In my family, foster care is normal. My kids have grown up in a home where caseworkers are their friends, our foster care agency is “the fun place with the ducks” (there’s a pond behind the building), home studies and in-home team meetings are words that mean “clean your room” and judges are people they know and trust. My kids talk freely about things like drug use, visitation, court, and prison. And they have managed to survive the roller coaster of foster care with their emotional stability in tact.
I think part of the reason they have done so well is because we started this conversation when they were very young. It may seem too early to talk to 2, 3, and 4 year-olds about foster care. You don’t want to spoil their innocence about the world or make them feel unsafe. But what we’ve found is that by starting these conversations with them while they are even too young to understand some of what you’re saying, you make your mistakes early, too. You make mistakes before they are old enough to remember and you’ve got time to fix it. And by talking about it early, you end up normalizing it instead of instilling fear. Foster care is just life.
Photos by Rebecca Tredway Photography
(Everything I’m sharing with you is what I’ve learned from a “boots on the ground” perspective. I am not a therapist and I know in the world of foster care, the “right” language is always changing. I’ll do my best to explain what has worked for us with a full understanding that there may be other approaches.)
So here’s what I want you to think about when talking to a toddler or preschooler about foster care:
-What you say to them, they may repeat. While we might be tempted to give our kids a lot of information in order to help them have grace with this new member of the family, we need to be aware that those words can come back to haunt us. It is better to use words you’d be okay with them bringing up in their Sunday School class or at Grandma’s house or when they meet the family of your foster child.
“Sam is coming to live with our family for a little while so his parents can get some help in learning how to take care of him.”
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