It’s rewarding but also very challenging. We take teens and teens sure know how to get in trouble. We only take one at a time and are currently taking a break cause we had two really challenging kids in a row and it took a toll on us.

So kids have a case worker and foster parents have a certification worker. Our certification worker basically does the work of presenting us with kids they think would be a good placement. If you have an available bed, you can bet your cert worker will be hitting you up often with “hey, we’ve got this kid in this situation, their history is blah”. Sometimes it can be an emergency, sometimes it can be something with some heads up. Since we are newer, we haven’t taken anyone in who is brand new to the system

Our approach is that we provide a family environment. We don’t have any kids of our own, so when someone comes in, we treat them as exactly we would if we were capable and did have our own. So like, we did have a kid for just the weekend the other week. We watched Frieren together, I took them to the arcade, we went for Boba, and took the dog to the dog park. This kid is coming from a foster parent who’s clearly just using kids as a paycheck. The money we get paid is supposed to go to taking care of the kid, and we make sure to do that since we do pretty well and don’t have to worry about much