Day -365

We've been asked a lot of questions about the entire licensing process and what it takes to be able to foster and/or adopt, so I thought I would write about our journey for anyone else out there who is thinking that this may be something they want to do.  

So as most of you have heard at at some point, this has been a long process.  Ours was a little longer than normal, because of personal reasons, but it will take months at a minimum.  It all began back in November of 2016, when Alania had decided to start looking in to adopting. She first went to the CPS office and then decided to look into agencies that worked with CPS. 

She had decided that we wanted to do foster to adopt over straight adoption bc the process, while still arduous, could be quicker than just straight adoption.  We had also decided to go through CPS and a local agency due to the fact that there are many local children that need our help within our community. The local and state foster system is over loaded with children that need homes, so we decided that we could do some good locally. 

So after Alania did some research on agencies, we decided on SAFE, a local agency that has only been helping families become certified to foster for about 2 years.  We decided on SAFE because of the great work they do with underrepresented people in our community, including teen moms and children who have been the victims of sex trafficking.  

Now, there are quite a few things you need to do to be certified to foster and therefore foster to adopt. The first thing we had to do was take 6 full day (8 hour) classes on a variety of topics. These classes primarily revolved around a few things. One of the primary focal points is a theory of child rearing known as TBRI or Trauma Based Relational Intervention. This method of dealing with and raising children with is designed to prepare practitioners for working with children from trauma and their families.  It focuses on positive reinforcement rather than negative, and the empowerment of the children to understand they they have control over their behavior. It was developed by the Karyn Purvis Institute of Child Development specifically for children and families that have endured emotional and physical trauma and has had a lot of great results. 

The classes also dealt with a number of other things designed to prepare us for having foster children, like how the state expects us to deal with medication and the paperwork and documentation the state requires for these children. There were also classes on cultural sensitivity and psychology of attachment styles and how to make connections with children with a different attachment style than us. Not only are these classes really interesting, in our opinion it is great stuff that any parent would benefit from and a lot of it was common sense. 

But, the state has good reason to properly educate foster families to make sure that the children they are placing have the best care after some of the trauma they have been through. It can also be difficult to work with children who have had such trauma as they tend to have PTSD as well as a number of other behavioral and developmental issues, so making sure parents are equipped to deal with this trauma is important. 

In addition to those 6 classes, we also have to take at least one additional training per year to maintain our certification. 

Once these onsite classes were taken, there were some home visits and certifications online that we had to get. Some of these were video based Ted talks around shame and how this can negatively affect development and at least one was based on state certification around first aid. These all probably totaled about 20 hours of online work that we had to complete and document. 

The next few things we had to do was have our house checked by both the fire marshal and the city for fire safety ad well as general safety. This involved making sure we had up to date fire extinguishers, a plan for fire and emergency evacuation, that our smoke detectors were functioning properly and that things like electrical outlets and cabinets were child proofed. The actual inspections didn’t take more than an hour a piece, but we spent hundreds of dollars and at least 10 hours of our time making sure things were up to code. Again, much of this is common sense, but the state needs to hold foster parents to a standard.

Another thing we had to do was be CPR certified. So we had to go down to a facility and spend about 5 hours of a Saturday to become certified, in addition to online training. It was relatively easy and straight forward, but it was another time commitment to our actually becoming ready to foster. I, for one, am glad we have this training as it could be useful for not just fostering, but in general. 

The last thing we had to do was actually have what they call a home study, which consisted of two visits: one to ensure that our home is fit for children, and one to learn more about us. 

The first visit focused on a checklist about 20 pages long and ensured that we had things like outlets covered, a bed and room for the child to sleep in, hot water, etc.  The second was much more invasive and is basically where a case worker comes to observe us in the home and has a very long conversation about our background, upbringing and really tries to get to know us so they have an idea about who we are and what we are like. This is so that they can create a profile of us that can be used to match us with children that would fit best with our family from a background perspective. They asked us all sorts of questions, from our upbringing, to our relationship, to when and how we'd talk about sex with our kids; although some of these questions were uncomfortable, they were good to discuss BEFORE having kids, and are things that would be good for any couple to talk about and start thinking about before having kids.

We just finished our last home study in February and finally, after more than a year, are licensed to be foster/adoptive parents. This was quite a process and only served to add to some of our anxiety about becoming foster parents.  If you want to find out more information on how you could become licensed to become a foster/adoptive parent in Texas, check out DFPS .  You can also find more agencies on our Resources page.  Or, you can always reach out to us with any questions!