Making your foster child feel at home

Let's face it, foster kids often have pretty crummy lives and it can take a lot for them to feel safe. My oldest daughter is a perfect example of that, as I've mentioned before she was the "mom" to her sibling group and we struggled with making her feel like a kid and tried everything in our power to do it. One of the biggest things we realized was our kids wanted some form of control, they had no choice to come to our house. They had no choice to leave their biological family and the whole situation to them just sucks. We decided to let them have as much say in things as we possibly could, obviously we had to set boundaries and we needed to show them we were in charge but for little things they got total control. That meant wearing their "Spiderman" costume to Target was totally acceptable, that little thing alone allowed our son to realize he wasn't going to get punished just for the sake of punishing him. I will warn you though, they sometimes will push their boundaries and see how far they can go-make sure you discipline when necessary. Discipline however can be hard especially if you don't know what happened to these kids prior to your placement, you have no idea if they were just never taught what is acceptable and what is not. Our oldest daughter is another perfect example of this, she was eating food right out of the fridge even meat, without cooking it. We told her that wasn't okay and she cried and told us she was sorry but that was how she was used to eating. Use that as a teaching moment, it will make them feel loved and they'll know that now someone has their back and is going to teach them all these things that we take for granted. I've realized now that fostering is more than just being a "temporary" parent at times, you may possibly be the only one to ever show that kid that someone cares so making them feel safe is super important. Our first week we just got to know our kids and let them pick some things out to have to feel safe, it wasn't long before our kids were saying "Let's go home" instead of "Let's go back to your house" and I couldn't be happier.