In my experience over six years of fostering and adoption, I've yet to meet a kid anywhere near as stressful to care for as the "training" material presents them. Maybe I got lucky, but the four kids I've looked after have been some of the sweetest, most cheerful, and most charming little folks you could ask for. If anything, the struggle was getting them out of their shells and behaving like a normal rambunctious kid.

On the flip side, Texas CPS was a fucking nightmare. We got grilled for taking one girl to have her hair trimmed. We spent three weeks filling out paperwork and doing status checks because we took another little guy with a fever to the Urgent Care. Every single placement involved us submitting whole volumes of medical records to multiple different agencies within a week of taking in the new child. Some of these demands didn't even make sense - we were supposed to bring a newborn to the dentist, despite multiple dentists telling us there's literally no point until they start teething. Our attorney ad lidem was perpetually late for scheduled meetings and insufferably rude at every interaction. Our guardian ad lidem was an absolute sweetheart in a volunteer position who got chewed out by her own "bosses" several times for failing to find anything wrong with us to report up the chain. Court hearings every six months were time-consuming and pedantic, with state officials repeatedly fouling up their own paperwork and forcing rescheduling. Multiple agents left or were fired within the span of a six month placement. Nobody knew when kids were going to be assigned to us or moved to a relative's house, or whether the house was properly inspected and the family accredited, or whether we were foster parents or adoptive parents.

Ultimately, we did a private adoption just to avoid the shit show.