On The Case

Welcome back to Taylor Talks!

I've been spending a lot of time lately writing about my daily life and discussing matters that don't have much to do with foster care. As you know, I moved to Florida two months ago, and I feel like this blog has become a way for me to keep loved ones back in New York informed about what's happening in our lives.

That being said, I want to take some time to focus on a topic related to foster care tonight.

If you go way back (and I do mean way, way back) to my second post on Taylor Talks, I posted a list of meanings for different terms related to foster care. One word on my list was caseworker. On that post, I wrote the following meaning:

Caseworker: an employee of the state who works for CPS or DSS; they either bring the child to the foster home (CPS) or work with the biological parents and foster parents to obtain the best possible outcome for the child, having monthly meetings to check up on the foster child (DSS)

Caseworkers are the DSS social workers who you, as a foster parent, have the most contact with throughout the term of a child's stay in foster care with you. They are the people who work with the foster family, biological family, and court system to figure out what is best for the child in question. They relay information between the parties involved, and they keep everyone informed about changes in the case on all ends.

There is always one caseworker assigned to each case, whether it involves one child or a sibling group. Even in certain cases, something that we dealt with first hand, there will be one caseworker who is responsible for working with everyone involved when a sibling group is split between multiple foster homes. I think that shortly before we stopped taking in foster children in New York, they were starting to have teams of caseworkers assigned to cases, so that four caseworkers would be working together to lighten the load for each of them, but I'm not sure if that's something that happens all over.

Over our eighteen years as a foster family, we have dealt with some incredible caseworkers who we have been a huge help in my foster siblings' cases. I think that caseworkers have a very demanding, time-consuming, and heart-wrenching job. It must be very difficult, especially when they're working with kids with whom you can't help but become emotionally involved. It can be easy to get frustrated with caseworkers when the case itself is becoming overwhelming, but they really are such a big part of what makes the foster care system able to accomplish a lot and help these children.

Thank you so much for your continued support! I look forward to sharing more stories about my experience with foster care, and hopefully hearing from readers who have questions or similar stories to share. I'm always willing to answer questions and hear about other experiences! Please don't forget to like and share my Facebook author page as well!

I’d greatly appreciate it if you would share this blog with friends and family through your favorite social media sites. If you’re sharing on Twitter, don’t forget to tag me (@TayTayK02) and use the hashtag #TaylorTalks.

Thanks!
Taylor

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