Fostering Faithfully Wants to Increase The Odds!

Foster parents need an entire team of people around them to keep going and make them brave enough to say the word, yes, when DSS calls again.

Being intentional and proactive in finding, supporting, and sustaining foster placements in our county sure beats being reactive and frustrated with the overwhelming need for new foster families. Nationally, about half of all foster families quit fostering within one year of their first placement. New foster parents come into fostering thinking that their love will be enough and often it just isn’t. 

The honeymoon stage of excitement and zeal over adding a new child can wane rather quickly as a host of new appointments at doctors, therapists, schools, or DSS can be a full-time job. Add to that, strangers coming into your home for visits, pleasing birth families, and the complex behaviors and health needs of traumatized children can start to pile up quickly considering that you are likely not sleeping too well at night.

Foster parents need an entire team of people around them to keep going and make them brave enough to say the word, yes, when DSS calls again.

Many times foster parents have expressed that the friends and family members they thought would be faithful to support them are long gone after the real work begins. There is a real cost to biological children at times when the stress added to their lives from meltdowns of both their mother and their new addition can simply wear at the fabric of a family. Parents who formerly parented six kids have expressed to me that they thought they had parenting down pat—but then they became foster parents. It is an entirely different parenting game. Complex trauma and behaviors can have even the best parents emotionally on the edge and feeling seriously incompetent.

Fostering is like an entire lifestyle change where a family that formerly “could keep it all together” might need to ask for help! Families need to know there are people who won’t judge them, but just want to serve. Church families often offer an “atta boy,” but are sometimes not mobilized and organized to tangibly help. Fostering Faithfully is looking for volunteers willing to get their hands dirty loving foster children! Foster parents need to feel the practice love of the Church community through meals, date nights out, babysitting, shopping/delivering clothes from the foster closet, or simply letting them focus on doing laundry one Saturday.