First step for foster parents: go to class

When Charlotte Clements, a veteran schoolteacher and mother of a teenage daughter, heard she had to take a class to be a foster parent, her first thought was: "Yeah, whatever."

She wondered what she could learn that she didn't already know, especially since she had grown up alongside foster children.

But her "been there, done that" attitude quickly changed after a two-month weekly training course from the Massachusetts Department of Social Services, which taught her to look at foster care in a way she hadn't before.

"It was really great because you got a different perspective in terms of the way the child thinks. You have to remember where they're coming from ... they're leaving a whole life," she explains, the recent course still fresh in her mind.

That foster children aren't necessarily thrilled to leave their homes, no matter how bad the conditions are, is just one of the lessons parents are taught when they go through the training.

Educational support for foster parents is of particular interest this month – National Foster Care Month – as efforts are made around the country to enlighten people about foster parenting and woo more recruits.

Nationwide, about 600,000 children are in foster care, according to the most recent figures from the federal government's Department of Health and Human Services; 134,000 children are waiting to be adopted. In Massachusetts, for example, as of the end of March there were about 7,900 children in foster care, but only about 5,400 foster homes.

That state was one of the first to combine the training for foster and adoptive parents, eventually developing the Massachusetts Approach to Partnership in Parenting, or MAPP. Eleven other states, including California and Texas, have adopted the curriculum since it was introduced in 1985, and it has traveled as far away as Israel.

The program covers a range of topics, from how to help children who have been sexually abused to how the foster or adoptive family can adjust to a new member. Some parents, like Ms. Clements, feel it's time well spent. But it doesn't sugarcoat anything. Through role playing, videos, and discussion, it brings home to parents the unique needs of foster children and how to navigate the bureaucracy that controls their lives.

Trainers and participants say the sessions place the most emphasis on how to deal with the care and behavior of children who have been through trauma – both from abuse and from being taken from their homes.

Regina McNulty, a recruiter and trainer in Arlington, Mass., says potential foster parents will often say to her, "You're bumming me out here." But she says the state has a duty to explain everything they might encounter.

"It's our obligation to tell you that it could be bad. And hopefully you'll get a foster kid and it'll be nothing like this," but we can't leave anything out, she says.

MAPP has been updated since 1985, but even in its original form it made prospective foster parents stop and think.

"We used to go faithfully every week. It really made you decide if you really want to go through with this," says Rose Ann Pasquariello, who lives in Arlington and had her training 16 years ago. "They present the case that they have a lot of children out there, and not all of these children are perfect."

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