After you've spent some time encouraging friends and family to volunteer, foster, and adopt, you may start to wonder if there's more YOU could be doing to help foster children. Many people start out by becoming mentors to children in foster care and/or former foster youth aging out.
Becoming a mentor seems like an easy transition, but it is harder than you might think. In addition to needing to locate an agency or receive permission and training from your local child welfare office, there are several things you need to think about and ensure you are capable of before you decide to take on such an undertaking.
Some Important Considerations:
Mentors need to be a safe place. Unless you are concerned about the child’s safety, you cannot breach their confidence to share with another adult in their life. Most agencies (if you are with an agency) have a policy of what must be shared, and ALL people with confidentiality clauses have cause to break confidentiality in cases where there is concern for the client’s safety or anyone else’s.
Mentors have to be reliable. It’s hard to build trust when you are constantly flaking out on the foster child you are mentoring. Be careful to only cancel when there are circumstances beyond your control, such as illness, death, or very severe weather.
Mentors need to be relatable and comfortable. Be prepared for it to take some time to get them to open up.
You may need to share some things about yourself as well. You cannot expect openness if you aren’t willing to be a little vulnerable too.
Find out what skills your foster child needs to work on, and what resources they may need shared. Part of your job is to make sure they have all the tools for success – even if you aren’t the person to provide them all.
Another thing to think about as you decide on whether or not to mentor – will you choose to remain in the child’s life as they age out? Many foster children age out with literally no one to support them and encourage them as they discover just how hard being an adult really is. Decide beforehand if you are willing and able to be a permanent fixture in young adult’s lives… And decide how much of a part of their life you can be.
Are you willing to:
Be a sounding board for decisions?
Be a place to find information and resources when they just don’t know where to go or what to do?
Be a financial resource yourself?
Be a place they can stay if they need that, or a ride to resources?
Be a medical, financial, or legal reference or contact?
Be someone regular in their life – someone that can be their Sunday dinner or Saturday brunch or Monday coffee person?
Just be there when they need someone to talk to or a pick me up?
Make sure that they are aware whether you are available, and just exactly what they can count on you for. Chances are they will second-guess themselves and choose not to call when they really need you, because they are worried it’s just too much to ask of you, and will instead save up their “favor quota” for something dire that they are too desperate to care about keeping quiet about.
Come back next week for Transitions, Part 3: Transitioning to a Foster Parent!
Have you made the transition to mentor? Did you find these guidelines to be accurate? Is there anything else you would add? Let us know in the comments!
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