Foster Care Book: Chapter 7
Chapter 7 - Professional Parenthood
Another article I picked up on the Internet was an excerpt from Professional Parenthood.
Professional Parenthood, A Guide For Foster Care by Vincenette Scheppler, M S W Published by Arvin Publications. I don’t know how you feel, but I for one, would just as soon not be labeled as a professional. That gets us back to looking at foster children as a job. Jobs can become boring, uninteresting and wearisome. We can never, ever, look at the responsibility of foster care in that vein! I do not ever want to be a professional! I want to be considered as a foster father who is interested in each child as a human being capable of becoming a positive influence in our society.
When working with hurt kids, it is difficult for me to look at myself as a professional. Am I considered a professional father to my own kids? I certainly hope not. That being true, why should I consider myself a professional foster father? Why do we always have to label everything and everybody? You will find that most individuals who approach foster care clinically are inclined, not only to label everything and everybody, but to follow pretty much the same path toward resolving the problems with foster children. The paths they choose are generally strewn with the thorns and failures of the past thirty years of our society. You have heard the statement, "If it ain’t broke don’t fix it!" In this case we have the opposite, "If it doesn’t work, why not fix it and stop using the same old approach?" This is a symptom that Outcome Management can help to resolve. Of course, there are always several ways to interpret the data gathered. Care must be taken not to tilt the data in the direction of your beliefs! As I have stated before: "A project should never be started unless a plan is identified as to how its usefulness will be measured."
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