Thailand Foster Care Transition Homes

After much prayer and discussion, we have decided to pivot our foster care focus from being transition homes to providing therapeutic foster care. There are a few reasons for this: 

1) transition homes are meant to be 1 year or less, but in our experience, many of our foster children need longer term care than this

2) our foster children have mainly come from children's home/residential care settings where they have never had the chance to develop good habits and thus need stability for a longer time to work on these life skills. One example is a foster child wanted to get a driver's license and as foster parents we said "you need to show us we can trust you with that responsibility if you want a driver's license." The teen responded "what does trust mean? How do I show that?" Such things that seem so simple, but a 15 year old has never had the opportunity to learn what trust is or how one earns the trust of another. 

3) time and time again, we have been asked to take "problem" teenagers, because no children's home or foster families want teenagers. If they are labeled "problem kids" the issues that need to be addressed to prepare them for living in larger society take longer than a year to resolve and heal from. 

Because of these reasons and more, we have decided to open our homes to provide therapeutic foster care. Our previous goal was to reunify children with their biological family. With this new focus, our goal will be to either prepare the child to go into a long term family situation (whether biological or foster) or prepare them to live on their own if they are about to age out of foster care. We will still be available for emergency placement as well. 

In the past quarter, we have provided foster care for 2 teen boys: one is about to turn 15 and one just turned 14. The younger of the two had major spinal surgery and needed intensive care that his family was unable to provide post-surgery. He was with Heather for 3 weeks before he was recovered enough to go home and return to school. The other boy is with Jay and Butsaba and is studying 8th grade. His current desire is to finish 9th grade in foster care and then attend a school that has on campus housing for high school. He sees his mom and brother (who is in another foster home) on school holidays and will spend the upcoming school break in October with them. Unfortunately, his mom has intellectual disabilities which made caring for two teenage boys too overwhelming for her, so she placed them in foster care, but we work hard to make sure they stay in regular contact.