As a successful foster and adoptive parents you must be able to:
Know Your Own Family: Assess your individual and family strengths and needs; build on strengths and meet needs.
Communicate Effectively: Use and develop communication skills needed to foster or adopt.
Know the Children: Identify the strengths and needs of children and youth who have been abused, neglected, abandoned, and/or emotionally maltreated.
Build Strengths; Meet Needs: Build on strengths and meet needs of children and youth who are placed with you.
Work in Partnership: Develop partnerships with children and youth, birth families, the agency, and the community to develop and carry out plans for permanency.
Be Loss & Attachment Experts: Help children and youth develop skills to manage loss and attachment.
Manage Behaviors: Help children and youth manage behaviors.
Build Connections: Help children and youth maintain and develop relationships that keep them connected to their pasts.
Build Self-Esteem: Help children and youth build on positive self-concept and positive family, cultural and racial identity.
Assure Health & Safety: Provide a healthy and safe environment for children and youth and keep them free from harm.
Assess Impact: Assess the ways fostering and/or adopting will affect your family.
Make an Informed Decision: Make an informed decision to foster or adopt.