What is an ESH Placement?

ESH is a specific kind of foster placement, an Emergency Shelter Home. ESH placements are short-term, typically less than a month, and are a safe place for children to land when they first enter into foster care.

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The goal of an ESH placement is to allow social workers time to find a relative who can care for kids (known as kin-care) or, if that isn’t a possibility, a long-term placement, either foster or foster-to-adopt.

What does it mean to be an ESH placement?

• A little extra chaos. No one ever seems to know everything that is going on when a child first enters foster care.
• Extra kids to love. Since ESH placements are designed to be short term, kids come and go quickly, which just gives me the opportunity to love more kids!
• Caring for birth parents. This comes with any foster or adoptive placement, but as an ESH placement, I often have to chance to be a support to birth parents who just experienced one of the worst days of their life and had their child removed from their care.
• A lot of different social workers. As an ESH placement, you work with a child’s first placement worker, their first case worker, and the birth parents’ first social worker. And all those social workers usually change after a week or two.

For me, being an ESH placement is the chance to provide a safe and loving home for the tiny humans who need it. As a single foster mom, I made the decision that newborn babies were the age I wanted to foster, so I have the privilege to care for babies who are just learning whether they can trust the world or not to meet their needs.

Constantly being a mom of a newborn baby means lots of sleepless nights, lots of new doctor appointments, and lots of laundry, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. Because it also means lots of first smiles, lots of new discoveries, and lots of the best snuggles in the world – that’s just what babies do.

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I’ve been an ESH mom for just over one year now, and I’ve had eleven placements in that time. Eleven. Placements. That’s eleven babies who needed a home, babies who needed someone to love them, babies who were missing the only world they had known when they left their birth parents – and I’m barely a year in.

That’s also eleven chances to witness birth parents who love their baby with all their heart, eleven chances to meet a new tiny human and watch them discover the world, eleven chances to love someone with my whole heart before they leave.

It isn’t the easiest thing in the world to be an ESH placement. But for every possible hurt I face, there are so many more possible joys. And while I don’t get to keep these babies with me and watch them grow up, I let them go knowing I have done the absolute best I could to lay the foundation for love, healthy attachment, and trust in their life. I can’t imagine anything else I would rather spend my time doing.