“Focus on Our Families” is a series of articles that will feature foster and/or adoptive parents and their experiences so those inside and outside of the organization will have a better understanding of the importance and the rewards of foster parenting and/or being an adoptive parent.
Children who reside in foster care often come into care scared, lonely, and feeling isolated. With the COVID-19 pandemic’s effects still lingering, these children are still scared, lonely, and feeling isolated. This time, they have the support, guidance, and love of their foster parents to help them through yet another difficult period in their lives.
Each May, National Foster Care Month is celebrated to recognize those who open their hearts and their homes and make personal sacrifices to make children’s lives and our society better.
Foster parents do not always receive the recognition being given to other frontline workers, but their role is nonetheless vital. They are the heroes to the more than 400,000 children and adolescents residing in foster homes in the United States, including more than 13,000 in Pennsylvania, and nearly 200 every day at CONCERN.
All of us have experienced a ‘new normal’ during these trying and challenging times, but foster parents and their foster children have unique experiences and challenges that many have not experienced and cannot comprehend.
These selfless people who open their homes make personal sacrifices are more than just caretakers for children and adolescents with histories of complex trauma. They are working on a daily basis with fragile children and adolescents who have experienced childhood neglect or abuse and witnessed or experienced domestic or community violence.
Now more than ever, these foster parents are trying to build and maintain a daily routine that helps support a sense of predictability and control; provide opportunities for these children to experience moments of choice and control; support their efforts to maintain connection with peers as well as family members outside the home; and support them in identifying personal sources of positivity, inspiration, comfort, and joy.
Thank you to all of the wonderful and caring CONCERN foster parents who have opened their homes to make a child’s life better. Your compassion and generosity truly change lives every day.
For more information about CONCERN and becoming an adoptive or a foster parent, please visit us at www. concern4kids.org or call 610-944-0445.