[paperchasingmom]

I'm sorry to see that your "signature line" at the bottom reads that another family was picked, just today....

Are you okay? If you want to share or vent, we'll listen....

Melody

[newMafamily]

I would probably use my first name since we will get older kids but my bio kids often use mommy and daddy like a title
(e.g. " daddybill") like there is some other daddy. Other kids who spend alot of time with us sometimes adopt these names. Frankly I answer to a number of names and would not force a child to call us mom and dad as long as thier choice was reasonably polite.

[chrystilynn]

We have only been foster parents for about a year. And most of that time we have only done Respite. So they were short term. We let the kids call us by our names. It is a little more interesting for us because my husband is 10 years my Junior, so while I am old enough to be "mom" he really isn't old enough to be "dad", especially since we take in teens. I think if we had them fulltime they would probably call me mom and my husband still by his name. I have teens from a previous marriage who obviously call me mom, and my husband is called by his name. We have had Exchange Students who did that, too. I am mom and my husband is called by his name. When we have introduced our foster kids at church we tell people they are our friends or they are just staying with us for the weekend. Most everyone at church knows we do foster care so they know the situation. Our church is one of the best. They all accept every child we have brought even if they were not good kids.

[SmileMonkey]

We had a 12 year old boy who called us by our first names and tnen one day out of the blue started calling us mom and dad. Everyone was shocked because he maintains a very good relationship with his bio mom.

Now, we have a sibling group who are 8 and 11 and we are hoping to adopt them (this is their hope, too). We were hoping that they would one day just start calling us mom and dad (their parents are not living) but it's been almost a year and no sign of it yet. Every once in a great while our 8 year old will call us mommy M or daddy M but the older child never. When referring to us to other people they even call us their foster parents.

It is beginning to get very frustrtating. When they came into care, their caregiver told them that they would never have to call us mom and dad and that maybe one day they could call us Aunt and Uncle. I don't want to force them to call us anything they aren't comfortable with but at the same time, we are trying to build and be a family. It is sad to me that we will always have children that call us by our first names and it seems like we will never really feel like a family.

How has anyone else who adopted dealt with this issue?

[soap_opera_life]

Hello all, the name is Jordan. I joined this forum hoping to help people understand some of the really weird problems us foster kids have. If you have any questions please ask me on this site or email me at flamingolvr2@yahoo.com.Thanx.