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With roughly 5,000 children and youth in the foster care system in BC there's a need for more foster care homes, but the role of foster parent can be confusing, difficult and stressful.

A Kamloops resident who works with families and troubled youth for a living, opened up his heart and home to a teenager in the foster care system a few years ago, and the experience proved more difficult than he first expected.

“I understand why many people choose not to open a foster home,” Tyler Carpentier said. 

Carpentier was doing one-to-one life coaching with young people with disabilities and behavioural challenges when he met a 13-year-old youth who was living in a staffed resource home at the time.

“He ended up in a home through an agency in town and wasn’t doing well there,” he said. “I had a good relationship with him. My wife and I talked and thought, let’s be a foster care home for this youth.

“We were his primary care giver for close to three years and it was bumpy because there were behavioural challenges with this youth. Us trying to navigate that ourselves and help a youth navigate their way through these challenges was very difficult.”

Becoming a foster home requires an extensive background check.

“Fostering requires an invasive process into your personal life with a huge amount of transparency needed, that can be a problem for some people,” he said. “The background checks are rigorous because the kids are so vulnerable, and I understand that.”

The couple was set up with supports that included a behavioural consultant, available counselling and a social worker to help with the paperwork. He said the process was confusing and communication was lacking at times. The youth had behavioural outbursts and safety issues had to be considered.

“We weathered a lot of tough storms with this kid. It can be confusing, at times we had to do our own digging for answers and information,” Carpentier said. “There are safety issues too, if the youth was to physically attack, you have to be able to protect yourself. Fortunately, my wife has training and can defend herself."

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He said when a youth steps out of line it is just a matter making a phone call to the Ministry of Children and Family Development to get the kid pulled from the placement and put into another one.

“There were times when our social worker said we should have called, but we felt it was a temporary situation and wanted to keep standing behind the youth and supporting them. But some of these kids have so many behavioural struggles, foster parents can’t keep them safe even in a safe home environment.”

The greatest difficulty for Carpentier came at the end of the placement when the youth in his care had such big, behavioural outbursts the police had to get involved. The youth had also run away a number of times. Carpentier grew worried his home would become part of an investigation and wasn’t hearing back from the ministry.

“It would've been easier with better communication from ministry staff,” he said. “We were left wondering what was going to happen next, if we’d be investigated, if we needed a lawyer. It was stressful.”

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According to the latest data by the ministry, there are 4,875 children up to the age of 18 who are in the foster care system.

A big inspiration behind Carpentier’s decision to foster was due to the youth being placed in a resource home. About one third of foster kids are living in contracted homes.

“The thing with being a foster parent is you can provide them with a caring family home, the kids in a resource home don’t get that environment, it’s emotionally sterile,” he said. “There isn’t attachment, the staff rotates around, the kids will have four or five rotating staff looking after them.

"It’s my understanding there are not enough foster homes for kids so that has opened up space for agencies to run homes.”

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The youth has since reunited with family members and is living in a different province. Carpentier and his wife remain in contact with the teenager while he continues working with youth.

“The rewards are astronomical when you coach kids with substantial challenges,” he said. “They’re not capable of doing a certain task or processing things for reasons outside their control, to see them do the thing they couldn’t do before, the feeling from that is a wild rush. It’s about seeing kids learning, coping and developing."

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While Carpentier was able to weather the challenges of foster parenting, he said the role is demanding and not everyone can handle it, and improvements with the system need to be made. 

"There are a lot of people not keen to become foster parents for a lot of different reasons. In a lot of situations foster parents are underprepared or unwilling to deal with the difficulties, and there are times they don’t feel safe and just need the kid to not be there."

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