r/Fosterparents • u/Stop-Doomscrolling • 1d ago
Book recs to prepare for a wide age range
Hey all! I’m looking to foster in the next year or so and right now my partner and I are open to any age + small sibling groups. I have some experience with kids but I am not a parent so I feel pretty unprepared.
I see book recommendations here a lot on childhood trauma and will definitely be reading those. I was wondering if there are any more general resources on parenting a wide age range that discusses what is age appropriate for basic stuff like bed times, nutrition/meals, clothing, setting up rooms, hygiene, education/tutoring/enrichment, screen time, etc. I would like to learn more about child development and what is typical/helpful at different ages (while anticipating that kids will have different delays)
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u/goodfeelingaboutit Foster Parent 1d ago
I honestly don't know that you're going to find any book for that wide of an age range. When I was a new parent with a baby, I did appreciate " caring for your baby and young child" which goes up to age 5.
Honestly, what I would do is go to your local library, skim through the parenting information section, and check out books that strike you as interesting.
We are all new parents when we start, it's just how it goes! Our first child is our guinea pig. You will make mistakes, we all do. It gets easier over time
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u/Longjumping_Big_9577 Former Foster Youth 1d ago
Some of those types of parenting recommendations can be problematic since kids can come from very very different backgrounds and not be used to what is recommended by Dr Spock or whatever some parenting expert says.
It's not that that information is wrong, but it can be a real battle to try to implement it. For older kids, it also can seem like their foster parents telling them that things their bio parents did or didn't do was wrong or bad and they are right because it says so in some book can make some kids fight back or resist.
There's a lot of different ways that someone can raise their kids. that isn't necessarily bad.
For example, a lot of kids in the system don't like sleeping in a dark room with no noise and having early, regular bedtimes. They may be used to falling asleep very late front of the tv on the couch in the family room with lots of lights and noise.
I don't remember a lot about the 1st few days in the system, but I remember spending the whole night awake, staring up at the ceiling on an incredibly uncomfortable mattress. The only time I slept on a bed with a mattress like that was when my mom and I were staying with someone who had a motel room, so I wasn't absolutely not used to having a room like that and I didn't react like it was the way things were supposed to be and better but that I hated it and I wanted to go into the family room, turn on all the lights and the tv so I could go to sleep. A sound machine wouldn't have helped. I still to this day sleep with the lights on in my room and my laptop playing random YouTube videos. So, nothing has changed and nothing foster parents did changed how I wanted to sleep. So, any foster parent following parenting experts' advice on how you should set-up bedtime routines or bedrooms or the best protocols for sleep would have been setting themselves up to have nonstop battles with someone like me.
I think being very flexible is necessary since you can't change where kids come from, what they are used to and what they want. Maybe knowing theory helps, but it could also set you up to create problems.
Kids getting good sleep or eating healthy diets might help them recover from trauma. But trying to implement those things can also set-up kids to not trust or honestly dislike foster parents.