Safe Families

Recently, our church partnered with Lydia Homes' Safe Families program, to help them meet their goal of finding 10,000 safe families in Illinois with which children can be informally placed to help parents out with short-term needs (typically a month or two.) This is different from the usual foster care arrangement, in that the children are mostly not wards of the State. This is important because even the state lacks resources to care for all the children who might need its help. In a typical year, I understand the state assists about 4,000 kids, out of 100,000 or more who may need help. That forces state staffers to triage - aiding mostly already-abused kids, rather than parents who just need a little time away from kids due to medical treatment, being in prison, etc.

Lydia Homes hopes is filling that gap with volunteer families willing to take in one or more extra children by mutual consent between the parents and the volunteer family for an agreed-on period of time. Unlike traditional foster parents, the volunteers are not paid.

Having been foster parents ourselves thirty years ago, and having recently freed up a bit of spare time, we signed up to help. This involved getting fingerprinted for a background check and completing lots of forms, but really didn't take long.

Literally within days we got a call, asking if we could take in a 7 year old boy. We said sure, and almost immediately had a new addition to our family for two months.

It was a really good placement - we all got along great and hope to see him again on our return from meeting our new grandson. It was also great in terms of his progress, as the Middlewife is a really good teacher, and the teachers in our local elementary school were just awesome.

Were there problems? Of course, but nothing we hadn't dealt with before as parents. I now have a rule of thumb - assume every child has twice as many problems as you are told about in advance, and you'll be about right.

In a short-time placement, fixes are also short-term. As a trained counselor, I found it interesting to be focusing on short-term behavior modification strategies rather than uncovering underlying causes of topics of interest. For instance, our new son loved violent movies, but had trouble sleeping after seeing them. Our solution was to watch only G-rated fare while he was with us. That may not have helped resolve underlying traumas, but I'm a big believer in the computer science principle of "garbage in = garbage out", so don't like filling my own head with ideas that would be problematic for a preteen boy.

Another learning for us about short-term placements is that it's essential to ensure from the start that either no bureaucratic issues exist, or that all necessary paperwork has already been completed. That's because there simply isn't time in a two month placement to fully deal with all of that.

The hardest issue in our case was tracking down enough info about our new son's prior education to get him admitted to our local school. The school very badly wanted to get one particular form from a prior school, but even finding out what school might have it was sufficiently difficult that we eventually convinced our school to redo the paperwork. Eventually everything was figured out, and that turned out to be the correct solution, but briefly I had visions of not being able to get our kid in school for lack of a piece of paper.

Similarly, presumably for privacy reasons and because lots of different helping agencies were involved, we weren't told enough of our new son's medical history initially, but had to track down lots of such info for our local school, to refill prescriptions etc.

As our church continues down this road, I expect it may need to find a doctor willing to accept Safe Families children for treatment. The Illinois "All Kids" program is intended to eliminate having to be concerned about such things, but for us its existence just made it harder to find a nearby doctor willing to see our son in time of need, presumably because "All Kids" doesn't pay as much or as quickly as our own PPO-type health insurance policy. When our new son developed an earache on his second day with us, this all quickly became real for us. Thankfully, under a new program at an area Walgreens, a nurse-practitioner happily saw him right away.

One other step we are taking before our next placement is lining up friends to help. Kids in foster care typically can't be taken out of state, so our recent trip would have been a problem if our placement hadn't ended just before. Next time, we hope to have other good folks with whom such a child can stay during an out-of-state trip.

Will we do this again? Definitely! We may not ever know this side of Heaven how much staying with us for a couple of months helped our new son, but I'm guessing a lot. He loves and missed his mom a lot while with us, but also really thrived under grandparent-like extra attention.

If this seems like something your family could do too, the need is great, and forms to sign up are here.