You can tell him you aren't his real mom, but that is a concept he will not be able to grasp. In my mind the solution is to let the child call you mommy, but call yourself in his prescence, mommy [your first name].
For an older child who has already known their mommy, I tell them that mommy is a really important word that should be reserved for people who are mommies. I tell them that they can call me Ms. But I never ever tell a child they cannot call me mommy if they want to do that. Some kids do that because they have been through a series of caregivers and no longer know the special place of "mommy".
Some kids do it because they don't want to be calling you something else when all the other kids greet the person who comes to visit them at school as "mommy". We only had one foster daughter who was old enough for this to be an issue and we told her that she could call us whatever was comfortable for her as long as it was respectful so sometimes it was Cari and Christi, often she called Cari mom.
Her bio family got all upset with her and we just explained that they were being a bit selfish and that again, she was the one who could choose. She would often introduce which ever one of us that was with her as her mom when she would meet other kids.
It made her feel more normal which was the important part. I know that she never forgot her bio mom or what role we were playing in her life but we were being her mom at the time and that was what counted. For what it is worth I call both my birth mom and my step mom Mom. They both had that role when I was growing up and my mother didn't have problems with it.
She totally understood that it was more about feeling normal then throwing her over for someone else. I also called the parents of some of my friends mom and dad because that is how they functioned when I was at their houses which was quite a bit While you may not be her forever mommy you are her right now mommy. We too have only had one child old enough to even call us anything but mommy or daddy. When she came in, she started calling me Ms. I let her do what she is comfortable with.
She recently started asking me if I am a mommy probably because she hears my kids call me that. I just tell her yes. I'm dealing with this right now. We got lolli bc my first name is Ali, and at first he said Ali like lolli. ATleast I do. We also have a baby who just turned 1, and I am starting to refer to myself as Mama to her. Mostly bc she says Mama now, and it is too darn cute.
I've learned the hard way. Join now to personalize. In our eyes, what she needed from us during the time she was with us was a mom and a dad, so that's how we treated the situation. If she had been older, we may have chosen other names, but we might not have. Each situation is different and sometimes kids just want to be part of the family. Our foster kids' stories are almost always devastatingly sad, and telling them out loud sometimes sounds like made-for-television drama.
But their stories are not entertainment. And really, best practice for foster parents is to keep those stories private. It's easy to be drawn to a child's tear-jerker of a story, but that story does not define them. Focus your questions, instead, on what the child likes and what great qualities they have, pushing the conversation toward how much they are valued instead of what drama you can rubberneck.
If they were truly lucky, their family situation wouldn't have necessitated that they be sent to a stranger's home. Period, end of story. I feel the same way about my adopted daughter. She is not lucky to have found her way to our home. Are we lucky to have her? Absolutely, but true luck and happiness is biological families being able to stay together, and biological families torn apart for any reason is tragic.
If you want to talk about luck, focus on how lucky the foster family is to have such a magical child in their home. A handful of birth parents are truly bad eggs, yes, but the majority of parents who lose their kids to the foster system are not evil. Many of them weren't parented themselves and, as a result, have never had examples of what it means to be a good parent.
They might lack a support system or they might lack means to get a leg up to better take care of their children. My job as a foster mom is not to judge birth parents , it's to care for their children as well as I can for as long as I need to. That doesn't mean there aren't moments when I rail against the horrific situations the child came from, or against negative choices, but at the end of the day that judgement gets us nowhere.
It is, instead, my job to wish birth parents every success in getting their lives back on track so their family can be reunited. That is the first goal of foster care, even if sometimes birth parents are found to be not suited to parent in the end. That was my biggest fear when my husband and I became foster parents: having a child in our home for months, or years, then suddenly having to say goodbye as they returned to their birth parents or to another family member. Well, I can tell you that it did absolutely break my heart to say goodbye to not one, but two foster babies in one year.
The thing is, my broken heart healed. I had a big cry when the social worker picked them up, and as I put away any gear we didn't send with them, but I survived and, dare I say, was stronger for it. The fear of your own heart being broken is just not a good enough reason not to foster. It's OK if you don't feel called to foster, and just because I'm a foster mom doesn't mean I think everyone should do the same. It's definitely not for everyone.
However, please don't tell me that you could never foster because it would be too hard to say goodbye. Give another reason or don't give a reason at all. Your broken heart — that's probably been before broken through a break up and healed over time — pales in comparison to the home you could give a baby or child whose heart has probably been broken more in their young lives than yours ever will.
You don't have to be a foster parent to help children who really need it.
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