Foster Care Pros and Cons: Is it As Bad As You Think?

All one hears today is how foster care has ruin a child's life. Nothing but bad news--foster mother kills two-year-old child; foster parents starved foster children; foster child locked in cage; foster child moves twenty-three times. Of course, good news about anything doesn't make good news for the media.

Foster care was the best thing to ever happened to me. My brother and I moved into a foster home when I was eight. I spent twelve years in the foster home. In that twelve years I only remember my foster parents sending two children back to be placed in a different foster home.

My foster parents owned a dairy farm so my foster mother couldn't have a child who hung onto her leg all day. There was too much work to be done on the farm. That was the first child they sent back. The second child was unable to keep from fighting with one of the foster children who had lived in the home for several years. My foster parents tried for nearly a year of bloody noses before they came to the conclusion they could not broker peace between the two boys.

Neither my brother or I bounced around in the foster care system. We both stayed in one foster home until we left high school. There were children who came and went, but not due to my foster parents. These children went back to their parents or to one of their relatives. My foster parents cared for up to five foster children at one time. Over the years, they cared for over twenty foster children.

Why was it the best thing to ever happen to me? It gave me stability. My real parents divorced when I was six months old. After living with our mother for about four years, she could no longer care for us. Our grandmother took care of us for a little over two years. The day before my seventh birthday, my brother and I were sent to one of our aunts. Life there was not good. This aunt had five or six children of her own and two more did not make her happy. We lived with her a year and a half before we moved to the foster home.

I don't remember my foster dad ever spanking me, or any of the other children, for that matter. He instinctively knew what punishment worked best. Standing with my nose in a corner hurt me more than a spanking ever did and that was the punishment he chose for me. Many times if I did something wrong, a stern look from my foster dad would straighten me out.

My foster mother only spanked me once. I was playing with fire and could have burned the garage down. I think she reacted out of fear.

After about two years on the farm my foster parents moved to a bigger farm. It was a square mile. Two rivers, a creek, three county roads (two dirt, one paved), and railroad tracks all ran through it. There were also two houses and three barns. One of the houses and one of the barns were dilapidated and were eventually torn down.

My brother and I roamed the hillsides and talked about wanting to live with our real parents. I later realized how, in our imaginary belief, we built our real parents up to be godlike. I think most children want their parents to be the hero in their lives, so they build them up to be better than they really are, especially if the parents aren't in their lives.

I remember many fun times on this farm. In the winter we sledded down the hill next to the house or down the road. Built snow forts and snowmen and had snowball fights. In the summer we fished in the creek and swam in one of the rivers. (One river was warmer than the other.)

There were chores to do, too. This taught me responsibility. The cows had to be milked twice a day and the barn cleaned at least once a day. In the wintertime this was about the extent of the chores. In the summer there was hay to cut, bale, haul and stack into the barn. There was also a garden to plant and, towards the end of the summer, the vegetables needed to be canned. Fruit off the trees, as well as fruit bought from nearby orchards, also had to be canned. We were paid for doing these chores.

One of my favorite activities towards the end of summer was going into the mountains and picking huckleberries. One time my foster parents left the milking to their son (they had two sons) and took me and two other foster children on a huckleberry picking, camping trip. I awoke in the morning to thumping and thought the worse was about to happen, only to learned several deer had come to visit us.

My foster mother's mother lived with us. She did most of the house cleaning and cooking. She made homemade bread until she was in her eighties. On occasion she made cottage cheese and butter. It wasn't unusual for her to make homemade pies--apple, peach, cherry, huckleberry and, one year when the plum tree decided to out produce all the other fruit trees, plum pie. Every Sunday morning meant either pancakes or French toast. In the early years the pancakes were made from scratch, but in the later years a mix was used. My foster grandmother died at 104. (About twenty years after I left the foster home.)

Life was not always good. There were bad times, too. My foster parents' oldest son (twenty-three, married and father of two at the time) was killed on the railroad tracks right in front of the farmhouse. He couldn't stop on the icy road, his car slid onto the tracks and the train hit him. My foster dad died a few years later of cancer.

My foster parents were devoted to caring for all their foster children. They certainly gave me an early life I would never had had if I would not have been under their care. And I believe there are still foster parents out there who are just as devoted, caring and giving as my foster parents were.