How to Deal With the Emotional Pain of Losing a Foster Child

It can be difficult for outsiders to understand how attached foster parents and foster siblings can become to a foster child. When you love and care for a child’s every need for a year or more you become that child’s parent. Unless there is a real personality clash, the parents usually fall in love with the foster child. When the child leaves, either to return to the birth family or to be adopted elsewhere, it can feel as if the child has died to the foster parents. If you had a child die, friends would offer sympathy, cards, and help with meals and cleaning. But, they don’t think of doing that when a foster child leaves. After all, it was just a foster child may go through their minds. How can you deal with the emotional pain of losing a foster child?

Difficulty: Challenging

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Foster child
• Foster care license

1. Cry for as long as you want to, whenever you feel like it after your foster child is returned home or moved to an adoptive placement. Sometimes DHS decides that the foster family should not be the adoptive placement, especially when a relative applies for adoption. Doing visitation is almost unbearable. Go ahead and start crying before your foster child even moves.

2. Feel angry, it is ok, to be upset with the foster care system and the injustices that occur. The system has many problems and could use a real overhaul. Write letters to congressmen if you think it will help.

3. Keep busy, paint your house inside and out. I painted my ceilings, walls, basement, and wrought iron during one very painful loss.

4. Focus your love on your spouse, other children, or your pets. Pets are very comforting when a person is suffering from emotional pain.

5. Try not to look at pictures of your foster child for a while, that makes the pain worse.

6. Find a new hobby to focus on for a few months, or work on a hobby that you put aside while foster parenting.

7. Journal, blog, or write about your loss and your pain.

8. Find a support group with other foster and adoptive parents who have lost foster children for comfort.

9. Adopt a child through private adoption. You know from day one that the child is yours, forever.

Tips & Warnings

• It is better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all.
• By Alfred Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam: 27, 1850
• Broken hearts go with foster parenting

Resources

• No Goodbye After Four Years of Parenting Foster Daughter
• Are Your Chances of State Adoption Better If You Foster Children With Intent to Adopt?
• How to Change Your Baby’s Diaper in Public
• How to Prepare a Baby Bottle in Public
• How to Find a Child to Adopt and Negotiate an Adoption Subsidy
• How to tell if your child has SPD Sensory Processing Disorder
• How to Calculate Baby Adoption Cost
• How to Adopt a Baby or Older Child for Free or Receive Reimbursement
• How to adopt a domestic newborn as fast as possible?
• What Is Adoption Subsidy, Who Gets It, How Much, and for How Long

[Fuller1972]

on 9/26/2009 Sometimes there is an instant bond like that, when a child is a perfect fit into your family. It is easy to bond with babies and toddlers, they need you so much. HUGS..

[countrymom69]

on 9/26/2009 this is my first time being a foster parent.i feel so guilty for grieving a 20 mnth baby i only had for 2mnths. everyone said its hard a yr or more. but i can't help it i am a house wife and i spent my every waken moment with this child.i love with my whole heart and soul that's me i can't help it. his parents were in jail and great grama was to old and i was told there was no ther family member and this will be a while as the father was very absusive and long time history of that and drugs and the mother as well. then out of the blue comes a cousin he never ment with 3 children of her own and she lived in the same township and had plenty opportunitybefore he was given to the dad and taken away on neglect and then put with us.so now this sweet inocent child who called us mom and dad had his own room with tv and bedding animals pool love kisses and hugs over kill. family vacation a st...

[taylorsaid]

on 7/10/2009 I have fostered many times and was not fostering anymore because of the heartache. 3 years ago I was called by a grandparent who wanted me to take her newborn grandchild who was born addicted to drugs. I agreed to take a leave of absence from a job I loved, secretly praying someone from the family would step forward before I actually met this sweet little angel. That didn't happen and I brought this little guy home from the hospital. He was with us for 2 1/2 years. I was asked by Social Services to consider adoption, of course I did and my family and I went through the adoption process, home study, interviews, and paperwork. Caring for a baby going through withdrawals is very hard and sad but through it all my family and I fell madly in love with this little guy. Recently his birth grandmother, who was the person who asked me to take him in the first place, decided she did not want t...

[taylorsaid]

on 7/10/2009 I have fostered many times and was not fostering anymore because of the heartache. 3 years ago I was called by a grandparent who wanted me to take her newborn grandchild who was born addicted to drugs. I agreed to take a leave of absence from a job I loved, secretly praying someone from the family would step forward before I actually met this sweet little angel. That didn't happen and I brought this little guy home from the hospital. He was with us for 2 1/2 years. I was asked by Social Services to consider adoption, of course I did and my family and I went through the adoption process, home study, interviews, and paperwork. Caring for a baby going through withdrawals is very hard and sad but through it all my family and I fell madly in love with this little guy. Recently his birth grandmother, who was the person who asked me to take him in the first place, decided she did not want t...

[Fuller1972]

on 5/1/2009 That is very common, my now adult daughter returned to her bmom. It lasted about 3 months. We didn't adopt her until she was 15, I'm her mom now that she is 26. Be patient, I know it is hard. ((HUGS)))