September is National Kinship Care Month. It’s a great time to recognize the people who do the tough job of caring for children within their extended families. It’s also a good time to recognize the legal gaps that many such caregivers can fall into. Picture a grandmother…
I once told one of my foster daughters something my grandmother had told me years earlier. She got quiet for a minute. Then she admitted that it had been so long since she’d seen her own grandmother that she’d forgotten what her face looked like….
As I discussed in my last post, commitment is the cornerstone of parenting in foster and blended families. However, healthy commitments can never be unlimited. We should love our kids unconditionally, but healthy commitments are never unconditional. We must establish healthy boundaries in order to protect and grow our relationships with our children…
When stepping into the role of a foster parent or stepparent, you may hear that all you need to do is love your kids. Love is wonderful and essential, but it is not enough. Love alone won’t sustain your challenging relationships with children who have suffered trauma. Commitment — unwavering, realistic, and bone-deep commitment — is the only foundation for building a healthy relationship…
I’ve mentioned before that I’m a sucker for made-up holidays, and this week is no different. Tomorrow is National Tell a Fairy Tale Day, and it prompted me to start thinking about what fairy tales can tell us about foster and blended families. I’ve written before about what fairy tales can tell us about being the mentor rather than the villain in our kids’ stories. Today I want to look at some of the other lessons that fairy tales can teach us about raising other people’s children…
An important principle in setting priorities for your foster or blended family is understanding how to balance everyone’s unique needs. Younger children, for example, need more of our time than older children. Children who have suffered trauma have more complex needs than children who haven’t gone through those experiences. In addition to the usual work commitments, school requirements, and extracurricular activities, we have to find time and energy to encourage emotional healing and building trust. To meet all of those demands, we need to remember some important principles…
This week of Valentine’s Day is a good time to remember raising other people’s children requires us to prioritize our marriage after self-stewardship but ahead of our children. As parents, we know that we need to put our children’s needs ahead of our own. We should not put them ahead of our marriages…
When talking about how to set priorities, I always start with core values and self-care (actually self-stewardship) as the foundation. The reason I put those two at the bottom of the pyramid is that we can’t adequately care for our families unless we first put in place the resources that we will need to draw from…
Being a foster parent or stepparent comes with unique challenges, but it also offers profound opportunities. One of the most critical lessons in this journey is understanding how to set priorities to create a solid foundation for your family. Over the next few weeks, I’ll post about why I think certain priorities come before others. Today, I want to give an overview and explain why I believe children should be last, instead of first in the order of family priorities…
Next Sunday is Groundhog Day, a holiday that, because of one of my favorite movies, has become forever linked with repeating the same day over and over. That’s a familiar sensation, whether we are foster parents, step-parents, or biological parents. Parenting often feels like a revolving door of reminders: “Say please,” “Don’t forget to wash your hands,” “We don’t hit when we’re angry.” No matter how many times…
I like to describe raising other people’s children as learning how to fit into the stories that our children tell themselves. We humans are story-telling animals. For thousands of years, we have used stories to learn and make sense of our reality. Our children have done the same thing from their earliest days. They have a narrative of their life, and when we enter it, they have to figure out where we fit…
Helping our kids process the loss of a biological family and new family dynamics can challenge even the most patient caregiver. Here’s how we can respond in ways that can build a healthy blended family or at least not torpedo whatever fledgling relationships we have with the children we are parenting…