Foster parent

“ Yet the parochial boards do not appear to view with favour the practice of boarding children with relatives who are perhaps aged and infirm, or are in receipt of parochial relief on their own account. The person thoroughly suitable should be in middle life, engaged in active duties, and fit to act the part of a foster-parent. For the success of his endeavours he should be aided in every reasonable way. The child put under his charge must not wear clothes bearing the pauper stamp, but be dressed like the other children in the place. ”

“ And Michael was also five years. His mother abandoned him at birth. He was put in foster care right from the hospital when he was born. And he's been in through foster homes in the five years before I adopted him.
I think it should be a lesser amount of time a child—don't give the parents that long to try to get their children back. I think a year should be good enough. If a parent don't clean up their act within the year, then that child should be put in a loving home where he will get all the love that his natural parents can't give him. ”

“ Persons in receipt of public assistance are not suitable as foster-parents.
The foster-mother must not have too much to do, apart from her work for the child; and, above all, she should not be employed away from the house. It is necessary that the foster-parents should lead an orderly, decent life, that they should be really fond of children, that they should have a proper knowledge of how to bring up children, and that they should live in a suitable house. ”

“ How is it possible for the average unmarried mother to find the sum asked by the foster-parents? Those who, as foster-parents, assume the charge of an illegitimate child, cannot reckon on the child’s remaining permanently in their care, and ultimately becoming a useful member of the family. ”

“ The Act provides that any party seeking to effect a foster care placement of, or involuntary termination of parental rights to, an Indian child must establish by stringent standards of proof that efforts have been made to prevent the breakup of the Indian family, and that the continued custody of the child by the parent is likely to result in serious emotional or physical damage to the child. ”

“ Because the tasks facing foster parents often include special challenges, such as care of a child who is physically or mentally handicapped or who has been emotionally or physically abused, the mothers and fathers whom society qualifies to accept this added responsibility must be held to a high standard. To accomplish this goal, many more happy and successful families must be willing to step forward and to offer to share heart and home with children desperately longing for both. ”

“ In actual fact, a proportion of the children committed to family care do permanently remain with their foster-parents—a proportion are indeed adopted. Since the children are as a rule the offspring of poor parents, and inasmuch as well-to-do people rarely trouble themselves to undertake the upbringing of other people’s children, the foster-parents will themselves usually be poor. ”

“ I saw the handsome little boy of five whom again everybody wished to adopt withheld because the intelligence test had found him defective. He must have no home save with people who would be willing to act as foster-parents to a subnormal child.
I saw frowsy, uncouth, foul-mouthed children of ignorant and disgusting parents tested and pronounced normal. I then watched these same workers systematically groom the small imps into pleasant-mannered youngsters purified of body and mind, and I saw them enthusiastically adopted by people who would on earlier contacts have drawn their garments aside. ”

“ The foster-parents may retain the child in their service or employment till the age of twenty-two, but the true parents may at any time reclaim the foundling on reimbursing the asylum and compensating the foster-parents. ”

“ The parental relation was still further lessened by the custom of sending children to be brought up outside the family in which they were born, so that they had foster-parents to whom they were as much, or even more, attached than to their natural ones. ”

“ The mother is perhaps out of work for a time, and a fresh pregnancy may ensue. The foster-parents know very well that if this particular child dies, they will readily find another to be entrusted to their care. Sometimes the mother’s own interest in the life of her child fades. ”

“ It was the general custom among the chiefs and other leading men not to have the children reared at home, but to have them educated with some distinguished friend for the future duties of life. Those who received them were bound to treat them as their own children, with love and kindness; and there are many examples in the Sagas of the great love of the foster-parents for their foster-children. ”

“ I call upon all Americans to observe this month by taking time to help children and youth in foster care and to recognize the commitment of those who touch their lives, particularly celebrating their foster parents and other caregivers. ”

“ In every case where a child is handed over to foster-parents it will belong to the clan of its foster-parents and not to that of its real parents, but if the child is a girl she can marry a man of the foster-father’s clan provided he does not live close to the foster-father, while marriage with a man of her real father’s clan is prohibited to her. ”

“ Despite the progress we have made in increasing our adoption rate, we still have much work to do. More than 130,000 children, ranging from toddlers to teenagers, still remain in foster care awaiting adoption. While foster parents offer temporary essential care, the children for whom they care need the stability of a permanent family. It is often challenging to find families for older children and those children who have special needs. Yet they deserve a future with a nurturing family. ”

“ A child in fosterage was reared and educated suitably for the position it was destined to fill in life. There was fosterage for affection, for payment and for a literary education. Fosterage began when the child was a year old and ended when the marriageable age was reached, unless previously terminated by death or crime. Every fostered person was under an obligation to provide, if necessary, for the old age of foster-parents. ”

“ Childless parents naturally adopt a child of kin to the wife, so that the adopted child occupies the position of one born in the house; but if, as sometimes happens, an orphan child from the husband's kin is adopted out of pity, it is brought up as of kin to the wife, and care is taken to conceal the fact of adoption. When the child grows up and by some chance finds out that he has been brought up on the wrong 'side of the house,' he will leave his foster parents, and go and live with his own sogoi. ”

“ No one will maintain that it is easy to achieve relations of reciprocal reverence between parent and child, viewing the fact that family intimacies while tending to foster affection do not make for the strengthening of respect. For respect is most frequently evoked by the unknown and unfamiliar even as the familiar and the known, because it is known, touches the springs of affection. Parental reverence may not be unachievable, but it involves the acceptance of a child as a self-existent being, intellectually, morally, spiritually. ”

“ The parent is sacrificed wholly or partially in the production of progeny. Nor even in the higher forms of life does this form of sacrifice disappear, though the very beginning of new existences may involve egoistic rather than altruistic relations. Unconsciously at first, but consciously afterward, and later still by definite actions to that end directed, the mother of each new member of even the human race divine sacrifices herself for her offspring. We may be said to imbibe altruism with our mothers' milk. ”

“ Foster families serve young people from all walks of life, from infants awaiting adoption, to children seeking reunification with their families and teens in need of safe havens from negative influences. In many cases, they offer our Nation's most at-risk children a second chance at the American Dream.
A tremendous demand exists for foster parents and families across the country. Together as a Nation, we must raise awareness about this need and inspire volunteers to step forward and invest in the lives of our Nation's youth through our foster care system. ”

“ When the children go to service, the family relationship is still kept up, and they return to their foster-parents as other children do to their homes, bringing at term-times, when they get their wages, presents of tea and sugar, articles of clothing, and other tokens of affectionate regard.' We learn that in some cases the children adopt the name of the family with whom they are boarded, and as a rule they are not distinguishable from the younger members of the family. ”

“ There are certain groups related by marriage and held together by the bond of affection, from which foster-parents and guardians may most suitably be selected to fulfil the duties as regards education and training of children who have been orphaned in early years. ”

“ The orphaned children were at once adopted by their father's eldest sister, Jane Martha, and her husband, William Edward Forster [q. v.] , who had no children of their own. Perfect confid- ence and affection marked for life the rela- tions between foster-parents and adopted children. ”

“ Here the foster parents of the myth correspond to the real parents as they are revealed to the disappointed insight of the child who, with widening experience of his human environment, begins to realise the discrepancy between the actual position of his parents in the world of men and the ideal qualities with which his infant's fancy had endowed them. ”

“ In the first department, the most important matter is the careful choice of the foster-parents. The official guardian’s experience and business connections undoubtedly make him far more likely than the individual guardian to secure good foster-parents. The legal duties of the official guardian, such as the provision of maintenance for the child, are merely routine official duties. It is much easier to secure the requisite ten confidential assistants than to secure a hundred private guardians. ”

“ It looks rather as if the little foster-parents are hypnotised by the uncouth guest, for they see their own young ones elbowed out of the home and continue, with unflagging devotion, to minister to the insatiable appetite of the greedy little murderer. ”

“ During the month of May, we observe National Foster Care Month and we celebrate those who have opened their homes and their hearts to children in need and those who have devoted their careers to serving America's foster youth.
Americans throughout the country are serving their communities as foster parents, mentors, respite care providers, and volunteers. In the last year alone, America's foster families opened their homes and hearts to more than 300,000 young people. ”

“ Three years later, when Dagmar was five, an age at which she could walk and talk and think and was about to begin her quest of worldly knowledge, my father gave her in charge to a sterile couple who had long desired to possess a child. These foster-parents were only selected after a great deal of preliminary study—many excellent offers were rejected. The investigations, however, were conducted through the medium of a third person. An ineluctable rule of my father's system stipulated that foster-parents and actual parents should never meet. ”

“ Of course, only such illegitimate children should be received at a crèche as are cared for by their own mothers during the hours of the day when they are not at the institution. Illegitimate children boarded out with foster-parents should not be admitted to a crèche, because foster-parents who send to a crèche the child entrusted to their care are not properly fulfilling the duty they have undertaken, and those who cannot look after the foster-child themselves should not receive one at all. ”

“ The actions of his foster-parents become, when he is full grown, almost ludicrous, for they often have to perch between his shoulders to place in his gaping mouth the delicate morsels he is too indolent or too stupid to take from their bills. ”

“ If at all possible, we must find foster-parents who will do the duty of real ones to the children assigned under proper precautions to their custody. We are aware that this may not be always practicable, and where it is not, the grouping of children in some kind of asylum must still be perpetuated. Some countries appear to be more favourable than others to the plan of boarding out children with foster-parents. ”

“ It will appear manifest, I think, on careful consideration of the matter by any one who notes, for a few days or even hours, the course of events around him in his family and in society, that he who neglects to defend his own rights against the encroachments of Class D as well as of Class E, and of Class C as well as of Class D, fails as clearly in his duty to the social body as the parent who overlooks selfish and unruly conduct in his children. ”

“ They may pay them visits, but they never take them back permanently to their homes, and temporarily only by permission. The foster-father may, strangely enough, pass his adopted child on to some friend of his, as freely as he might one of his own. ”

“ The great proportion have grown up respectable men and women, creditable members of society. Many of them have been legally adopted by their foster-parents. The majority have become successful farmers or farmers’ wives, mechanics, and busi15ness men. Many have acquired property, and no inconsiderable number of them have attained positions of honour and trust.”
One of the children thus developed was a typical waif of the slums, a ragged urchin loitering in the streets of New York, and sleeping in store-entrances and hall-ways, until one day taken in charge by a kindly policeman. ”