Need for foster parents far exceeds supply

By John Howell
Children under the care of foster parents often have “tough exteriors, …but underneath they’re pretty scared,” a Panola County resource parent said Wednesday, speaking to the Batesville Exchange Club.
Donna Davis and her husband, Ron Belt, who have cared for children in their home for four years, said that foster or “resource” parents play an intermediate role with the goal of either seeing children return to the home of their birth parents or to be placed with permanent adoptive parents.
“The real push these days is to not leave kids (in the system) for so long,” Davis said.
Legislative reorganization creating the Miss. Dept. of Child Protection Services as an independent agency has brought improvements, according to the foster parent.
Children placed in foster homes are often “above their age,” she said, in self-care skills. “We had a little five-year-old boy who was used to cooking breakfast for his two-year-old sister.”
Yet, the children often lack other basic social skills. “A lot of it (behavior) that you would interpret as disrespectful, it’s just that they don’t know,” Davis said. “They’ve been stripped out of the only home that they know.”
“A lot of what you do as a foster parent is backfill; you go back and teach skills that kids should have learned much earlier,” she continued. “In the short time that you have them, you try to give them some coping skills that will help them have a better life to the extent that you can.”
The anxiety in children who are uncertain about their future in a new, unfamiliar home is understandable, Davis said. “I’d feel pretty insecure and anxious about it, and I’m an adult.”
Davis said that the oldest child she has yet fostered was 12. The longest any foster child has stayed their home has been 10 months. “I’ve had parents who did what they needed to do, and got their children back, and I’ve had a situation where the parents just were not going to do what was required, and that child went on to an adoptive family.”
When that time comes, she said, “It’s hard to let them go.”
The need for families willing to host foster children far exceeds the supply.
A person who would like to assist in the care of foster children but who is unable to become a resource parent can assist those who are with money and time, according to the foster mom. “For a lot of those families who don’t have the resources, it’s tough for them to provide the little extras,” she said.
A small monetary donation could enable a resource family to visit a zoo or go to a movie, an experience that many of the children who end up in foster homes have never encountered.
“You could adopt a foster parent in your neighborhood and say, ‘You and your husband want to go out on Friday night? Let me come and sit with the kids,’” she said. “You need that break, because these kids are challenging, but they are at rock bottom good kids who just have not had experiences.”
The need is even more acute for adult men who would be willing to “throw a football around with them or take them to McDonald’s,” Davis said. Often, the children “have not had good experiences with adult men. They will often be either afraid of adult men or resistant to them because of the background they come out of.”
“You don’t need to make huge efforts; it’s the little pieces that you could help fill in that would just mean the world to these kids and to the foster parents,” she said.
“There are some kids in the neighborhood who come and play with the kids who are there with us and they don’t treat them any different, so it’s a good place,” she said of the community where she and her husband live on John Branch Road.
Davis and Belt completed a lengthy screening and vetting process as well as required training through Child Protective Services. In addition to being a resource parent, Davis is an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Mississippi Law School.
More information is available on the Mississippi Dept. of Human Services web site www.mdcps.ms.gov.