The authors explore issues concerning employing older adults as foster parents for children. A survey of agencies in the United States suggests that agencies that utilize older adults as foster parents experience benefits, including elders' abilities to impart life experience and to offer a high degree of tolerance and time flexibility. Older foster parents, when surveyed, reported that fostering benefited them, citing pleasures they derived and defining contributions gained to their own welfare. The authors recommend strategies for agencies to recruit older adults as foster parents as well as public consciousness-raising efforts that promote the value gained by society and the older adults when they choose second careers in child care.
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