What You'll Learn This Week
- The importance of putting boundaries around key things in your life.
- Identifying the important things for you and your family.
- How to establish workable boundaries as a foster family.
The Importance of Placing Boundaries around Key Things in Life
Without boundaries, foster parenting responsibilities may begin to overtake the bulk of a foster family's life.
Yes, the work is important, but so is the work that goes into making a home for yourself and your family. This may bring about feelings of frustration, regret, and perhaps even some bitterness for the foster parenting role. It will be very easy for foster children to pick up on these feelings and begin to wonder if they are truly a part of the family or even cared for at all.
Identifying Your Foster Family's Important Things
Before things get to this point, it's important to try to define what are the important things to the foster family. When it comes to defining the important things in your life, it is personal work. You and your family are the only ones who can define what is important, valued, or needed by you and your family to remain happy in your own home and lives. These are things you will not budge on as a family and will vary from foster family to foster family.
Important things to you and your family are activities or needs that help breath life back into your home each week.
It could also be something that is needed for your livelihood, like work. Some important things may include:
- Marriage
- Time with children
- Friends
- Work
- Your schedule
- Free time or space
- Church
- Hobbies or other creative work and endeavors
Establishing Workable Boundaries as a Foster Family
This will be an ever evolving endeavor as you continue on as a fostering family. Your fostering family will continue to grow and change, as will the needs of your family. Foster children will continue to bring with them each different needs, and your family's ways of meeting those needs will vary.
However, with all these variables in mind, I have attempted to outline several ideas on how to create boundaries around several important key areas in a foster family's life.
This Week's Assignments: Identifying and Make a Plan
Identifying the things that give your family joy and happiness.
Take a few minutes and call a family meeting. Have every member of the family note the things that they look forward to each day or week. Maybe it's as simple as being able to sleep in once in awhile. It could be attending church weekly without drama. Maybe it's a weekly lunch date with friends. Whatever those things are, write them down.
Begin to Establish Boundaries.
Now, it's time to figure out how not to let those important things go after accepting a foster placement. Utilizing the ideas listed in Establishing Workable Boundaries as a Foster Family, start to outline ways that you can maintain your boundaries and find a balance between foster care and life.
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