Tag: Foster kids

Gratitude can come from suffering, hope from devastation, and intentionality from chaos.

While growing up, I think I had an above-average level of exposure to the foster care system. I had close family members and multiple friends who fostered and/or adopted kids. Also, two of my best friends in high school had been in foster care.

I’ve had a few different jobs over the years, but none more important or as rewarding as raising my children. Once I became a parent, and my children went through the different stages of childhood, my empathy for kids in general grew immensely. God gives us just a glimpse into his fierce love for us when we become parents. I am very thankful for the family I grew up in, and for the privilege of being a mom. I’ve also become increasingly aware that too many children have a very different story than mine.

We work and serve in a very challenging field, and we can’t avoid acknowledging and responding to the vast injustices our foster children have experienced. However, it is far too easy to forget that these children are just children. They tell me, at the end of the day, they want and think about the same things the other kids in the neighborhood think about, the same things their peers worry about, the same things “normal” kids dream for. And while it is true that our foster kids do indeed have additional complicating factors and concerns–supervised visitation with a biological parent, separation from siblings, life away from the home they knew–they often want to be thought of for other things; things that might seem irrelevant and inconsequential to those working with these kids who know the gravity of their whole situation. To illustrate, these kids follow pop culture, they care about what’s “cool,” they have favorite foods, they laugh and joke with friends…and they also happen to be in foster care.  The point, though, is they happen to also be in foster care; they aren’t just about foster care.