What is foster care?
Q: What is foster care?
A: Foster care is when a child is living and looked after by a family which is not their own, usually because their own parents are not able to look after them.
Q: What do you need to do to make sure your foster child feels welcomed into their new home?
A: To make sure your foster child feels welcomed into their new home, you would need to do more than just open the front door for them. Welcoming a foster child into your home is like a balancing act.
Q: Why might children be put into foster care?
A: Children may be put into foster care for several reasons. The parents may be very ill or unable to control their own lives, perhaps because of alcoholism or drug addiction. They may be in prison or the children may be threatened with violence in their own home. Children are put into foster care so that they are safe and can live a more normal life in someone else's home.
Q: Who looks after the fostered child instead of their own parents?
A: The person who looks after the fostered child instead of their own parents is called a “foster parent”.
Q: How does this arrangement become legally binding?
A: When a child is fostered there has to be a legal agreement where power is given through the court of law to the foster parent to look after them, making them “in loco parentis” meaning “in the place of the parent” and allowing them to make decisions about the child as if they were real parents.
Q: Is fostering always long-term?
A: In most Western countries fostering can sometimes be a long-term arrangement, perhaps until the child has become an adult but in many cases it may also be possible for the child to return back with their family later on if circumstances have changed.
Q: How does adoption differ from fostering? A: Adoption differs from fostering in that adoption involves taking another person's (a different set of) parental rights over another person's (the adopted)child while fostering involves providing temporary parental rights over another person's (the fostered)child without taking away any parental rights from that other set of parents
