More often than not, foster parents and their foster children have huge differences. Fortunately, in Muskogee County, there is an intervention program that helps foster parents and their foster kids close their gaps.
The children's services supervisor at Green Country Behavioral Health Services, Melissa Shofner, said that Muskogee County's "blown placements" rate is very high, Muskogee Phoenix reported.
"Blown placements" means that foster children have to be moved to another foster home for a particular reason, Shofner said. "The more foster kids move from one home to another the more trauma they may experience," she said.
Green Country's Systems of Care is now working with the Department of Human Services (DHS) to provide a 24/7 intervention service to help lighten the conflict between foster parents and their foster kids, Shofner said.
Whenever an issue arises between the foster family and the foster children, a DHS social worker may call a licensed counselor through the service's number. The licensed counselor then will do everything to fix their problem.
"We either go to the home or meet the family or child and do whatever we need to do to stabilize the placement," Shofner said. "Through our collaboration with DHS and our intervention, you hope to maintain the (foster) placement, to stabilize the placement, and prevent movement, or even maintain placement in the biological family. We want to help families before they enter the court system and get them behavioral and parenting skills."
On the other hand, not all placements for foster children end up like that. Phyllis Wilson, 63, a single parent from District of Columbia decided to become a foster parent and treats every foster kid to enter her house as her own children, as reported by Washington Post.
She already lost count of how many foster kids there have been since she started caring for these kids a decade ago. But one thing is for sure, she has done everything for every one of them.
"Everything that I did for my children that I bore, I have done for the children I've taken in," she says. "The exact same thing," she added.
