What is the heart of a foster parent?
They go about their days, calculating a thousand little moments and inferences that even people close to them never realize. They adjust their tones as they scan for body language, consider how to phrase a question so it isn’t too invasive, think about what is coming next in the day and how to make it the least overwhelming, most supported, it can be.
Foster parents lead with their heart, but they are overall a very humble bunch. Our staff work quite closely with these parents, but we are even fallible to forgetting how many little energetic shifts they make throughout their day to help a child feel safe, seen, heard, and supported. Once they learn the needs of one child, that child reunifies or takes on the next leg of their journey. A new child arrives and the foster parent begins again, an archeologist carefully brushing away the debris to understand the child beneath the rubble.
We asked our foster parents to share something about foster care. Some recorded, some wrote. The responses…let’s just say we are still processing it all.
We think we know our parents, the journeys their lives take as they step into the role of foster. Day in and day out, we are in communication and can often get lost in the paperwork, the meetings, the logistics.
Their responses remind us that it is so much more and that they are attuned to all those little moments.
The parents who shared their experiences are so different. Some single, some from small families, some from large families with foster care in their DNA. Some are often seen as brash and unflappable, while others are sensitive and wear their heart on their sleeve.
As diverse as they are, their voices hummed the same note: the note of being present. For all of the big things they experience, the significant events of a child’s life of which they are involved, it is the quiet dinner table-riding in the car-taking a walk moments that count. It is putting down their phone and listening. It is asking how something made a child feel and validating that. It is finding what sparks a child’s energy and tending that little flame with quiet encouragement.
We will be posting our foster parents’ experiences and stories in the coming weeks. They share the quiet, gentle moments that mean the most. Please take a moment to tune into our social media feeds and discover for yourself the heart of a foster parent.
