My mini sailor, 1 year and 2 months 🙂
Hello! I wanted to do an update on the foster care registration process that Andy and I are in the midst of. As Andy mentioned in the past, we are working on getting approved as an approved “adoption family” while at the same time getting registered as foster care parents. We are also working with a private adoption agency, but for the foster care, we are dealing with the local government. I usually hate dealing with government agencies since they are a slow bureaucratic nightmare, they are not flexible and lack basic communication skills. The child guidance center which we have to deal with for foster care is no exception.
When we first approached the child guidance center to register as foster parents, Kiko was six months old. We took her to our initial interview with the case workers. They complimented us on how well behaved Kiko was and told us that we should NOT be foster parents. The case workers said that they did not want to ruin our “happy family” because the kids in the institutions are full of troubles, badly behaved and socially awkward. Even if they consider us as foster parents, they would not give us any child until Kiko turns at least three and it will be a “weekend visit”, not a long term assignment. We came back home disappointed and angry. Shouldn’t the case workers be on the kids’ sides? How dare they insult the kids when they are suppose to be protect and care for them. I don’t doubt that lot of kids have “problems” since they have some abusive history etc. But, that does not mean that the case workers should flippantly insult the kids in front of the hopeful foster parents!
After the initial interview, we weren’t sure if we should continue pursuing the foster care option. It sounded like a long arduous fight. But in the end, we decided to push on since Andy said “Don’t take Japanese people’s “no” as an actual “no”. Japanese people will eventually say ‘yes’ if you are persistent enough”. I called back the case worker a couple times and hounded her until she agreed to allow us to continue the process, which involves taking three group courses. So far, we’ve gone through two out of three, and the last group course is coming up this weekend.
The first group course was terrible. We had to sit in the class room for 6 hours listening to boring lectures on the Japanese orphanage and foster care systems. Most of the info I already knew. They gave us reading materials, so we could have just read it on our own and skipped the lecture. Instead, they felt it was necessary for them to read it out loud to us like we were in elementry school. The topic that bugged me the most was the abuse by foster parents. There were news articles about a foster mother who ended up killing and sexually abusing her assigned little girl. It made me really sad but at the same time, it planted doubt in my mind, “how do I know that I won’t follow the same path?”. I remember coming home all depressed thinking about this. Have you ever thought that maybe it is possible that you end up abusing your kids?
There were five other couples in the course. Those couples depressed me even more. It was obvious that the guys were brought there by their wives unwillingly. Some of them were out right sleeping during the courses. I understand the course was boring, but still. I feel like Andy and I were totally qualified to be foster parents compared to them!!
