Focus on Fostering: Kids' Foster Care Book

I am always on the lookout for good books about foster care and foster care issues.  Today I share a book about the journey from being taken into custody thru a year in a foster home and eventual kinship placement.

From the "Hurts of Childhood" series it is:

For Your Own Good:
A Child's book About Living in a Foster Home


by: Doris Sanford
Ill by: Graci Evans
Pub: Gold'n'Honey Books [part of the Questar publishing family]  Multnomah Books

An Amazon.com reviewer said "It addresses the feelings of confusion, self-blame, loneliness, and hurt that all children in foster care experience." and it does. I also appreciated the 10 statements about foster care they include at the back of the book.  All prospective foster parents should should have these as core understandings.


This book is not written to be clever or amusing or emotional. It is a straightforward description of some of the feelings and behaviors and events common to children in their first year of foster care. It uses a fictional boy and his younger brother and follows life from their original home situation to being taken into custody, court hearings, emergency placement, adjusting to a foster home, counseling, failed family visitation, acting out, adjusting to the new life, school struggles and resource rooms, and eventual placement with relatives out of state. All this is done in only 26 pages filled with beautiful colored pencil/pastel illustrations. 


Alibris used books has a couple of copies for around $4 because it is currently out of print.  You also can probably find it through interlibrary loans or other used book sites.  Click on the link to see if they are still at Alibris.  


The same author in the same series also wrote:

I Can't Talk About It:  
A child's book about sexual abuse  [for girls] 


  and Something Must Be Wrong With Me: 
               A child's book about sexual abuse [for boys]