he didnt want to risk.

My bf’s foster dad worked in the system (and had been basically a foster kid himself) and had handpicked my bf to be a kid that he thought he could help with a level of challenge that wouldn’t be too much for his family.  My bf was very high IQ and came from parents that were very high IQ, and had a stable loving home when he was very young. (Neglect and abuse at very young ages has a different impact than it does at older ages and I think is harder to treat because it affects brain development.). His family did have a history of depression and probably bipolar but I think the foster dad felt like that was the sort of thing he could deal with.  There was no history of real violence.

Anyway, I don’t have a history of adopting teens so maybe my response is not at all helpful to you, but my experience (I also worked with kids in foster care for a brief period) is that you need to know what you’re capable of, and then find the right match for that.  There are a lot of truly wonderful kids languishing in foster care but there are also some real nature/nurture issues that you need to be ready to deal with, including potentially increased genetic risk for mental health and addiction, which is the root cause for a lot of kids who end up in foster care.

I think boys have a harder time finding homes because of the commonly held perception that hurt girls hurt themselves, whereas hurt boys hurt others.

If you’ve never parented a teen before…..teens are tough!  But fostering a teen who had a stable childhood from 0-5 might actually be in some ways easier than raising a teen who was severely neglected from 0-4 and whom you adopted at 5.  [/quote]

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