Making Choices for Yourself and Your Children

When you’re in foster care, you need information to help you decide if, when, and how to parent. When you become a parent, you need information to help you make good choices for yourself and your children. You need to know about your rights, your responsibilities, and all the resources that are available to you. You need that knowledge after you leave foster care, too.

When you have that knowledge, you can protect your family and keep it together. You can push yourself further in life and you can advocate for your children to achieve more. You can gain skills because you know what resources are available. You can inspire your children, because your children grow up with your knowledge and confidence.

This website was developed in partnership with young parents who also spent time in the foster care system to provide you with information about rights and responsibilities that no one may have ever told you that you have.

 

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How This Website Can Help You

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On This Website You’ll Learn

On this website, you’ll learn about your rights in many different situations. You’ll learn about your sexual and reproductive health care rights and your right to choose a doctor for yourself and your child that you feel good about. You'll learn about your housing options and about making childcare arrangements so you can continue with your own life plans. You’ll also learn what to do to try to keep Child Protective investigators out of your life as well as steps to take if you are under investigation.

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This Website Will Provide You With

  • Information about your rights in different situations.
  • Short stories and audio clips from parents with lived experience in foster care.
  • A toolbox full of checklists and worksheets that can help you advocate for your family out in the world.

We hope you use this information to protect your family and get what you need for yourself and your children.

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Who This Website is For

This website is meant to be helpful to all young parents in the New York City foster care system as well as to parents who have left the system. Some information on this site reads as specific to mothers and fathers, but this information is meant for all parents, including cisgender, heterosexual, queer, trans, and gender nonconforming parents. This website is also for you if you are deciding whether or not to become a parent.

Although much of the information on this site is specific to New York City, there's also information that will be useful to all young parents in and after care no matter where they live, as well as to all parents facing involvement with the child welfare system. 

 

 

Parents who grew up in care share stories of the good times, the hard times, and the lessons they’ve learned.

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    This father shares what he learned about what it takes to co-parent, even if you aren’t together as a couple.

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    You have rights! Hear how a young mom advocated with her agency to choose the doctor she wanted for her child.

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    Some parents experience intense worries after their babies are born. This mom wished she’d found support before she gave birth so that she’d have had someone to help her when her anxiety got big

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    The stress of being pregnant was part of why this mom failed to pay her rent for six months. Her advice? Don’t ignore the rent after you leave care!

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    The staff who told this father that he wasn’t allowed to visit his baby in his wife’s group home were wrong. As a father, you have the right to be with your child every day, even if you don’t live together.

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    This teen wasn’t ready to let anyone get close to her—until she became a mother, and realized that she needed someone to help her learn how to navigate the world for herself and her son

We Want to Hear From You

If you’ve found something in this website helpful or if you’ve done something for yourself or your child that you think other parents might learn from, we want to hear from you. Send us an email describing what you’ve learned or what you’ve done.

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