Success as a Foster Parent: Everything You Need to Know About Foster Care [Mass Market Paperback]

National Foster Parent Association (Author), Rachel Greene Baldino MSW LCSW (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 7, 2009

Change a child?s life!

Reap the rewards of becoming a foster parent.

Over 600,000 American children are in the foster care system each year?and the number is growing. So is the number of good-hearted people willing to become foster parents. But what does it take to become a foster parent? How does one begin? What about your own family? What does it cost?

Success as a Foster Parent has the answers to these basic questions and much more. Written by Rachel Greene Baldino, MSW, in association with the National Foster Parent Association, it is the first and only commercially available book to clearly explain the process of becoming a foster parent. Readers will learn:

·The questions to ask before making the decision to be a foster caregiver
·How to research local state and private agencies
·The financial cost and the compensation
·The challenges involved in caring for children from infants to teens, including physically and psychologically challenged kids
·Issues relating to schools, birth parents, supervisory visits, vacations, and dozens of other factors
·All about adoption
In addition to concrete information, there are dozens of moving stories drawn from interviews with veteran foster parents and tips about caregiving.

Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 18 and up
  
• Mass Market Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Alpha; 1 edition (April 7, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1592577474
• ISBN-13: 978-1592577477
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #92,499 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #59 in Books > Parenting & Relationships > Adoption

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good, but overgeneralizes...., May 20, 2009

By 

M. Garrison (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Success as a Foster Parent: Everything You Need to Know About Foster Care (Mass Market Paperback)

I had always wondered why I had never been able to find a great book about foster parenting, and reading this book, I think I realized why. Foster parenting can be *so* different from state to state, and can even differ hugely within states depending on the county or program.

As a result, there's a lot of great information in this book -- but not all of it may be an accurate picture of what foster care is like where you live. Repeatedly throughout the book, I came across info that was presented as a universal truth of foster care that just is not true here where I am -- and it's not like our county is a unique little special snowflake, different than everywhere else. :p As an example, the book states several times that foster parents have to pay for daycare out of their own pockets (and that's a cost that will almost always be greater than the monthly stipend), but in the two areas I've lived in most recently (and in different states), the foster care program does indeed pay all daycare costs in most circumstances. This wasn't the only thing, there were just lots of little issues like that.

At the same time, the book doesn't go very far past "intro" level stuff, which sets up an odd conundrum. The people who have enough background to know which information just doesn't apply in their area probably aren't going to get very much out of the book; and the people who will find the most new info in the book are probably also those who may not be able to tell which parts aren't relevant to their situation.

So, why did I give the book 4 stars instead of 2 or 3? Because I think for a very specific population, this could be a truly excellent book -- people considering foster care, who are just wanting to learn more about how it works and haven't taken the training classes yet. The other books that are out there are really focused on people who are already foster parents -- and often on foster parents who have taken on especially challenging children, to boot. It's great to have a book that I can pass on to friends who want to learn more about foster care that doesn't go straight into reactive attachment disorder, etc., but instead focuses on the broader issues about what foster parenting can be like. I'd feel totally confident passing this book on to people like that, I'd just do so with the caveat that some of the logistic information presented may not be true with their state/county/agency/program. I think this book can be a great starting point for people who have been thinking about signing up for that foster parenting orientation session they've seen advertised at church or the library, but haven't felt comfortable taking the plunge.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars House Parent, July 26, 2011

By 

mandajean16x - See all my reviews

This review is from: Success as a Foster Parent: Everything You Need to Know About Foster Care (Kindle Edition)

My husband and I read this book from the perspective of being a houseparent as we had a hard time finding house parent books. It has a lot of good information in it. Some of it did not pertain to us but overall it was informational. A bit reptitative sometimes.