[Courtney]

Hello all! This looks like a wonderful place to come for support and for questions. I have two brothers that are foster children. I have a 9 month old that was placed with us last March so we got him when he was 3 months old. My husband and I absolutely adore him to pieces and we are hopeful that with the next hearing coming up in November, parental rights will be terminated and we'll be able to file our petition for adoption. I couldn't imagine loving this little boy any more even if he were my own.

His 3 year old brother came to us a little over a month ago. He's usually pretty well behaved minus typical 3 year old behavior but here's our problem. The boys still have supervised visits once every 2 weeks with the birth parents. The 9 month old has no clue who these people are but the 3 year old has issues after he sees his parents...and with good reason. I understand that he is confused and he misses his Mommy and Daddy and seeing them now once every 2 weeks is hard for him but he gets very emotional after the visits and his behavior is almost unmanagable. He refuses to go into time out for his bad behavior and throws temper tantrums. The day after visits he is very willful in daycare (won't listen to the daycare workers and has bad behavior) and last week he pulled another child's hair and when the daycare worker tried to put him time out he tried to bite her. He knows that his is unacceptable but how can we help him cope with these visits? It usually takes a couple of days after the visits for him to return to his normal self.

We had talked to the social worker about this and this is the reason why he only gets a visit once every 2 weeks. It had been weekly but because of the behavior problems she had them moved down to once every 2 weeks which has helped.

Any ideas?

Also, if and when parental rights do get terminated how do we explain to a 3 year old that he will not be seeing his parents anymore? He does talk about them quite a bit and sometimes when we get in the car to go places he asks if we are going to go see his Mommy. We respond with, "No, but you'll see her soon." What do we say if it comes to the point where he won't be seeing her anymore?