Matching a Child with a Home

One of the questions I get a lot is, what kind of kid will I take?  It can be hard to figure out in a world full of children how to decide which child will fit well with which family.  Among other things, one of the things the agency uses is the below checklist.  It's called the Child Profile Checklist.  It's a 4 page document spanning different aspects of a child that you rank on ability to take in and handle certain things versus things you don't want to and/or need help with.  You rank everything on a scale of 1-4.  Then you go through each item which ranges from gender and number of kids all the way to behavior and characteristics of children.

Since I've got lots of questions, I decided this would be a good post.  I prayed over this list before I submitted it as some were easy choices however several were very difficult.  I struggled with thoughts of being in this as a ministry and wanting to help all kids and being wise in what I knew I could handle.

One thing to note, is that although this list is useful if CPS knows about an item on it and your willingness or lack there of for that item, there are a lot of kids that enter into foster care for the first time and until these things are noted in their chart, no one has record of them.  So some of the obvious like gender become apparent pretty quickly, the behavioral things can be quite a bit more tricky until they are discovered down the road.

 

Honestly, this list took me a while to go through, I read it over and over and tried to imagine each one of these things and how I could handle it.  What I would really struggle with and what I wouldn't.  Not only that but what do you do when you have a combination of all of these?  I think this is one of the points where the devil just got in my head and overwhelmed me.  After sleeping on it, I realized regardless of how bad of a parent I am, I'm here and I'm trying which is more than the bio parents (probably).  These kids are in foster care, something had to happen for them to get to this point, which means just by trying and doing what I can, I am giving them more than what they had. 

 

For those of you curious, I set my scope pretty narrow this first time... I'm open to 5-8 year old, girls only, all ethnicity's.  At this time I'm only willing to take 1 child, as I'm single and man to man defense seems like the best route this time around however, down the road I'd be open to more if they were a sibling group.  Being in that age range, I feel like some of the characteristics and behaviors aren't really going to be an issue (I hope) although I'm fully prepared for them to be.

 

Anyways, licensing wise, I'm willing to accept any kid under 8, after 8 I could do, I would just need a new home study as the requirements change (for example, alcohol has to be locked, not just out of reach).  For now, I want school age so they are in school while I work, but still young so hopefully little to no teenager attitude stuff.  Outside that, I'm licensed to take all behaviors except for medically fragile, there is a few extra classes you take for that and at this time, I know I don't have the bandwidth to take on those kiddos, but again, maybe one day.