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1. You are making a huge difference with children in your own community.

Anyone can send money every month or year to some charity to help orphans in another country. All it takes is a couple of minutes on the phone and your credit card and you’ll have a good feeling in your heart, a tax write-off, and maybe a free T-shirt or a letter from a child you’ve never met. That’s wonderful, but fostering is caring for children on a much deeper, personal level. Children in foster care are kids from your own community who are in situations so dangerous that they have had to be removed from their homes. As a foster parent, you are given the unique opportunity to be a safe haven for them. To help children heal and grow in a safe place. There is no better way to help your community than by helping to heal and protect the children that are already a part of it.

2. You learn valuable life skills.

The training to become a foster parent is generally focused and intense. Parenting, how to help someone affected by trauma, mental disorders, first aid, CPR, and even important aspects of the law are taught in these classes. Often times such skills are used not just while you are working with those in the Foster Care System, but in interactions with family members, co-workers and others in your daily life. This training is generally offered free of charge when similar classes cost tens or even hundreds of dollars somewhere else.

3. You may possibility to expand your family.

The number one goal of The Foster Care System is to reunite families; for children to return to safe homes, healthy parents, and become a family unit. Unfortunately, due to certain circumstances, such reunions are not always possible and children become eligible for adoption. Adoption through foster care comes with many advantages. Most state services including healthcare are retained post-adoption for the child’s use. Additionally, adoption through foster care is generally much more affordable than going through a private adoption agency, some states reimbursing and or waiving most of the fees for foster parents adopting foster children.

4. Financial compensation.

Caring for foster children is time-consuming and exhausting in many ways. These children have therapy, parental visits, doctor’s appointments, and occasional court hearings to attend. They’re involved in school and extracurricular activities as well. They need food, clothing, and shelter just like any other child. Foster parents are compensated financially to help ease the financial burden that suddenly having a child or more children in the home can entail. Though it should be noted that the compensation is meant to go into caring for the kids and should not be expected to be much. 

5. Making lasting bonds and learning to love selflessly.

Being a foster parent is exceptionally difficult, particularly in the beginning when learning about yourself, the foster care system, and the new individual in your home all at once. There are some that avoid foster care out of a fear of falling in love with a child just to have them taken away again. However, loss is as constant in our lives as life is. When you lose someone we love, we don’t wish that we’d never known them and loved them, we are instead thankful for the time we had with them, even if it felt entirely too short. Fostering teaches you, above all else, to love unconditionally and that lasting bonds can be forged in a short amount of time. Children in foster care remember the foster parents who loved them, cared for them, and cherished them. Many keep up with their foster parents and remain in contact even into adulthood. We always remember the ones that truly loved us and foster children are no exception.

There are few callings as high or as sacred as caring for children. As a foster parent, you will be raising up, protecting, and teaching the next generation who will inherit and lead our world. Fostering is a wonderful opportunity to take up that call and extend a loving, helping hand in a child’s darkest hour. Foster parents step up and offer their hearts and homes in order to help mend broken families. To be a foster parent is an honor.

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Tonight, there is a three and a half-year-old little girl sleeping soundly in this house. She arrived three and a half years ago–a tiny, beautiful princess. The call came, and as I sat at my desk at work, I could hardly contain my excitement. A girl?! A princess?! We had been waiting so long for a little lady to dress in all the tutus we had accumulated over the years of infertility and loss. It couldn’t be true, could it?! Oh, it was. It was as true as can be as I walked into that hospital nursery, and they placed her gorgeous self in my waiting arms. Being a foster parent changed my life.

I held her, and I knew this was what God had created me to do. He had created me to love babies…to love all the babies. The ones born to me, the ones adopted by me, and the ones with parents who had some difficult roads.

As I held her I prayed and I asked Him to hold her parents, to ease their burden, to comfort their hearts. It would be a prayer that would continue for three and a half years and on. My love for her was instant, and I became very protective of her. I knew that from that moment, in that hospital, that I would do whatever necessary to keep her safe and loved for the rest of her life. God allowed me the privilege of loving one that I would have to fight for and nothing in my life has been as easy or as difficult as the road that followed. Foster care will change your life.

Being a foster parent will change your life.

We took her home that weekend and showed her off to our family and friends. She was showered with oohs and aahs, dressed up, and pranced around like the queen of her own kingdom that she was. Life got crazy with an 18-month-old boy and a new princess, but we made it work. After about six months we started to feel like we weren’t just surviving, but actually living and loving every second. Foster care will change your life.

One-hour weekly visits with bio mom and bio dad were the norm, and we all slid into them fairly unscathed. We managed to get along quite well and eventually began to text back and forth daily. Her bio mom loved getting all the pictures of our adventures, and I loved sending them and making her smile. She had a rough life, and to walk this journey how God created me to, I needed to show her much grace and mercy, just as I had been shown.

I asked questions, she gave me advice on how to do her hair, she walked her out to our car and put her in her seat after every visit. She bought her clothes and snacks and loved her well. We loved her, but we also knew that her chances of reunifying were very slim. Always in the forefront of our mind was the fact that we were in charge of advocating for this baby’s best. Foster care will change your life.

Foster care will change your life.

We moved through a year quickly and our prayer was always that God’s will would be done, but He knew what we wanted. We wanted this baby to be our baby, our forever princess. There were whispers and discussions in high places in regards to a relative out of state–some family member that may want to adopt this baby. What? It had been a year. Where did they come from? Where have they been? What are you talking about? We are her family. She loves us. We love her. This cannot really be, can it? It most definitely was, and we began to understand more about a system that is so devastatingly backward. We hit our knees in prayer and with more tears than one journey should ever hold. Foster care will change your life.

Our decision to fight was not an easy one. Well, I should say it was easy and difficult at the same time. When we looked at her–her beautiful smile, her hilarious giggle, her unstable walk, her crazy hair, her sassy attitude–it was the easiest decision in the world to make. The instability of a system that is not a family made it very difficult. Foster care classes didn’t quite prepare us for this point–the point when they want to take your baby away from you and send her to a stranger. A stranger to you and a stranger to her. How could we possibly walk through something like this? Foster care will change your life. 

We continued to walk through the fire as our lawyer and her guardian ad litem worked their magic all around us. God–that Guy who told us she would be one we would fight for–He pulled some miracles here and there also. We walked through monthly visits across the country and watched as our baby girl tried to make sense of it all. Why would we ship her off to a place she wasn’t used to? She came back angry and showed it through meltdown after meltdown. As she got older her behavior changed from anger to sadness; she would return and hug the walls of her room and tell them she missed them. It was heartbreaking to watch. The effects of a system gone terribly wrong. Foster care will change your life.

We weren’t going down without a fight.

After years of a back and forth system, a decision was finally made, and it was to move our daughter away from the only family she had ever known, for almost three full years of her life. That day I fell on my knees, for the millionth time, and cried in the middle of my kitchen floor as my three children ran circles around me. They had no idea the devastation that had just been declared. In that moment, I realized one thing…it wasn’t over until God said it was over. She was still in our home. She was dancing, she was singing, she was smiling, she was still home. We weren’t going down without a fight. Foster care will change your life.

There was one month between the call that blew up our world and the call that put it all back together. Do systems change their minds? Do they make a final decision and change it? Go back and re-evaluate. Can someone’s words make them take another look? Have you ever had so much hope in the unseen? Had so much faith in what God can do? Loved a child so much that you would fight until it BROKE you in all the ways that someone can be broken? April 7th will be a day we will remember forever–the day that God made sure the system knew that He was bigger than they were. Your daughter, the one you fought for, the one you have loved, the one you have cherished, the one you have stood up for, advocated for and screamed loud for…she’s yours. Forever. I hit my knees, again. Foster care will change your life.

Being a foster parent will change your life, friends, in all the ways that a life can be changed. Get ready because you have no idea what is coming…Foster care will change your life.

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So what are 5 things your foster child needs from you?

It is 10 pm on a Wednesday night. You are ready for bed; you are in your PJs, you are loading the dishwasher, you are tidying up the living room, you are plugging your phone in for the night. As you walk away from that plugged in phone, it rings. You stare at your husband who is standing across the room, ready for bed also, and you slowly answer that call.

An hour later a beautiful and terrified 8-year-old little girl walks in carrying her tiny, sleepy 9-month-old baby brother. She doesn’t say a word and stares around the room with wide eyes and then immediately runs to sit down on the nearest couch. The caseworker hands you a bag with a bottle and one can of formula in it, tells you their names and says, ‘Thank you so much, you will hear from another worker in the morning.’

Alrighty…so, here you are. What do you do now? What do you say? What do they need? What don’t they need? This was me just a few short years ago; let me see if I can help you out.

1. Listen To Your Child & Have Patience

The first thing a foster child needs is a lot of patience and a lot of listening. After that caseworker walked out of our house, we started talking, and she started getting uncomfortable. We noticed it quickly and stopped ourselves, eventually. She didn’t need us to ask a bunch of questions that she didn’t have answers to or care to answer. She had just experienced one of the most traumatic events of her young life and our questions were the very last thing she wanted to hear.

We sat silently until she was ready to speak, even just to ask to use the restroom. That night we didn’t make her sleep in the designated bedroom that was approved by the county. She was terrified–she didn’t want to move off the couch. We brought her blankets and pillows and a pack-n-play for her brother. They both ended up sleeping on the couch together because that is what made them feel the safest.

2. Safety & Security

They may not always feel that way, but you must always show them that your home is a safe and secure place to be. They came from chaos, from trauma, from abuse. They need to see that a family can have its good days and its bad days, and everyone is still a team, still loves each other, and still functions without it becoming abusive. They need it, every single day.

3. Bio Parent Love

They need to know that you support their parents. It is hard. It is hard when they don’t show up for visits, when they don’t do the things required, when they just can’t seem to get it together, but it is necessary. They love them, and if they’ve been in your home for any amount of time, it is likely that they love you too. If they can see you encouraging their parent, helping them in any way possible and/or having a positive attitude in regards to it all, it will go miles.

4. Fun

Have tons of fun! These kids come from not-so-fun situations most of the time; they need to know that families have fun! Whatever you do for fun, take them along and include them. Vacations, day trips, amusement parks, out to eat, family game nights, movies, swimming. I took our 8-year-old little girl to the doctor in her few days with us, and afterwards I stopped at Chick-Fil-A, which was completely routine to me. She had no idea what Chick-Fil-A was, she had never been there before. She loved every second of it and had the biggest smile on her face the entire way home as she scarfed down her food. Fun and new experiences. They need them and love them.

5. Plain & Simple: Love

They need love. They need to feel it, see it, hear it, know it…deep within their bones. They need to know that no matter what, you love them. When no one else does and no one else did, you did. They need to see you love your significant other, love all the other kids in the home, love all extended family and friends. It will look different for each child, just like it does for any kid. Some will need time; some will need space; some will need hugs, some will not; some will need praise and encouragement; some will need pushed. Every child will be different. Love: they just need love.

Patience, a listening ear, safety, security, bio parent love, fun, and love. They don’t require a lot more than any other kid in order to thrive. Give them what they need and watch how they fly! Happy fostering!!!

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Ever wonder what you need to be a foster parent? Check out this list below.

1. A clean(-ish) (not spotless) home with enough beds, and square footage for the number of people you want to

live there.

Square footage varies state to state but you’ll get the exact dimensions just by asking a caseworker or

foster/adoption agency. You don’t need to own your own home or even live in a house.

An apartment will do just fine as long as there is a room for you, and a room for the child(ren), running water, no

infestations, and it can pass a fire and safety inspection. My caseworker is pretty laid back but some are fussier.

Be prepared to keep you home cleaner than usual if you’re a little bit like me and kind of sloppy/disorganized (or

have kids that constantly undo what you just cleaned up).

2. A working, insured vehicle that can haul as many people as you want to haul.

Plan on adopting a sibling group of six? You’ll need that minivan you’ve been eyeballing on the way home from work.

Just want one teen boy and you’re a single man? That red sports car will earn you cool points with your new son and

will be just fine.

3. A stable income.

You may get a stipend from the state, but it won’t cover much, and it won’t come when you need it to. Meanwhile the

kids will have come to your house with the clothes on their back and nothing else, so off to the store you go at midnight.

You needn’t be wealthy, but you will need to have money to support yourself and your new kids as they settle in.

4. A clean background check.

You’ll be sent for a FBI fingerprinting and federal background check. You’ll also need to write down all of your family members

names and birthdays, and all the places you have lived and worked for the past 10 years. They want to make sure the kids

are going into a safer, better place than they are leaving. Please don’t take this personally. I’m sure you’re a good person. Have

your closest, most reliable family member available to answer questions about addresses and birthdates when it comes time to

fill out the packet. It’s a whopper.

5. A support network.

This is both critical and overlooked. Fostering can be (but isn’t always really, really, really difficult. Kids may go back to hard family

situations and there is nothing you can do about it. Kids may stay, you may eventually adopt them, and they will drive you bonkers,

and there is nothing you can do about it.

What will help make or break you as a foster parent will be the people you surround yourself with–to go through the good and the

bad with. Find a support group for foster parents near you. Take the class with a friend so they’ll know what you are going to go

through. Pick an activity that is your “one thing” that won’t be interrupted or ignored (for my husband it is playing ice hockey, for

me it is running), and don’t let life stop you from doing that thing.

Get your people around you to rally when things go sideways. I cannot be more thankful for the dear ones that stepped up when

kids needed the hospital, or we just couldn’t take one more wretched minute of tantruming so there was someone to tag out to.

You might not think you’ll need this. You might not even like people, but you’ll need them to make this whole fostering thing work

for you and your kids.

6. An agency.

This isn’t imperative if your state’s CPS will license foster homes. Some states rely exclusively on foster care agencies for

training and licensing. A quick internet search will reveal where your state stands on this matter. An agency will help you

navigate the intricacies of getting licensed and sometimes buffer CPS from you. Find one that matches your faith (or lack

thereof), your ideologies, and will have your back if something goes wrong.

7. Patience.

You will need to be patient with the agency to get you licensed. Then you’ll need to be patient to get a placement. Then

you’ll need to be patient with CPS when they change their minds about where the placement (aka a real, living, breathing

child) will be going. Then you’ll need patience with the actual, eventual child. You don’t think you’re impatient now. I

thought I was a very patient person. I was very, very wrong. Ha.

8. Flexibility.

Things will constantly change. The goals for the child and your home will change. You’ll have to learn to roll with it or you’ll

find yourself very broken. You might anyway, if I’m being honest. It’s worth it though.

9. Love to give.

Lots of it. These kids come into foster care through no fault of their own and often have no idea what is happening. Your love,

kindness, and patience with them as you navigate the unknown together will help them in unfathomable ways. They may not

even realize what you’re doing for them in the moment. In fact, they will probably at first see you as the enemy. You will still

need to love them with a love bigger than yourself.

10. Time.

There will be doctors appointments, therapy appointments, school visits, sports activities, things you have never thought

about doing before but you suddenly have 4 occasions of having to run to or accommodate in one week. (I’m giving you the

side eye ice hockey.) Your life is no longer yours to run. CPS will be in your home at least once a month. Your agency worker

will be in your home at least once a month. You’ll have trainings you have to attend a few times a  year.

Anything after those things is gravy. If you feel your heart tugging you toward foster care I urge you to at the very least

investigate if it isomething you could do. Attend an informational meeting at an agency. Ask questions of a friend that fosters.

Become a certified babysitter for a foster family and see what their lives look like from the inside.

You won’t regret it.

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