When mum and dad first asked you how you’d feel about welcoming a foster child into the family, you probably had mixed emotions. After all, you had heard so much about the problems many of those kids had faced in life and you didn’t know if that was something you’d be able to deal with. You have your school and your friends to consider and probably wondered if those kids would interfere with the things you do in your social life at school and at home.
Also, you probably didn’t know if you would like to share your parents, but that’s common enough. That’s what most kids wonder when facing the possibility of sharing their home and parents with a stranger, and that’s really what they are – at least in the very beginning. So, how can you actually make those kids feel at home when you will probably feel awkward as well? Here are a few tips that you might want to try.
Learn What You Can in the Days Before Their Arrival
The people at the Fosterplus foster care agency where your parents are registered to be foster parents take matching kids with foster families very seriously. Therefore, they gave your parents some much-needed background on the child they felt was a good match for your family. Some of what you were able to learn about the child they had chosen shows that they like the same kind of music you do and shares your love of video games.
Take a Few Days to Get Acquainted
Any child into the same things as you can’t be all bad, right? So with that said, the best thing you can do in the very beginning is to take a few days to get to know your new foster sibling. Your friends will live without you for a few days, so reserve those first few days just for them. You want to help them feel at home and to ignore them in order to hang with your friends wouldn’t be a good way to do that at all! Let them know you are happy they are there and you will do what you can to help them feel comfortable at school and with the neighbourhood kids.
Slowly Introduce Them to Your Friends
The one thing you don’t want to do is to overwhelm them with too much too soon. This means it might not be wise to bring them out to hang with all your friends that meet after school every day. Instead, invite a friend or two over to the house each night for a few days so they can slowly get to meet your friends. This way they will slowly get a feel for what it is you guys do and it will help them to fit in a bit easier as well. After a week or so, it is a different story, but for now, take it slow and easy.
You can always ask if they would like to come watch you practice with your sports club after school one day, but don’t push it. They will come when they’re ready. These are all good things to do if you want them to feel good about you and you want to feel good about them. Take it one step at a time and before long you just might have the sibling you’d always wanted.
My son has always wanted a sibling since we’re a single-parent family, so I was considering welcoming a foster child into our home soon. it was helpful advice when you told us to take a few days off after welcoming our foster child to get acquainted with them and help them feel at home. I’ll be sure to do so once I find a foster care home I can visit soon.