FAQ

The Family Care Home Agreement is the written agreement between you and MCFD or an Indigenous agency. It must be signed before any child is placed, and it sets out the type and level of your home, the rate structure, your service and training expectations, and the review, dispute, and closure processes. It also writes in compliance with the Rights of Children in Care and the Standards for Foster Homes.

Signing it means you agree to provide care that meets those standards, uphold children’s rights, take part in each child’s Plan of Care, keep the required records, complete your training, allow annual reviews, carry required insurance, and notify your resource social worker of significant changes at home. It is not an employment contract — you are not a government employee — and it does not give you guardianship. Keep your signed copy handy; many of the day-to-day rules you work with live inside it.

Source: Foster Family Handbook

The home study is a conversation, not an interrogation. Your resource social worker is trying to understand your motivation and expectations for fostering, your history and current circumstances (including health, relationships, work, and finances), your parenting experience and approach to discipline, the physical home itself, and the views of everyone who lives there. They will also look at your support network of family, friends, and community.

It is a collaborative process meant to help both you and the ministry decide, realistically, whether fostering is the right fit before any child is placed. If relatives or friends might later provide relief care for you, they can often be screened at this stage too, so they are ready to go once you start.

Source: Foster Family Handbook

The path runs in roughly this order: an initial enquiry for information, an application, pre-service PRIDE training, a home study (assessment) by a resource social worker, criminal record and prior contact checks for you and other adults in the home, an approval decision by a director, and finally signing your Family Care Home Agreement. The whole process usually takes several months, depending on training schedules, worker availability, and how quickly the checks come back. Your resource social worker will give you a realistic timeline at the start.

On Vancouver Island, a CFS Area Coordinator can help you figure out where to begin — whether that is MCFD, an Indigenous agency, or the Foster Parent Support Services Society — and can connect you with experienced caregivers who have been through it themselves.

Source: Foster Family Handbook

Yes. A home’s level is not fixed. It is set jointly by you and your resource social worker during your home study, looking at your training, experience, skills, capacity for more complex needs, and practical things like your household and available time. As you gain experience, training, and confidence with harder placements, you can apply to move to a higher level.

Levels can also move the other way if your circumstances change. The level mainly affects what kinds of placements you are offered and how your payments are structured. If you are thinking about a change, raise it with your resource social worker.

Source: Foster Family Handbook

Homes are described by both a type and a level. The type is about your relationship to the child. A Kinship (Restricted) home is approved to care for a specific child you already have a family or kinship connection to, and that approval ends if the child leaves. A Regular home is approved to care for children generally, which is what most foster homes are.

The level is about the intensity of care your home is approved and paid to provide. Level 1 is basic family care for needs that fit ordinary parenting. Level 2 is for children with more complex needs and comes with extra training and a service payment on top of the family care rate. Level 3 is for children with extraordinary behavioural, medical, developmental, or emotional needs, with substantial training and a higher service payment. Whatever the type or level, the core responsibilities of caregiving are the same.

Source: Foster Family Handbook

You are one member of a team responsible for a child’s well-being. Your part is the day-to-day one: a safe and nurturing home, consistent parenting that meets the child’s physical, emotional, cultural, educational, and developmental needs, support for the child’s family relationships and cultural identity where that is part of the plan, and good records of how the child is doing. You also take part in the child’s Plan of Care.

You are not the child’s legal guardian unless a specific agreement gives you that status — for most children, guardianship rests with a director or with the parents. Alongside you sit the child’s social worker, who handles the Plan of Care and legal and family decisions, and your resource social worker, who supports and monitors your home. When you are unsure where your role begins or ends, those two people are who to ask.

Source: Foster Family Handbook

The Family Care Home Programme is the BC programme under which foster caregivers open their homes to children and youth who cannot safely live with their parents. It is run by the Ministry of Children and Family Development (MCFD) and by Indigenous Child and Family Service Agencies, under provincial child welfare law. Your home becomes part of it once you are approved and have signed a Family Care Home Agreement.

Caring Families Society does not run the programme itself — that is the ministry’s and the agencies’ job. CFS works alongside it to support you, through coordinators, peer mentoring, training, and help during investigations. The better supported you are, the better you can do the caregiving the programme asks of you.

Source: Foster Family Handbook

Repair after a rupture is one of the most powerful tools you have, and it’s often something you’ll need to initiate. A child who has been dysregulated may not return to you on their own — their pattern may be to withdraw, hide, or distance after the hard moment. You coming back, gently and without recrimination, is often what re-establishes the connection. The child doesn’t have to lead this; the adult can.

Once the child is calm, a short, connected exchange tends to be more useful than a long discussion — talking briefly about what happened, naming the feelings that were there, and reassuring the relationship is intact. A phrase that often helps is “nothing you do will make me stop caring about you.” A relationship that has small breaks and consistent repair teaches a child something a perfectly smooth relationship cannot: that connection survives difficulty. For children with relational trauma, that’s one of the most important things they can learn.

Source: CFS Trauma-Informed Practice Notes

Yes. Let your resource social worker know promptly if a new adult joins your household — a new partner, an adult child moving back home, or a long-staying guest. The same applies if a visitor’s stay is going to pass 30 days, or if you start a new intimate partner relationship with someone who will regularly be in the home.

These situations usually trigger record checks, and those take time. Telling your worker early avoids delays or complications in keeping your home approved. Circumstances are also revisited at your annual review when things have changed.

Source: Foster Family Handbook

Relationships between foster and birth families take many forms, and some are strained. When a birth parent is angry, competitive, or critical, it often reflects their own experience of loss, trauma, and shame rather than a deliberate attempt to undermine you. Trying to understand the experience behind the behaviour usually makes it easier to keep a steady, professional approach. Your most useful tools are understanding, empathy, and honest communication, along with modelling positive parenting and good ways of handling the child’s behaviour.

If there are safety concerns for the child or for you, those belong in the pre-visit planning conversation with the child’s social worker, not something to manage on your own in the moment. Maintaining contact never means exposing the child to harm; how contact is structured and supervised is worked out with the social worker.

Source: Foster Family Handbook