Loving Children Who Might Leave: The burdens and blessings of foster parenting

Disclaimer: Opinions expressed in this guest post are solely those of the author.

It was Christmas night when we got the call.

A three-month-old baby girl had been picked up by police alongside her mother, squatting in a flop house. We sat under the glow of Christmas lights, trying to process what we were being asked.

We were not planning on welcoming another child into our home. Our family already felt full in all the ways large foster families often do. But there was something about the Christmastime of it all that pierced through every reason to say no. So we said yes.

A few hours later, “our girl” arrived bundled in the arms of a caseworker, tiny and wide-eyed. Before long, she became woven into the fabric of our family. She was not ours legally, but functionally, emotionally, in every way that mattered every day, she became ours – daughter, sister, the little princess of our home. 

We fell in love with all the things that made her uniquely her – the way she pulled a book right up to her nose to focus in, the way she stole a bite of your food and offered you back a bite of her own, the way she sang and danced along to everything from Baby Shark to worship songs.

Like all children who enter our home, she stopped feeling like a visitor and started feeling like she had always belonged here. 

And through loving her, we came to love her mother.

The complication and beauty of real life

This part of foster care is misunderstood from the outside. Too often conversations are reduced to simple categories: good parents and bad parents, heroes and victims, rescue and failure. But real life is far more complicated and beautiful. 

Her mother was battling addiction and homelessness. She had experienced profound hardship and instability long before we ever met her. Yet even in the middle of that struggle, one thing was always obvious: she loved her daughter deeply.

She came faithfully to visits. She held her baby close. She cried when visits ended. She tried to move forward, stumbled backward, and tried again.

So we prayed for her. We encouraged her as she fought for sobriety and stability. We celebrated small victories and grieved setbacks. Over time, what began as a cautious co-parenting relationship became something much more personal. I became a trusted confidante, a supporter, and eventually, a genuine friend.

We shared birthday parties for our little girl, spent Christmas together in our home, and had phone calls filled with laughter, tears, and hope. The lines that once separated us began to blur. We were two women who deeply loved the same child and wanted her to flourish.

For a long time, reunification felt uncertain. Progress came slowly, and there were moments when it would have been easy to lose hope. But then, gradually, things began to change.

Mom became healthier and safer by the day – recovery, housing, a job. She started building a different life, step by step and choice by choice. And eventually, after two and a half years, the day came when she was ready to welcome her daughter home permanently.

We buckled our little girl into her car seat one final time and drove her to her mom’s home —her home. Tears streamed down our faces the entire way – tears of grief and joy and everything in between.

Even 'heroes' need help

Behind every welcoming front door and carefully prepared bedroom is a family carrying an enormous emotional weight: children in crisis, court hearings that determine the future of your family, midnight phone calls, grief-filled goodbyes, trauma playing out right inside your home, mountains of paperwork, and the daily uncertainty that comes with loving children who might leave.

Though foster parents are often called heroes, many are quietly drowning and carrying everything alone. The result is a growing crisis in foster care that most people never hear about.

Research shows that about 50% of foster families stop fostering within the first year, and 50% more each subsequent year (NCSL report on Foster Parent Retention).

Burnout, lack of support, and feeling unequipped, made them feel they had to close the door they thought they’d keep wide open. 

When foster families close their homes, children lose those homes. Kids sleep in offices, sibling groups are split apart, and children are moved from home to home because there simply are not enough families willing or able to keep going.

The need for community

People often assume the foster care crisis is primarily a recruitment problem. But after more than a decade in the foster care world, I believe the problem is much more complicated – and much simpler. 

Years ago, after welcoming children through foster care into our home, I found myself feeling isolated. I was overwhelmed, confused, and desperate for someone who understood the strange tension of foster care. So one day, sitting in that loneliness, I made a simple post in a local Facebook group: “Any foster or adoptive moms want to get together to offer each other support?” 40 women showed up.

These women carried the same stories and burdens and questions I was carrying. They were mothers desperate for connection, mothers who loved the children they’d welcomed into their homes but needed someone to help hold them up while they did it.

What I realized sitting in that room was this: foster parents don’t just need more training or better systems or additional resources. They need community.

They need people who understand. People who will answer the phone after a hard court hearing. People who will sit beside them in the grief of reunification and the uncertainty of waiting. People who can look at the chaos and complexity of foster care and say, “I get it.”

Connection changes things. Support changes things. Being seen changes things.

From one living room to national mission

That small gathering eventually became Foster the Family, a nonprofit organization built around one central belief: foster, adoptive, and kinship families are far more likely to continue saying “yes” to vulnerable children when they themselves are supported, equipped, and connected in community.

Today, that mission has grown far beyond one living room.

Through Foster the Family’s national support groups, foster and adoptive moms gather every month in cities across the country to experience practical encouragement, honest conversation, education, and friendship. In a journey that can feel isolating and misunderstood, those groups become lifelines.

I have watched exhausted foster moms walk into meetings barely holding themselves together and leave feeling strengthened enough to keep going. I have watched women who were ready to close their homes find renewed hope simply because someone listened to their story and reminded them they were not failing. I have watched lifelong friendships form between families who once felt completely alone.

These gatherings don’t “fix” foster care. But they do something profoundly important: they remind families that they are seen. And when people feel seen and supported, they are far more likely to stay.