Pulled

 

Pulled

I get asked a lot about being a foster parent. What advice do I have for people considering it for their families? Parenting is hard. Parenting foster kids is harder. Parenting when you break birth order can be harder than foster parenting needs to be. My advice to families considering foster parenting with biological children still at home: Decide carefully if birth order issues is what you want to struggle with.

We love our girls; they add so much joy to our family and we don't regret bringing them into our family, but the struggle with birth order is real. Remember back to how conflicted you and your first born felt and struggled with the adjustment of an added sibling? Yea, like that, but worse and more complicated. Although we have made it work in the past and committed to making it work now, too, I am stating it here so that I can hold myself to it: this is the LAST time we are breaking birth order if we continue to foster after these girls find permanency.

When we accepted this placement, we knew their might be issues because Miss S is smack dab in the middle of Maybel and Charlie (although we didn't realize she was developmentally behind Charlie) and Miss E is only two years older than Maybel. We anticipated issues with the four youngest. We figured the 4 year age gap between Maybel and MR wouldn't be an issue at all. WRONG. The conflict between the others was present in the beginning but minimal now 9 months in. But the first borns seem to be in a constant, unfixable battle for first status, and it's affecting both their self-worth and self-esteem. Is there someone in your life that makes you green with envy every time you look at them? Now imagine being forced to live with that person in a makeshift sibling relationship competing for the attention of your parents. This is what I am dealing with with these first borns. Sooo much jealousy over every little thing.

These three girls are so attention seeking, demanding, energetic, with more needs than Maybel... the squeaky wheel gets the grease, right? Sensitive, quiet, independent Maybel is the one getting lost in the shuffle of five kids. Charlie is unaffected by this placement and the birth order-upset I think because he is the only boy and he is home with me half days while all the girls are in school so he gets plenty of one on one time with me still and gets father/son time regularly which the three girls aren't that interested in. No jealousy is directed toward Charlie at all - just Maybel.

Maybel recently told me that she feels less important than the foster children and wants more one on one time with me and her dad. Talk about a punch to the gut - we never wanted our foster parenting to be detrimental to our biological kids. So, we have made some changes to meet her emotional needs to make sure she feels seen and heard in all the chaos of these three girls. Now, MR is saying she feels unloved and unliked because we are giving Maybel what she needs (and because of underlying trauma details I wont go into here). We just can't win.

The counselor has reassured us meeting Maybel's needs is what we should and need to be doing and she will do her best to help MR understand and cope with it and address the underlying trauma issue behind it, but that its also obvious this is a birth order issue that we just need to keep pushing through. But gosh, do I feel pulled in two opposite directions and stuck in a losing war of the battle of the wills of the first borns.