My Experience With Placements

The first call came on a Thursday.

It was 9:47pm. My kids were in bed. I was halfway through a glass of wine and a show I'd been trying to watch for three days. The caseworker on the phone was apologetic but clearly stressed — she needed a placement for a 6-year-old, could we take him, she needed to know in the next 15 minutes.

I said yes. We said yes. We'd been licensed for four months. We'd done the training, read the books, bought the extra bed. We were ready.

We were not ready.

He arrived at 11:30. His shoes were on the wrong feet. He carried a stuffed bear that was missing one eye. He didn't cry. He just stood in our foyer and looked around like he was calculating whether this place was safe enough to exist in.

I had no idea what to say. I'd prepared a bedroom. I'd bought pajamas in four different sizes. I did not have a single word for that moment.

The first week taught me everything the training didn't.

I learned that trauma doesn't look like sadness. It looks like rage at homework and walls that won't stop crying and a child who eats everything in reach as fast as possible because his body doesn't believe there will be more. I learned that "acting out" is the wrong frame — that every behavior was something he was trying to tell us that he couldn't say in words yet.

I learned that I needed documentation I didn't have. I needed a system for tracking what was happening, when, and what helped. I had notes on my phone, sticky notes on the fridge, a text thread with my sister. It wasn't enough.

I learned that the system moves slowly and the child moves fast. By the time the therapist appointment came through, I had six weeks of observations that I couldn't organize or communicate clearly. I knew something. I couldn't prove it.

Why I started making tools.

I'm not a therapist or a social worker. I'm a foster parent who made a lot of things with my own hands because I needed them and they didn't exist in the right format. Or they existed but were designed for professionals, not for someone doing laundry and making lunches and trying to hold a child together at the same time.

The first thing I made was a behavior tracking sheet. Just a table on a piece of paper that I could fill in quickly when something happened — time, trigger, what I saw, what I did, how it ended. It took five minutes to design. It changed everything. I could see patterns. I could show them to the caseworker and the therapist. I wasn't just describing feelings — I had data.

Then came the court letter template, because I had to write to a judge and I had no idea what format to use or what was appropriate to say. Then the placement checklist, because I was tired of realizing at midnight that I'd forgotten to ask for the vaccination records. Then the regulation tools, because I needed something I could put on the wall that the kids could actually use.

Then a second placement. Then a third. And then I started sharing the things I'd made with other foster parents, and they kept saying: I needed this. I've been looking for something like this. Can you make more?

This is what Empowered Foster Parent is.

It's the tools I wish I'd had. Made by someone who has sat in every situation these tools are designed for — not in a theoretical way, but at 2am, in the dark, when a child is dysregulating and you need to know what to do right now.

It's built for the foster parents who are doing the hardest work in child welfare and getting the least support. The ones who get a garbage bag and a phone call and have to figure out the rest.

I can't fix the system. But I can make you better equipped to survive it — and to give the children in your care the stable, safe, informed caregiving they deserve.

That's the whole thing. That's why this exists.