Why Foster Care and Adoption Don’t Provide Perfect, Happy Endings

Don’t get me wrong. Foster care and adoption are needed more than ever with today’s opioid epidemic. They are good—and too seldom taken—action steps for those who hold pro-life views. And they are an avenue of ministry that is close to the heart of God.

But foster care and adoption are more complex than the perfect, happy ending that many assume them to be. We do a disservice to the children in these positions to paint them that way.

My husband’s and my understanding of these complexities has grown in the 3+ years we have been providing foster care and seeking adoption.

The Problem

With almost all of the 7 foster children placed in our home during the past 3 + years (from 4 different family units), over and over we have heard the refrain, “Oh, I hope they can stay with you.” Depending on the child’s situation, this has often rubbed me the wrong way. Well-meaning but uninformed people assume that EVERY child is better off with us than in the home from which he or she was removed. We feel honored by the confidence people have in our parenting (or that they are simply rooting for us to finally have children to call our own). Yet it distresses us that the majority of people hold such a simple, one-sided view of foster care and the families and children involved.

First off, children belong with the families into which they were born. There is a bond, an inexplicable connection that remains even when a child is permanently placed in another home. Stress, grief, confusion, and a multitude of other emotions are created when this connection is forcibly broken. This has become vividly clear to us in this past year with two of our foster children.

Regardless how much we love a child, or how well he or she flourishes in our home, there are reasons why each set of foster children should not have stayed with us. Let me share a couple examples.

Grief in Foster Care

One boy I’ll call Bobby. This child attached well to us during the 6 months he and his younger brother stayed. But at 4 years old, he was acutely aware of his separation from his “family,” as he always called his parents. He was clearly attached to them and spoke of them almost daily. He talked about memories of things he did with his family, most of them happy. He referred to extended family and friends with whom he had been connected, and even other places, from which he was now separated.

While generally happy with us, Bobby frequently mentioned the month in which he believed he was moving back with his family. He talked about what he and his family would do when he moved back. As he learned to pray with us at mealtime or bedtime, his daily prayer came to include, “God, please help my family do more good things so I can move back with them.” Every single day. Every single prayer.

One night at bedtime, a few months into his stay with us, Bobby suddenly had a meltdown. The first few months he had been so strong, rarely crying, but he really missed his mama. That night he stayed up until 10:00 crying and moaning for his mama, despite all the rocking and comforting we could give him. After that incident, he frequently told me at bedtime, “I’m almost about to cry about my family.”

As this boy’s parents did well (a rare but wonderful thing, in our experience), and the plan for him and his brother to be returned to their parents solidified, Bobby grew more and more excited. His joy at the prospect of moving home was evident.

And then someone at church would say, “I hope they can stay with you.” Ugh. No. You just don’t understand. Terminating his parents’ rights would crush him. Staying with us forever would break this tender boy’s heart into a million pieces. It would damage him in unforeseeable ways. He loves us and is safe with us, but no. His greater attachment is to his family of origin.

I am so glad his parents did well, for his sake. If his parents made bad choices, didn’t make the necessary improvements or get their act together, and it was unsafe for him to return, I would have been heartbroken for this 4-year-old to have his greatest hopes in life dashed. He clearly belonged there, where his heart was, not with us.

And even though we might have (debatably) provided more structure, better discipline, a healthier diet, greater financial stability, and more opportunities to learn to know God, his family is where he belonged. There often may be no comparison between what foster parents can offer and what biological parents can, but sometimes that natural bond from birth is even more important to a child’s overall well-being than all the benefits of a “wonderful” foster home.

Bobby’s transition from foster care back home revealed even more complexity to this issue. While our role was needed—the courts had determined his family was unsafe for a time, so a safe home was needed—our love and good home created additional emotional distress.

Amidst all the excitement of moving home to his family, about a week or two before the set date, it suddenly dawned on Bobby that moving home meant leaving us. Another bedtime meltdown ensued, as he sobbed out his sorrow on leaving us and no longer getting to see us or play with our other foster daughter whom he had grown close to. While the prospect of being forever separated from his birth family would have brought unspeakable grief, the fact that he spent six months in our home created ANOTHER grief.

Thus, “Oh, I hope they can stay with you” is often an insensitive thing to say to a foster parent, especially in front of the foster child. So I encourage you, when interacting with foster families, to support both the foster parents and foster children by recognizing these complexities and speaking sensitively.

In Bobby’s case, either way the courts could have decided, whichever home they could have chosen as his permanent home, he would face loss. While foster care is a dire need in our society, it can never be a perfect solution.

Loss in Adoption

While foster care may have its downsides, adoption seems to be the panacea for children from unsafe homes. The fairytale ending for a child destitute of love and protection. The heroic choice of generous people to give a needy child a forever home.

Again, no.

Again, another story.

Our foster daughter, whom I’ll call Missy, has been in our home for OVER THREE YEARS. (This is way over the limit set by the law requiring a permanency plan be in place by 18 months, but that’s another story.) Missy entered our home and our hearts at 2 years old, and we cannot imagine life without her. She has become just as much a part of our family as any of our biological parents, siblings, and cousins.

Almost a year after she came, we found out a relative in another state had filed paperwork for custody. We were appalled and terrified. Not just at our potential loss of a child we loved and had been asked to consider adopting, but at the new trauma this would cause for a now 3-year-old. She had called us Mommy and Daddy right from the start. She was settled in our home, church, community, and extended family, and didn’t seem to remember much about her birth mother. She certainly didn’t remember this relative.

A psychological evaluation confirmed our feeling that to move her to a family member’s home at this point would be detrimental to Missy’s mental and emotional well-being. (The uncertainties in her life were already causing some anxiety and depression.) And so, instead of moving her to family (which could have been more ideal for her IF it had happened much earlier in the process), we were instructed to meet and maintain contact with this family member. Then Missy could form a biological connection, and the relative could see she was in a good place. (This contact continues to this day, and has been a blessing to both Missy and us.)

For the next year or so, everything was fine until Missy internalized Bobby’s constant talking about his family and his daily rote prayer, “God please help my family do more good things so I can move back with them.”

This led to Missy having an extreme bedtime meltdown about missing HER family and wanting to move back with THEM. Even though she has little, if any, memory of them. Again, we were probably up until 10:00 pm trying to comfort, reason, and sooth a tired, emotional, and irrational child.

While her therapist introduced some good tools to help with this new understanding of having another family out there somewhere, Missy’s processing spanned over weeks and months and was often painful for both of us. One day I heard, “Mommy, I love you guys so much, I want to stay with you forever!” And she detailed her plan for living in our basement when she grew up, or next door and coming over every day for tea or coffee and Bible studies. But the next day she exclaimed, “I don’t want to stay with you guys. If you adopt me I will cry forever!”

But some days her internal struggle was real: “Mommy, I can’t figure out if I love you guys or my birth family more.” I tried my best to reassure her that she didn’t have to choose; it is okay to love both families.

I am so thankful that this season of processing—this major upheaval in her little world—seems to be coming to a close. She seems to be settling—on her own!—into the feeling that she belongs here with us.

Yet my innocent belief that adoption fixes everything has been blown to shreds. I grieve that our dear girl will always have this uncertainty, this divided loyalty, this question mark, this huge hole in her life left by unanswered questions and vague or missing memories of her birth family, of where she came from, and why she ended up here. As perfectly as she fits into our family and as strong as our love is for each other, I grieve that she can’t grow up with the mother who gave her life. Like children are supposed to do. I grieve that she has to process all these concepts of family and all these emotions at a young age, and that she will carry this all her life.

While in adopting Missy, we might give her the “perfect” home (though there is no such thing), her sense of self and belonging will never be “perfect.” There is no “perfect” in having to be removed from her mother and grow up with us, away from her roots, her innate bond to biological family. No matter how much the finalization of Missy’s adoption will be a huge “win” for her (and us, of course), it represents huge losses, as well.

All this being said, we still choose to provide foster care. We still desire to adopt. But perhaps by recognizing these complexities, these imperfect mixes of blessings and losses for all foster children and adopted children, we can care for them with more compassion and understanding. Maybe we can alleviate a tiny bit of stress imposed by an imperfect system.