As a kid, my parents taught me the biblical principle, love your neighbor as you love yourself (Matthew 7:12). This is a principle I carried with me for the rest of my life. When I first became a case manager, I was bright eyed and determined to “change the world”! That 21-year-old enthusiasm wasn’t tainted or jaded by life’s experiences. There was only room for hope, and helping kids in foster care remain in safe homes until they could be reunited with their families, or in some cases, adopted. May 21st 2012, I started my first “big girl” job, making a whopping $30,000 and I thought I had so much money. I felt lucky. I had a job offer before I graduated college and started a new job 2 weeks later. It really felt like a dream. But I was young and ignorant about the real realities of systemic racism, bias, and hardship. This was life outside of textbooks and tests.
Biological Parents Are Not The Enemy
I began my journey as a case manager in the midst of the “orphan care” movement sweeping the church in the early 2000’s. A lot of transracial adoption occurred during this time. Most people felt it was their calling to foster or adopt, and care for “orphans.” I quickly began to realize, though, that there was a problem with this thought process. Saying that children are orphans means they don’t have any living parents, but for many kids in foster care, that is not true. The majority of them actually have living parents. And this discrepancy caused me to wonder if the church was missing a crucial part of ministry to families; the whole family.
Biological parents are not the enemy. I would remind my foster parents of this often. A child, no matter how little they are at the time, will grow up and ask “who are my biological parents?” It’s a foster’s or adoptive family’s job to steward the child’s family history privately until the child is old enough to comprehend pieces of their story. None of us are perfect, and some parents make life altering mistakes, experience trauma themselves as children, or struggled in ways I can’t comprehend, but that’s never a reason to look down on someone else. None of us are exempt from hardship and pain. Regardless of our differences, we should always treat people the way we want to be treated.
While society has this perception that all kids in foster care have “bad” parents, that reality is just not true. What I did learn, however, is that the foster care system is not set up for the poor, especially black and brown families. I watched as parents DID fight for their children, but they had to take parenting classes, take the bus if they did not have a vehicle of their own, go to work, maintain housing, and in some cases, still take care of other children in the home. Some parents fought hard and eventually gave up because their child was happy in their “new” home, and some families kept fighting until the very end and got their kids back.
Minister To The Whole Family
The work was hard and laborious, the days were long, and I was constantly on the go. The stories of trauma and abandonment were overwhelming to read and hear, time-and-time-again. But the resilience of little children, who had experienced abuse beyond my comprehension, broke me. I met kids who hated their foster parents because they didn’t know if they would be safe in their “new” home; kids who ran away; teens who got pregnant while in foster care—only to get moved to a “new” home that would take a teen mother; kids who crossed the border; kids who wanted to go back home even when their parent(s) weren’t “deemed safe;” babies with FAS (Fetal Alcohol Syndrome); and babies withdrawing from drugs. Unfortunately, the list could go on.
While I met some foster parents who may have fostered for the wrong reasons, I met a lucky few who fostered because they were committed to loving children no matter how deep their hurt and pain. These were parents dedicated to honoring their child’s cultural heritage, maintaining a healthy relationship with their bio parents (if they were able to), and offering the child a loving home. These are the families who never gave up on any kid who walked through their doors.
Somehow, advocating for children, taught me a lot about life, about my bias’, about my beliefs, my perceptions, my feelings about others who are different from me, and mostly it taught me about how I want to live out my faith. Being a case manager led me to the racial literacy work I do today. I cannot “unsee” what I’ve experienced, learned, and witnessed. I am now responsible to uphold truth and justice in an unjust racialized society designed to oppress and suppress communities of color. I aim to live out Matthew 7:12. May we all look at each person, and treat them the way we would want to be treated. And never underestimate children; they are a gift to us all.
Practical Next Steps
1. Honor a Child’s Cultural Heritage
- Ensure the child in your home builds friendships with other children of the same ethnicity and children of color.
- Make it a priority that the child in your home is not the only child of color in each setting.
- Ensure the child is taught their cultural history and american context of how they are viewed. We live in a racialized society, and its imperative children understand how society views them and how to operate in a racialized society.
- Keep the child connected to their culture by incorporating food, cultural experiences, and celebrations.
2. Maintain a Healthy Relationship with the Biological Parents
- Exchange email addresses and create a pathway to foster communication with the bio parent or bio family.
- Honor the bio parents by never speaking of them negatively to the child.
- Respect and honor the grief the bio parent will experience.
- Allow the child to process their feelings about missing their bio parent by allowing them space to color, draw, write, or talk about their bio parents and you listen.
3. Offer a Loving Home
- Practice acts of kindness (e.g., write kind notes, and initiate bonding activities, like cooking, reading, and coloring).
- Practice thoughtfulness (e.g., make their bedroom comfortable; reassure that they are loved; respect their story, and compassion for the range of emotions a child who has experienced trauma will express).
- Create space for play and fun, including family game night and bonding activities.
- Do not make your child feel “othered”. They should feel just as loved and cared for as your biological children.
