Dear Church Offering Me a Free 'Foster Parent Night Out'

Dear Church Offering Me a Free Foster Parent Night Out,

My short answer is: no thank you.

My long answer is: Can we talk, friend?

I’ve gotten a lot of offers like this, both for free babysitting and other free supports like Christmas gifts. They arrive in my email inbox like glitter confetti; nice, but also relentlessly hard to remove. “Orphan Care Ministry” is a thing your members have decided is a worthy cause to support. I get it! You want to help! Helping is great! It’s why I got involved in foster care, too.

The problem is, foster families like mine? Are not the ones who need your help. There are a two main reasons for this:

We chose to become foster parents, and we are paid for our work. This is a touchy subject so I’m just going to be frank with you here: being a foster parent does not mean I’m a saint; every month I receive a check from the city I’m licensed through for my foster parenting work. The money is intended to go towards maintaining food along the miscellaneous things a child needs month to month. I am not in need. My child does not go without, not now, not at Christmas, not ever.
Dropping our children who have experienced trauma and loss with unknown caregivers is adding to their trauma. My child who has experienced trauma had a really difficult time adjusting the twice-a-week preschool with the same teachers every time; while I would love a night out with a free babysitter, that free babysitter isn’t really free. They come at a cost. The trouble is, the person paying the price is my foster child. It doesn’t matter if your volunteers are trained in trauma-informed parenting (by the way, are they?), it doesn’t matter if it’s just this once. The fact is, leaving my foster child with an unknown caregiver, even if *I* feel comfortable with it and the state trusts my judgment, my child’s brain does not know this, and it is deeply unfair to put the true cost of the “free” night out on my child’s mental health. Someone is paying for this free night, and it’s the person with the least power and the most to lose.

This is where we talk about power. Because the truth of the matter is, in the world of foster care, there are so many people with power, and many people without it. I think of it as two bubbles existing side by side. In one bubble there are powerful entities: judges, social workers, attorneys, guardians ad litem, CASA workers, foster parents, and, yes, churches and community groups. The people in the power bubble all have one thing in common: they all chose to be a part of foster care.

In the other bubble are powerless entities, like foster children themselves, and their biological families. These people did not choose to become involved in foster care; often their involvement is due to the systemic racism in America which causes Black children to wind up in foster care at a disproportionately high level, due in part to the criminalization of poverty. Yes, some parents whose children are in foster care made bad choices and did bad things, but this does not strip them of their inherent personhood, and when organizations and groups of faith focus their efforts instead on the people who chose to be involved, instead of those who need the most help, it sends a message that really, children are better off not with their families of origin. Where we aim our help points to where our values lie, even if we don’t state them outright.

When we think about power structures in foster care, what does it mean when a powerful actor like a foster family receives support from another powerful entity like a church? The power stays within the power bubble, and never shifts to the powerless bubble. When support is given within the power bubble, the powerless bubble does not benefit. The powerless bubble continues to stay exactly as it is, while the powerful bubble gains more power.

Too often, the bubble of power can keep the status quo going. The ones in the bubble don’t need to think about what could be different, because the bubble is working for them. But if we change the way we interact with each other, we can pop the bubble.

What if, instead of the powerful boosting the powerful, the powerful shifted their focus to the ones without it? What could that look like?

What if churches…offered biological families support in keeping their kids.
What if churches…fundraised for groups and mutual aid societies that help keep families together in the first place, avoiding foster care entirely? Platforms for this already exist, such as Care Portal, making such a shift easy! You can also find regional groups like the one in my city, Patty’s Hope, which offers support to biological moms of foster children. As they say in Hamilton, look around, look around. You’re bound to find something that can lend structure and a path forward to your new focus.
What if churches…held job fairs specifically for parents who have lost their children to the foster care system, in a concerted, direct effort to help those who need to show proof of stable employment as a way to get their children back.
What if churches…made it their mission to fundraise for biological parents’ legal defense instead of adoption funds.
What if churches…decided the high rate of homelessness among former foster youth was going to be their area of concern.

There are so many ways churches, as part of the power bubble, can take a stab at breaking the power bubble. Offering me, a foster parent with means, a free night of babysitting (which will do mental harm to my foster child), will not break the bubble. “Adopting” my foster child for Christmas will not break that bubble. In order to break the bubble and change foster care, organizations and faith communities must look beyond the power bubble. All of us must.

Otherwise, we just keep floating.

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This post was previously published on Medium.com.

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