The new guidelines list five areas in which prospective parents must show their readiness to supply the needed foster care parenting. The guidelines do not seek to deprive the foster children of parental love, but they hope to guide foster parents to the most suitable methods for demonstrating that love. These guidelines come from lawmakers in a state that has some excellent child care facilities.
Take for example, Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston. The children there get more than medical care. Long term patients get an education during their stay. The Hospital also makes sure that relatives can stay close-by, and can easily visit with their sick son or daughter.
Texas’ concern for the general welfare of children is also evident at MD Anderson Hospital and Cancer Center. The children there have a special teacher, one who has an office on the children’s floor. She makes a point of giving them what other children enjoy, things like a bulletin board full of spooks and witches, as Halloween approaches.
The wisdom acquired by those who care for the children in such facilities has helped the State lawmakers to provide foster parenting in Texas with some very useful guidelines. The lawmakers have requested that the members of Child Services work to insure adherence to those guidelines by the families that are part of foster parenting in Texas. The lawmakers have thus sought to improve the State’s delivery of foster care parenting.
The State’s new guidelines ask the members of Child Services to examine five different aspects of every potential foster home. The guidelines make clear to the Child Service personnel the characteristics that are important in a home that offers foster care. Here is what they say.
The guidelines ask the Child Service personnel to examine the living conditions at the potential foster home. They also ask the Service personnel to check-out the medical and mental status of both parents. In addition, the State’s new guidelines ask the personnel in Child Services to determine the parents’ financial status.
None of the above determinations require a great deal of research. A member of Child Services would have the authority to check records not normally available to the general public. Still, all the records in the world might not help a member of Child Services to complete the final assessment called for by the overseers of foster parenting in Texas.
That final assessment tool concerns the social support available in any possible foster family. What sort of friends could a foster child make in the neighborhood or in school? What sort of adult contacts would such a child have? Those are the sorts of questions that would need to be answered.