Husband not Convinced

I'm still very new to the community, but want to say that I'm glad that you are eager to do fostering! Unfortunately, if your husband isn't completely on board, then it is better to wait. Especially if most of the work will fall on him, and he will resent you & the kids. Perhaps just ease him into it, show him statistics & talk about the good things to balance what he knows about the bad things. Find out what specifically scares him about it. It may be something simple that you can avoid by just telling your social worker that you can't accept a child with a particular issue. Good luck!

The process to get licensed is long as well. Therefore if he is not convinced probably will not enjoy that process, and it could show.

We didn't have any bio kids either and never really planned on it. But I always had fostering and adopting in my heart for some reason. I'd bring it up every few years and he never really got wrapped up in it or took it very seriously. I wasn't even sure if he felt the same pull or not. Finally this year he stopped me when I brought it up and pointed out that we aren't getting any younger (me almost 40, him 46) and he didn't want us to keep putting this off. I set up all the orientations and he was a good sport about driving an hour in each direction over the month of January checking out agencies. He really excelled at PRIDE training and is on board with everything. His motivation is different than mine and his feelings about what we are doing are different. But we are different people too. As long as our hearts are open and our goals are similar I think it's okay. I'm sure people struggle with any big decision in life when it comes to their spouse's reaction. But communication and letting someone have their own feelings and thoughts on the issue is important. I wouldn't want anyone to resent me if I pushed hard but I also know that we get complacent in life and sometimes we need a PUSH toward making a change!

Do you have any foster care friends you can hang out with? It helps if you can both surround yourself with likeminded people. What about trying out a local foster care support group meeting? I'd call some agencies and churches to see if they have support groups. Many have couples FC groups and not just ''women''. When we first became FP's, ppl told me there were none, but after my own digging not only did I find one support group but several. I will admit that FC is not my hubby's thing, it's not his passion, but it IS mine. He went along with it more to be supportive. Of course this means I end up doing most the work, but that's fine b/c I'm a sahm and love what I do. Some can come along and say, ''well that's not fair''. I did/do most of the work with our bios too....don't most moms? Anyway hopefully he'll come around. Bring it up and just be honest. He may pleasantly surprise you.

I had thought about fostering for a long time as well, but was scared to take the plunge. Two years ago I started volunteering at a RTC and now I'm in the process of adopting a 12 year old girl who started living there a year ago. Maybe if there's a RTC or group home near you, volunteering would be a non-threatening way to get his feet wet.

I was in the same situation as you are in now. Although my husband does work, I am the main breadwinner with all of the benefits. Due to fertility issues, we were not able to have kids of our own. I was real reluctant to bring up foster/adopt to my husband due to being afraid that he would shatter my dreams of being a mommy. Much to my surprise, when I did finally bring it up he was more excited about being a foster parent then I was. If you have not talked to your husband about it in detail, please don't wait and just do it.......he might shock you with his response like my husband did.

My hubby wasn't fully on board either until we started looking in to it more and he realized what a huge need there is in our area. Now when people ask him why we're signing up for this (just finished MAPP class and waiting on homestudy), he tells them "We don't need another kid. A kid needs us." As a previous poster mentioned, I too will be the one really doing most of the day to day parenting, just as I do for our biological children, but hubby definitely needed to be on board as it is a long process to even get licensed. We hope to be able to adopt one of our foster babies someday.

My husband was initially quite against us growing our family. We already had a total of 5 kids between us from previous marriages. So I went to the informational meetings, I researched online. Then I started talking to him about the process and kids in the system. He reluctantly agreed to go to PRIDE training. But once there, it opened a door for conversation. The process took us 8 months to complete, so we had about the same time an "expectant parent" would. The compromise was he agreed to 1 placement, and I wanted 2. We both ended up getting what we wanted. We had an emergency infant placement, and then before he was RU'd we got a "match" for a sibling set of girls. The birth mom relinquished on the infant, so we adopted all three! :)Just when I thought we were done, and we were letting our license to foster/adopt expire, my husband came to me, and wanted to renew. He wasn't sure if he was "done" ; perhaps there was another child of ours making their way home.You could have knocked me over with a feather. I was stunned. So we have submitted our HS on another sibling set, and hope to hear something soon.It has changed our world, I would say go for it!