What's the first week of foster parenting like?
The first week a child spends in your home can be a blur. There will be a lot to take in—new people, new patterns, new terms, and new roles. Some families find it helpful to use a few days of vacation time that week, using a fun day trip or outing to help ease the transition. Other families don't have that luxury. With so much change, still other families prefer to maintain their routine. However you choose to cope with all this change, the most important piece of advice we have for you is this: Triage. Don't try to do it all at once.
Triage is a concept with its roots in emergency medicine, fused in 1792 by the Chief of Surgery in Napoleon's Imperial Guard. The same guy invented the ambulance. And hospitals still use the same fundamental idea at times today. When a sudden surge of injuries overwhelms the first responders (think a train derailment), they have to make tough choices about how to spend their most precious resource: attention. Not everybody can receive treatment at once, so triage is a process of categorizing patients, making quick decisions about whether someone needs medical attention right now (cardiac distress) or if a painful but stable injury can wait to receive treatment later (a broken bone). Borrow that page of the playbook, and use it in your first week as a foster parent, or frankly whenever you start to feel like too little butter spread over too much bread.
In that first week, there will be many forms to read, appointments to make, and people to meet. And all that work, all that responsibility will look like it's blinking red and already past due.
But it's not.
Most of it can wait.
No really, most of it can happen whenever you have time to do it in an unhurried way.
“Group the work into categories, and focus on the things in each that actually can’t wait untill later.”
So triage. Make difficult but necessary decisions about how you are going to spend your limited attention. Group the work into categories, and focus on the things in each that actually can't wait untill later. Do those things first, and then move on to the others. Use whatever categories make sense to you, but our people-first approach prompts us to suggest thinking about the types of people who need your attention. There are three that stick out:
You.
This is not the week to neglect your self-care. Keep up your rest, hygiene, exercise, and nutrition. It can be tempting to set all of your own needs aside—especially in a critical time like the first week a foster child spends with your family—and focus completely on the child(ren). But don't do that. It's a trap. You will be a better parent and you will provide better foster care when you are healthy. At Skookum, nobody trades their own health for the health of someone else. We are not in that business. We are in the business of making more people healthy, increasing the total net health and well-being in the world. We are not in the business of trading our health, your health, for someone else's.
The child(ren).
Oh right. There are kids to care for. New kids, kids who weren't here before. What do they need? Your social worker will probably give you some kind of tipoff about what things are most urgent. Think about kids (and all people's, for that matter) needs in three categories.
Body—Do the child(ren) have lice? That would be an example of something to do right now. When was their last dentist appointment? That one can wait till later, but start making a list. What is their sleep routine? What kind of food do they eat? You probably have these and many other questions about the child(ren)'s physical health. And while it might seem most convenient to ask the child all these things, anything you can learn from a file or from the social worker will mean one less probe you have to make at a child who's been questioned quite a lot recently.
Heart—There are lots of big feelings in foster care. And that needs to be okay. You should tell them that it's okay, and you should show them that it's okay by keeping your cool when those big feelings come out in unexpected ways. But for many kids, all that will come later. Many kids describe feeling numb in those first days. Cara, a brave alumna of foster care who was generous enough to share her story described that numbness melting away many weeks and months later.
We sometimes call those first weeks that a child spends in foster care the "honeymoon period" because that numbness leads to passive behavior. But as they relax and become more comfortable with you and in your home, their personality will start to blossom and you'll start to see more of the big feelings / big behaviors that we spend so much of FosterClass talking about. Take that as a sign of progress. If a kid feels at home enough to let their big feelings out, then you are making progress. Stay the course.
Mind—Rather than asking lots of questions of a child, do your best to answer the questions that they might have. Not all of them will come out in words. Some will come out in behavior, and others won't come out at all. Use your empathy muscles to make a best guess at what a child might be wondering and give them the answers no matter how and whether or not they ask.
Other people who depend on you.
When preparing to become a foster parent, you may have had a conversation with one or more people who depend on you—maybe a spouse, your biological children, or some friends—about how things might change (or not) and how your attention would (or would not) shift once foster child(ren) arrived. All that advanced planning is great, but THIS is the time when those people will find out if you meant it or not. In the flurry of change and new things, don't break promises that you made when things were calmer. You should still be on the soccer field sideline cheering just as loud as you did before you became a foster parent. This first week and how you distribute your very limited attention will go a long way to determine how committed the rest of your family and community remain to foster care.
One last piece of advice: take some pictures. It'll be over before you know it, and the memories of that first week will fade. But a year or so from now you'll be parenting a very different child, and if you have some photos they may jog your memory and cause you to swell with pride at how much they have grown while living in your home.