Foster parent preparing for the holiday season
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 6 ก.ค. 2024
- The holiday season can be complex for foster families. Here are some things you can do to prepare ahead of time.
How do you prepare for the holidays in your home? Let me know in the comments below. ⬇️💛
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Thank you for this. One thing I'd add is if you're offering to help kids find presents for their family or friends, be upfront about whether you'll help them pay for it.
I wasn't a foster kid, but I was expected to be very financially independent. To me, "I'll drive you to some stores to pick something out" would have meant "We expect to you buy 6 presents, so do some quick math on how to stretch the $10 in your pocket."
Offta. I felt this. I bet it feels great now that you have more financial independence to be able to give people the gifts you've always wanted to 😊
Please remember that ALOT of kids have difficult times with holidays. This may have meant money getting tighter, more fighting around the house, or more intentional abuse.
Kids deserve to have childhood, so learning how to get them to be open about wanting “frivolous” things without punishment is ALSO a good skill to learn around holidays. Many kids won’t come to you with a wish list unless you make it clear that’s okay
Thank you for adding in these nuances!!
It just goes to show a trickle down effect of trauma during the holidays to the next generation. Then the next, and so on. It's great that you're sharing your knowledge. Thank you!
I literally just watched a video here on YT, about a prison nicknamed "Prisneyland". I think the nickname is a grave disservice. It's in the USA; somewhat mimicking a program in Sweden, that lowered its receividism rate to 20% for 2 years. I recommend watching it.
I love how you talk about all these skills! Fosters being able to help a child in life-altering ways; it's incredible! 🥹
Have you ever told YOUR story? How did you get into fostering?
The ideal foster parent… gosh I wish they were all like this.
I come from abuse and a very broken home that I have been adopted in .. I wish I had someone like you in my life .. even now that I’m 29 years old
Love your videos please keep them up
I live in a residental group for 14 to 21 year old mental ill . We got a christmas tree and everyone got his own Advent calendar. At 21.12 we got our personal present . And we got money for buying Gifts for our family if we want. We got our Personal christmas present at 21. Because alot of Teens were allowed to get home for christmas. I liked it that they tryed to make us the time good as possible
How do you foster families go about traditions that involve going out of state? Do you ask your family to come to you (even if you're unable to accommodate everyone), skip it entirely, set up respite care, take the foster child(ren) with you and proceed as you do every year?
this is my first year fostering and atm my FK's birth family are 0-10 for turning up to visitation for both kids (they've been placed with me 5 weeks) and atm our social worker had told me not to plan on them actually turning up but to make my plans work for my family, which since one of them includes going to london (out of country) for a week, that paperwork's been a headache to do
Have you ever had a situation where a foster child was a different religion/celebrated different holidays than you?
So why would a parent only bring a gift for one child, and not the other? Unless they were separate kids from different families, I was confused by this.
Same! I wondered that
In that scene, I'm pretending to talk to a relative. Sometimes relatives in some families do not treat each kid the same. They may be hesitate to spend money on the child if they know they are returning home. I do not feel this is fair to the child - my personal belief is that all kids in the home should be treated the same when it comes to gift giving.
Because some adults are effing brain dead when it comes to how children feel, and our influence on their feelings. There are grandparents who don't buy gifts for step-children. It's cruel beyond words. When it comes to foster children, they never think that the kids are traumatized, by definition of not being in their birth family home, that the holidays can be a difficult time for those of us in the happiest and most functional families for a variety of reasons. But, ya know, Laura said it a lot nicer than I did:-😊
@@foster.parenting I can totally see that. Something similar happened with my own dad one year for Christmas one year. I overheard the conversation my mom had with my dad. I was about 12 and my brother was about 9, almost 10 (his brithday is just before Christmas). My mom found out that my dad still hadn't bought my brother anything for Christmas. When she asked him, my dad said "He doesn't deserve anything." That royally pissed off my mom, and honestly, I felt bad for my brother, even though we weren't close in terms of our relationship. Eventually, my dad went out and bought him a 12 pack of coke , just so he would have "something" from him under the tree that year, but man, that was a very lousy, completely a-hole thing my dad pulled that year.
@@foster.parenting I wasn't really sure if the two kids in the video were siblings in different foster cares. So one of the kids was like your bio kid and the other was the foster kid? 100% if the foster kid is there for Christmas, they should also get a gift. But I guess I can understand some people are more focused on money and forget how upsetting it might be to a foster kid to sit there while the bio kid gets tons of presents and they only got like two things.
What if a kid that previously didn't celebrate Christmas wanted to celebrate it but the perants say no?
This would depend on a lot of things. Could you set up a time for the child to talk about their requests with the worker directly?
Additionally, in a precious few cases, there might be a religious stance behind this one way or the other and that would bear discussion with the worker as well. After all, while a foster parent needs to ensure foster children aren't left out of activities any other children in the home are part of, if this is the first holiday celebration that has come up during the stay, it might be the first time that the teachings or faith tradition (or absence thereof!) in their other family had arisen. One doesn't want the child to be miserable, but also doesn't want the parents to feel undermined.
I will leave the actual foster parents to answer that one, but I will share one tradition my mother's family had that might come in handy: we opened presents Christmas morning, but at some point when I was little, we kids wheedled them into letting us open _one_ present Christmas Eve, and that became our annual tradition. (Mind you, this tradition won't work for any family in which you get a single gift!) It was understood that once we opened that lone Christmas Eve present, no amount of pleading was going to result in our opening any others before the morning. Now, obviously, in a foster parenting situation nobody needs to be begging or pleading for anything, even as a family in-joke, but I wonder if maybe it wouldn't be possible for a family that normally opens things Christmas Eve to leave one present for the morning, or vice versa. It also does make me think that some attention should be given to making sure that if your family has traditionally been one to shower kids in presents, maybe that tradition should be examined before your first holiday with a foster kid arrives. You want them to get the same treatment as your kids get, but it could be rather overwhelming if a kid went from getting no presents or just one in their family to suddenly getting a bunch, particularly since being in foster care means they may not be with you the next year.
How do you go about having kids with very different family traditions , like in one family presents are opened on Christmas Eve and in the other on Christmas morning or one child being used to always having the same food on Christmas, but the other kids don't eat that?
I once met a Jewish foster family who included their foster children in the holidays, made it easier for social workers to arrange for visitation with bio parents on the Christian holidays.
How do you handle religious differences?