Hi lulu

We are foster carers and have been for 2 years. We are taking a break from it for now with our lil man arriving (i was just getting too tired) and probably wont be doing it again except to offer brief periods of respite care.

We found it extremely rewarding yet extremely exhausting at the same time. We have had some fantastic kids come and stay with us, yet like other posters have mentioned they come with all sorts of different behaviours that while understandable can be very difficult to adjust to and adjust your own bios to.

In terms of finding out how to get started contact DHS in your state...DCD in ours. They will let you know what to do. We had a room set up with 2 beds..however there were times when we had 3 siblings together with another pull out bed in the room. We live on a large rural block so have all the normal kid things like cubby house, trampoline, swingset, basketball hoops etc , not to mention a range in toys ranging from kitchenette toys, babies, book, puzzles etc. We received no specification as to what toys and things were needed..this was just what we had already for our own children. We had several interviews with a social worker working on family history, family support, questions about our marriage, how we function as a family..discipline..fun times etc. They set up various scenarios and wanted to see how we would respond to them in terms of children and their development and behaviours. They also set up an interview with our kids and talked about what it would mean if children came to stay in our house and the positives and negatives of this. They also did background criminal checks and wanted detailed character referees from various people.

I think the general rule of not taking kids older than your oldest bio is a good one to follow. We generally tried to take kids that were younger than my youngest child however we did have several older children as well. There were some cases that we just had to say no to..for example w were asked to take a 13 year old boy for a school term. We just felt that with 3 young girls this was not in our family's best interests. Our hardest time was when we had a child aged 10 and her younger sister aged 2. My oldest was 10 at the time and the 10 year old little girl staying with us hit, swore, kicked, screamed..my 8 year old became the brunt of her anger with name calling and on one occasion being hit. This was really really hard on my kids....because no amount of explaining to my bios about how hard some childrens lives are and this is why some behaviours are present could excuse the fact that my child was no longer feeling in a safe environment.

For us we also found that while our interests were on providing a caring and nurturing home for children in need while they needed to be away from home, we found that it also created resentment because our family life was so different to what they had experienced. This was not something we had anticipated. Many children especially older than 7 did not want to leave and were torn between feeling anger and frustration seeing how other children are loved and treated. We felt bad that we created any conflict in these guys little lives just by simply offering a loving home.


Anyway hope this helps..best of luck on your fostering journey if its one you decide to go ahead with.

Jo