“I just think this is my mission in life,” said Joy Cole of foster parenting. “This is why God put me on this planet; mothering just seems to be my thing.”
Cole, 75, along with her husband Barry, recently won the Ontario Foster Parent of the Year award at a Foster Parent Society of Ontario conference.
“That was a nice reward … any foster parent deserves the same reward,” said Cole. “It doesn’t matter how many kids you foster or who, when you help a child, any foster parent deserves that award.”
Cole began fostering children 20 years ago after her own children grew up, because she has always liked working with kids.
“Since I was seven I would gladly push a buggy rather than play with the kids on the street,” she said. “Once I started working I became a policewoman in Toronto … because I wanted to work with the youth bureau with kids and I did …”
Once she had children of her own, Cole left the police force and she and her husband ran an English riding camp for 40 years. Toward the end of the camp’s life, Cole’s family moved from Milton to a Guelph-Eramosa Township farm and ran it specifically for kids from children’s aid.
Around that same time, Cole began fostering children.
“I just picked up the phone one day and said, ‘okay tell me about fostering’ and we started,” she said.
“Children have always been my passion so I’ve always had children around me so to me it wasn’t a big decision, it was just, ‘Okay, we have an empty house now, we’re on the farm, we’ll go with that.’”
Cole said she usually takes four children at a time; the maximum foster parents can care for.
“It’s easier with children if they have someone to play with,” said Cole, who attributes some of the ease of transition to the farming environment.
“Being on the farm is a plus I think because you take the children out of their environment and they don’t have to keep up with the other kids,” she said. “They can just be kids and be themselves.”
Having fostered more that 100 children over 20 years as a foster parent, Cole said she does everything she can to make holidays special.
“We celebrate holidays by the month because a day’s not long enough, so Thanksgiving it would be the whole month and we go the whole gamut,” she explained. “We decorate, have the table cloths, I buy dishes for Thanksgiving, we have all the setup, so it lasts the whole month and then we go on to the next holiday.”
She said they even have green milk for St. Patrick’s Day and pink milk for Valentine’s Day.
“The thing I like about fostering too, is you never have to grow up,” she said. “You live in a kid’s world.”
Darren Sinnaeve, families to permanence worker with Family and Children’s Services of Guelph and Wellington, said having the Coles on his team is “a sigh of relief.
“It’s a lot more comforting knowing that we can go to somebody with experience as opposed to placing a child or children into a home that haven’t really sort of been through all the things that they’ve been through.”
Cole said she takes time to learn each child’s interests and then finds ways to help them develop.
“A lot of them haven’t enjoyed a lot of successes in their life and they’re used to living on negative attention,” she said. “So I try … to get it reversed so it’s always not negative and so whatever way I can do that I do it.”
And she doesn’t foster for the rewards, “because working with troubled children you don’t use a measuring stick kind of thing, but the rewards are just seeing the kids relax and be happy and able to improve on their own … or in the morning when they say, ‘Good morning Joy. Did you have a good sleep,’ that’s a good reward,” she said. She also said hearing the kids say they loved her was rewarding.
“Because some of them don’t even know what love is at times,” she said. “They get mixed up.”
However, there was one child in Cole’s early fostering years that left a lasting impact.
“One of the children I got … they said he would never live in society, that he’d have to be in a home that (is) restricted and (now) he’s living in society,” she said. He was with her from the age of 10 to 17.
Cole still keeps in touch with many of the children she has fostered, either in person or over the phone.
In addition to Cole’s passion for working with kids, she and Barry are also very involved with other foster parents.
“They’re heavily involved within that larger community … in advocating for what’s best for children but also for foster parents,” explained Sinnaeve.
In fact, it was that group, the Foster Families Association, that nominated the Coles for the award. The group not only helps keep the lines of communication open between Family and Children’s Services and the foster parents, and inform parents of new ministry information, it also acts as a support system and builds the community. Foster parents are under a code of confidentiality, Cole explained, so they’re not permitted to discuss their challenges and uncertainties with their friends as a biological parent might.
“The only people you can really look to for support is another foster parent or the agency,” she said. “And sometimes that’s all you need to do, is just need someone to talk to.
“It gives you the idea of what needs to be done or tried.”
Sinnaeve said one of the most important characteristics of a good foster parent is being a good advocate and “an ability to speak up when you feel things aren’t being done or the needs of the children aren’t being met.” And this characteristic describes the Coles.
“They’ve really been bold and courageous and outright just (saying), ‘hey, you know what, this is going on. We need this. So what can you guys do about that?’ and I really admire that in the foster parents as opposed to the flip side where they don’t speak up,” Sinnaeve explained.
“Some parents for instance may not voice the needs or their own needs to manage or work with the kids and it ends in a break down or ‘we can’t handle this anymore.’”
Sinnaeve also said another reason the Coles are deserving of the Foster Parent of the Year Award is because they are accepting of any child.
“Which is quite telling of how open they are and how willing they are to do their best in caring for children,” he said. “There’s some very complicated little youngsters coming from lots of not such great experiences and with that comes lots of not so great behaviours, but despite all of that they’ve just really kept the door open and tried to always be there and help out whenever they can.”
