- Who We Are
-
What We Do
- Helping Children
- Strengthening Families
- Building Community
- Get Involved
Share
Every day, families connect with our Foster Care & Adoption Guides to ask questions and learn how they can become family for children who need one. You probably have many of the same questions, so we’ve compiled a list of our common responses:
1. Kids enter foster care because of abuse or neglect, not because they’ve done something wrong.
2. Child Protective Services (CPS) investigates abuse and neglect allegations. When substantiated, every effort is made to keep kids safe and with their family. If that’s not possible, a judge reviews the findings and officially orders that the children be removed.
3. When children are removed from their families, workers move quickly to find a family nearby that will be able to meet the physical, mental, emotional, cultural and spiritual needs of the children. The majority of removals involve siblings, so workers look for families that can keep brothers and sisters together whenever possible.
4. Foster families volunteer their home and family so children can be safe and feel loved.
5. PCHAS provides trauma-informed training using Trust-Based Relational Intervention (TBRI) and assesses families carefully to ensure they are qualified and prepared to offer kids the safe, loving, nurturing family they need.
6. When children are first placed into foster care, it’s called an emergency placement. Due to the circumstances, many of the details about the children’s needs are still unknown. Foster families who are committed to connecting with kids and willing to be flexible are a tremendous resource for kids in this moment of crisis for their birth family.
7. The goal of foster care is to safely return children to their family. We call this reunification. The court and CPS staff work with the children’s birth family and aim for kids to return home or be placed with Kinship Caregivers within 12 months.
8. Foster families take children for supervised visitation with their birth family. These visits are vital to helping children maintain a connection with their birth family and offer foster families great opportunities to show respect for the whole family and to learn more about the children and their stories.
9. Foster families focus on providing children with as much normalcy as possible. That means sharing family meals, celebrating holidays, participating in extracurricular activities, interacting with teachers at the local school, taking kids to appointments, going to church, and everything else that families do.
10. It’s never easy for a child to leave, but foster families and PCHAS staff celebrate when birth families are restored and children are able to return home. We work hard to make sure families have up-to-date information and minimize surprises. And, we’re here to support our families before, during and after every placement.
There is a shortage of foster families in Texas. If you’ve ever thought about fostering, call 281-324-0544 or email fosteradopt@pchas.org to connect with a Foster Care & Adoption Guide. We want to get to know you and make sure you have honest answers to all of your questions.
View All
