Rules and Regulations

I have spent this last year as a social worker searching for people who might want to become foster parents.  I have answered questions about how wonderful it is to become a foster parent and encouraged anyone who would listen to try it out.  Many times I heard people wonder if they are strong enough to be a foster parent.  Could they let go of a child when the time came for the child to leave?  Potential foster parents worry about the strength of their parenting skills or the impact upon their biological children.  I have provided support and encouragement every step of the way.  I can honestly say that it is very difficult to find parents willing to open their homes and families to a stranger's child.  I have enjoyed every minute of my job.  Foster parenting has always been my favorite subject to talk about.

Last week I hit the brick wall of reality.  I attended a training class designed to teach social workers how to license homes for foster care.  As a past foster parent, I have been through the homestudy process.  I remember gathering reams of paperwork, getting fingerprinted, and finding references.  I remember social workers visiting and interviewing my family.  When I am teaching potential foster parents about the process, I talk about how intense and time consuming the process can be.  A potential foster family must be willing to allow the agency to poke and prod their way through every aspect of the home and private life.    The class I attended taught me about all the forms, and interviews, and rules.  I enjoyed expanding my knowledge and learning more about my favorite subject.

On the last day of class, the students were presented with several fictional scenarios of potential foster families.  This was designed to teach us how to spot a home or family that was not suitable to be a foster home.  Three of the four scenarios were voted down by my classmates.  Now wait just a minute, my brain cried!  Michigan has a critical shortage of foster homes and turning potential families away is against everything I have spent the last year working towards.  Not one family in the last year that I spoke too, wondered if their home was good enough to pass all of the rules set forth by the State of Michigan.  I spent my lunch hour muttering to myself about over regulation and overzealous bureaucrats.  I returned to class determined to share my views with the rest of the class.

Before I got the chance to voice my opinions, we had a guest speaker who had been in the licensing profession for 34 years.  She spoke about the many situations she had seen come and go over the years.  She brought real life experience to the hundreds of rules we had spent the last three days learning about.  It made me think about the crazy warnings on the back of shampoo bottles.  The ones that say, "this product could be harmful to your health if ingested internally."  Who would ever want to swallow enough shampoo to find out the possible side effects of doing so?  Who came up with that crazy warning?  The answer is that somewhere in this crazy world, someone did drink shampoo and got sick in the process.  They probably sued the company and were awarded crazy amounts of money for their stupidity.  Now the rest of us in the world have to suffer through crazy rules and warnings that seem obvious to most of us.

The teacher of my class reminded me that we are not all born with the same list of common sense rules.  One of my favorite rules to cite is the requirement that foster children must have a real bedroom to sleep in.  The rule states that a foster child may not sleep in a walk in closet, broom closet (think Harry Potter), or unfinished basement.  The rules is actually much more specific than I have stated, but I think you get the idea of what I am talking about.  There are actually people in this world who think a closet is a viable sleeping space.  I would like to offer them a taste of my strawberry shampoo!

The State of Michigan needs foster families very badly, but not at the cost of child's safety and well being.  I have always taught my potential foster families that the rules are very practical in nature and in place to protect both the child and the family.  I still feel that way.  Now as I teach my informational classes about foster care, I will add a section on passing the home inspection.  A good foster family who truly cares about the well being of a child should be worried about passing an inspection.  Foster children deserve to live in safety, just like the rest of us.