Okay, so not “we” as in Brian and me, but “we” as in our church community. Over the last couple years we’ve been blessed to have a bunch of little foster babies make their debut. Some have been with us just for a season, or for a weekend of respite care and some have ended up permanent members of our community. I couldn’t be prouder of how families have chosen to help children in crisis either by fostering or by supporting our foster families.
But it wasn’t always this way in our fostering journey. In part because we weren’t always such vocal advocates for fostering and didn’t feel so bold about making our own needs known. Sometimes it’s easier to push for changes that help support other families because you know what kind of help you would have benefitted from. I remember the day after one of our foster babies arrived at our home I was balancing her on my hip while trying to make a meal for a family who had just brought their baby home from the hospital (one they made the old fashioned way). In retrospect, I probably should have found somebody else to make that meal or just brought them some takeout. I needed to be focusing on building a relationship with this new child in my arms who really didn’t know or trust me, but I was working hard to keep up appearances that I was capable of doing it all. I let assumptions go unchallenged that since I wasn’t going through a physical recovery after a birth, I didn’t need help. It’s now important to me to be sure as a community we are thinking through the VERY real challenges of building a relationship from scratch with a child who may have been in a difficult prenatal and home environment and doing what we can to make that just a little bit easier on foster families.
There has been a learning curve as we have become a community that strives to support foster care and adoption. The kind of support that is best for a family who has a baby of a race/gender/age/medical need they weren’t aware of or prepared for just the day before is very different from the kind of support we are used to offering new parents. Nine months to get ready for a baby and 90 minutes (which is more than what we had between the time we got a phone call about the placement of our daughter and the time she actually arrived) are two very different situations. If your church is wanting to come alongside fostering families, here are some guidelines about how to make this work.
Supporting Families with a New Placement
Respect privacy. Different states and even different foster agencies within the same state may have differing regulations about what kind of information can be revealed about foster children. It is best to err on the side of respecting privacy. Don’t have a church-wide email that states the child’s name or has a picture of the child. Don’t post anything about the child on social media. Don’t ask too many detailed questions about the biological family’s situation. Be understanding if the foster family is vague in their answers. We need to be guardians of that information in the child’s best interest. Once we’ve said something, it’s impossible for people to unknow that information and we can’t always control where that information goes. We don’t want to create prejudice towards the family we are trying to help.
