Dr. Kalyani Gopal

When you decide to foster, you are faced with many difficult decisions, dilemmas and questions: How do you navigate the daily struggles of foster parenting? How can you nurture bonds with your foster child who is angry, sad, and defiant? How can you prepare to step back when it's time to let go?

Foster Parenting Step-by-Step is a concise how-to guide to fostering that summarizes what to expect as a foster parent, and gives immediate practical solutions. It outlines the different stages of a fostering relationship, raising common issues encountered at each age and how to tackle them. It also explains the impact of trauma on your child: how this can show itself through challenging behavior and how to respond to it.

This book will provide fostering parents with the skills and knowledge to support the needs of the children in foster care. It will be invaluable not just to foster parents but also to those professionals supporting foster placements. Selected Reading Questionnaire.… (plus d'informations)

This is an invaluable book filled with all the basic information needed by prospective and current foster parents. All those who are contemplating, or have already taken on, the momentous responsibility of fostering a child, not to mention several children, should equip themselves with this book.

Dr, Gopal is an experienced clinical psychologist and has specialized knowledge on child sexual abuse, parenting, attachment issues and other related fields. Her wisdom and understanding shine through this book.

Stirring, in fact shocking, quotes from foster children are aptly provided at the beginning of the book. These will give you direct insight into how neglected and damaged these children are. They are not removed from their birth parents for no reason.

Those who take on the charge of fostering must thus be particularly mature, well-balanced and responsible, and be educated as to what to expect from these children and how to care for them and tackle their problems in the best possible way. The purchase and reading of this book would be an important first step in the way of educating foster parents.

All stages of the fostering process are dealt with, from the preliminary one of contemplating one's motivations for fostering, planning to do so, the welcoming stage, the educational stage, the empowering stage and the letting go/adopting stage.

One section deals with how to ensure good relations between your birth children and your foster children. Information is provided regarding common behaviour seen in foster children due to neglect, physical and/or sexual abuse. Another section deals with attachment/bonding issues, where both avoidant, resistant and disorganized attachment are explained. (These are forms of insecure attachment that often occur.) It is indicated how to develop secure attachment in your foster infant/child and how to help the infant/child gain emotional control. Various types of mental and conduct disorders are listed and information is given as to how to deal with these.

This book spans over many, many subjects within the field of fostering and contains a wealth of essential information that space does not permit me to mention here. It seems to me that all necessary themes, problems, disorders, helpful means of treatment and basic parenting skills are covered.

A valuable part of the book is one listing various programmes for foster parents by which to optimize their parenting skills, including a programme for "collaborative co-parenting" between biological parent and foster parent. (Such programmes should in my view be available to all parents, and perhaps be mandatory for many parents with problematical backgrounds.)

It must be pointed out that most of the book is not in ordinary narrative form, but is composed of lists and tabulations under appropriate headings, providing detailed information about each theme/subject. The book is thus extremely compact and informative and is thus not one that can be easily read in one sitting, but may need to be tackled in chunks of a few pages at a time. But it should be read in its entirety, perhaps several times, prior to deciding whether or not to foster. Subsequently, it can be used as a handbook or guidebook for reference purposes. Perhaps Dr. Gopal will later author further books on fostering in a more conversational style. However, this book constitutes a basic and valuable fount of information for all foster parents.

According to the author, 80% of those incarcerated in the USA have been in the foster care system. In this connection, I must concur with what is indicated on the back of the book, that it will contribute to empowering foster parents to transform for the better their foster children's quality of life, which will in turn transform their lives as adults. Thus could change the very fabric of society, and drastically reduce crime, drug addiction, prostitution and mental illness.… (plus d'informations)