The joy and pain of being a Catholic foster parent

The first time Stephen and Paige Sanchez took their boys to Mass, the children had lots of questions. The boys were 2 and 4, and this was the first they had heard of Jesus. They saw a statue and asked who it was.

Mr. Sanchez told them it was St. Joseph, the foster father of Jesus. The boys looked at each other.

“Jesus was a foster kid?” the older boy said.

Mr. Sanchez said he was, kind of.

To himself, he thought, Man, the church loves us.

The two boys are now the adopted sons of Mr. Sanchez and his wife, but at the time they were his foster children, and everyone expected them to go back to their birth parents. The Sanchezes also have an older son, who was also adopted through foster care.

Stephen and Paige first began exploring adoption after five years of struggle with infertility. Then they discovered how many children in their area needed placement through foster care. They took a class, just to learn more.

“We started thinking God was asking us [to go down this path],” Mr. Sanchez said. So they kept going.

The day after they received their fostering license, they got a call asking them to take a child.

“We decided we’d say yes, just like if we were having our own children,” Mr. Sanchez said.

That child, who came to them deeply traumatized, stayed only a few days before moving to specialized therapeutic care. But the agency immediately asked about another child, a boy whose birth parents’ parental rights were going to be terminated. Would the Sanchez family accept him, and eventually adopt him?

They talked it over for 10 minutes and agreed. The boy joined them the next day.

Two weeks later, the agency called again. This time, it was two half brothers who needed a temporary home until they could be reunified with their parents.

That was the plan, as it usually is with foster care. The reunification goal got pushed back more than once. The birth parents, who struggled with addiction, were unable to get clean and create a safe environment for their boys. Finally, after two years of limbo, the court legally severed the birth parents’ rights, and Stephen and Paige adopted the boys.

The Sanchez boy who was 2 years old in the church that day is now 15, and since that day when they first met St. Joseph and “his foster kid,” the boys have learned volumes about their faith.

But one of their first lessons was that God had a son and sent him to live with another family because God loved his son and trusted the family. It became a way for the Sanchezes to talk about Catholicism, and about the relationship the two boys might have with their new parents and their birth parents.

“St. Joseph became a clear patron,” Mr. Sanchez said—for the boys, and also for him.

Sacrifice and Stability

The Sanchez family story seems to have as close to a fairy tale ending as possible. But the foster father analogy only goes so far. And the family’s story also demonstrates some of the things that make foster care so hard: the legal and psychological limbo.

In foster care, the goal is to reunite the child and their parents, but it is not always clear how long that might take. And that goal is ultimately met less than half the time. Sometimes the timeline is changed several times, and sometimes the parents’ rights are legally terminated without another family ready to step in and offer care. The future of a child frequently hinges on the sustained efforts of people who are already in crisis, in dire poverty, suffering domestic violence or in the grip of addiction.

The practice of foster care is also widely misunderstood, leaving foster families isolated even among communities that could be helping the most. But experienced foster parents often say two things: Foster care reveals things that are true of every parenting relationship. And fostering is intensely, inherently pro-life work that should be much more vigorously supported and promoted by the Catholic Church.

Foster parents will also speak of a profound joy and satisfaction that keeps them doing this work over and over again, as long as they can.

Approximately 400,000 children—enough to fill Yankee Stadium eight times over—spend time in foster care every year in the United States. Each year around 60,000 children see their birth parents’ parental rights terminated, and around 50,000 children are adopted from foster care each year. About 25,000 children every year age out of the system, and 20 percent of these become instantly homeless.

Despite the great need, foster care can be a hard sell, even to families with the resources for it. Many foster parents say friends tell them they would love to offer foster care, but they are afraid of getting too attached. They are afraid they will fall too deeply in love with their foster children, only to lose them.

“In [American] culture, parenting is a little bit possessive,” Mr. Sanchez said.

Catholic culture puts great emphasis on the sacred bond between parent and child; and Americans often cultivate and cherish their identity as parents, emphasizing self-sacrifice in the name of forming lifelong attachments with their children.

None of this meshes easily with the goal of foster care, which is to relinquish children back to their birth parents. If foster care works as it is designed to, that sacrifice will lead to goodbyes.

The tension can be brutal. It’s also profoundly Christlike.

Holly Taylor Coolman, assistant professor of theology at Providence College, the author of ParentingThe Complex and Beautiful Vocation of Raising Children and the adoptive mother of five, including one by way of foster care, said foster care is the best example of the kind of love Christians are called to.

“We’re called to love people and will the good of them, even when it requires self-sacrifice. Maybe even especially when it requires self-sacrifice,” she said. “It’s a kind of hospitality that may be very difficult for the host.”

The two youngest Sanchez boys call their adoptive mother “Mommy Paige” and their birth mother “Mommy H—,” and once poignantly suggested that their birth parents could live in the backyard, so they could visit back and forth.

Mr. Sanchez reminds his sons that it’s good to love your birth parents, and such affection doesn’t hurt him and his wife. What did hurt Mr. Sanchez is seeing times when his boys’ birth parents withdrew affection and didn’t seem to care. This is where the analogy of St. Joseph as a foster father falls short, Dr. Coolman said.

Mr. Sanchez said that when his boys are mad at him, they’ll pointedly ask how their biological parents are doing. He laughs, but also feels the sting. He knows it’s normal for the boys to have conflicted feelings. Dr. Coolman said that those feelings will likely continue throughout the children’s lifetime.

“Foster kids know better than anybody else that there really is an idea of being raised by your bio mother and father. They know it in their bones,” she said. They need to know that people who have not been raised in the so-called perfect family are also beloved and precious and are not fundamentally broken; that their biological family may not be whole, but each member can be a whole person.

“Brokenness is not the ultimate description of who they are,” she said. And yet it is essential for the new parents to affirm the children’s undeniable loss.

The Ties That Bind

The possessiveness of American parenting as described by Mr. Sanchez sometimes leads to stigmas against the foster children themselves. More than half of Americans, for instance, believe that kids are in foster care because they’re juvenile delinquents, not because they were previously in unsafe homes.

Mr. Sanchez said that some Catholics he has met have absorbed unwholesome cultural ideas about heredity or destiny, and they harbor an unspoken fear that when you foster, you’re inviting a problem into your house. “Like they come from bad stock,” Mr. Sanchez said with disgust.

But while people are not their genetics, our biological connections are important. “DNA matters, which means biological ties to parents matter,” said Dr. Coolman. “I think Catholic theology should be ready to stand up and say: These relationships with the person whose DNA you share, or the person in whose body you spend the first nine months of your existence, really matter.”

This reality is an underexplored facet of St. John Paul II’s theology of the body. “You don’t just remove a baby from the body in which [he] lived and act like you’re just taking a baby from a petri dish,” Dr. Coolman said. She added that it was, in fact, at the urging of a social worker at Catholic Charities that the country began to question its practice of closed adoption. Today, approximately 95 percent of adoptions are open adoptions, a practice that works to allow children to maintain a healthy connection to their biological family of origin.

When a child is removed from their home, the smells, the tastes and their whole physical reality changes, and it is a shock to their system. And as they grow, things like their physical appearance and their genetic predispositions will continue to assert themselves. You cannot simply sever the link, and acknowledging that this is so is profoundly Catholic.

But Catholics have a long way to go until foster care is perceived as a central dimension of pro-life activity. While it is true that Christians are twice as likely to foster or adopt as the general population, it ismore often Protestant churches that sponsor foster care ministries, not Catholic parishes.

The theology is lagging, and so are the logistical supports. Catholic foster parents will tell you that while individual clergy members, schools or parishioners may be supportive, it is rare for a Catholic parish to offer robust, organized support for foster families, or even to offer information about how to get involved.

There are some Catholic communities that get it right. In South Bend, Ind., where the Sanchez family now lives, foster care has been unusually integrated into parish life.

“It’s seen as how we participate in the culture of life: Not just by being politically active, but by taking care of each other,” Mr. Sanchez said.

He also said that the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd was a helpful resource. This Montessori-based faith formation program gave the boys a space to talk freely about God and family as they played, and it became a kind of religious play-based therapy.

At one parish the family attended, the congregation had been deliberately instructed on how to behave around foster families. They knew, for example, to give children autonomy by asking, “Who is this you have with you?” rather than asking, “Is this your mom and dad?”

But in other situations, people made clueless blunders, asking in front of the children if their birth parents were on drugs, which provoked long follow-up conversations between Mr. and Mrs. Sanchez and their children.

It Takes a Village

The Sanchez family’s faith was deepened immeasurably by their experience with foster care and adoption, and they constantly relied on their faith to sustain them through the difficult parts. They say their faith has strengthened tenfold since they took that leap.

Mindy Goorchenko’s story went the other way…Read the rest of my cover story for America Magazine

Image: by Matthew Henry (Creative Commons)

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14 thoughts on “The joy and pain of being a Catholic foster parent”

  1. Thanks for this, Simcha.

    “There are all these kids, who may have living parents, but they’re orphaned.”

    My husband and I aren’t foster parents (at this point anyway) but we’ve got a couple extra kids just the same. One came to us at 18 and stayed with us on and off. Another teenager lives around the corner and eats with us four or five times a week. I’ve become a mother figure to both these kids and love them with all my heart. Please, please you guys, don’t be afraid of letting kids attach to you. Yes, it will break your heart- break it open to their suffering and their preciousness. Sometimes all it takes it setting another place at the table and doing that consistently, for months or years and letting people know they’re wanted. So many, many children don’t know that.

  2. I believe that every foster child deserves an age appropriate explanation (or acknowledgment) of why he’s been separated from his mother. Speaking freely and openly to the child about not being able to go back to his mom while she’s using drugs or while she’s still living with his abuser will help the child voice and process feelings. Hearing these harsh realities spoken of by others should not shocking to the child, and then the child will be empowered to choose whether or not he wants to answer personal questions about his situation. I think the Sanchezes may want to talk to their kids’ case worker or therapist. Foster kids will get all kinds of questions in school.

    Every foster child should be considered special needs. If anyone is interested in learning more, This YouTube lady does some videos about foster care. She has a lot of advice drawn from experience https://m.youtube.com/@foster.parenting/videos

    1. I think you are assuming these conversations aren’t happening.

      I would only add that it’s the parents prerogative as to when and how these age appropriate questions are dealt with, and adults being nosey isn’t a criterion. It’s not the child’s fragility that’s at stake, it’s the respect and decency (not to mention “mind your own damn business”) side of it that matters.

    2. yes, I’m not sure why you’re assuming that isn’t happening. Possibly some info got edited out or altered in the final draft, but the family has been and continues to be very open and thorough with their kids, with the support of professionals.

      1. A child should embrace his family history so that he feels no shame in it – whatever horrors occurred truly were not his fault. Secrets are a tool of the devil.

        I assumed open conversations hadn’t happened because when the kids were asked about their parents using drugs, it sparked “long follow up conversations.” Perhaps previous conversations occurred, but in my experience, intrusive questions about first parents aren’t a big deal and can be handled in the moment if the child has been well prepared in *prior* ongoing conversations.

        People will ask personal questions for a variety of reasons – perhaps they are just being newsy, or maybe they are dealing with addiction or another difficult situation and are looking to connect on it. In any case, continued, ongoing acknowledgement of the reason(s) behind lost custody is vital to the emotional health of a foster child.

        1. As you said, however, the conversations should be age-appropriate. It may be that the intrusive questions were not age-appropriate so that the foster parents had to follow up more. I definitely think the burden is more on other people to not ask terrible questions than on the foster parents to prep the kids for other people’s poor behavior.

          1. It’s not about prepping kids for others’ horrible behavior. It’s about raising emotionally healthy kids whose self esteem is not tied to their heartbreaking personal histories for which they bear no responsibility at all.

  3. “At one parish the family attended, the congregation had been deliberately instructed on how to behave around foster families. They knew, for example, to give children autonomy by asking, ‘Who is this you have with you?’ rather than asking, ‘Is this your mom and dad?'”

    Wow, I’m noticing this is getting my hackles up! It feels like erasure of the unique role of parenting. I know this is just another tiresome complaint about the changing of language, but the feeling of defensiveness is there. I’ll try to unpack why.

    “Back in my day” with my first baby, there were “parent and me” activities; now with my latest baby, it’s “caregiver and me,” to cater to the increasing prevalence of professionally delegated childcare. And with the rise of surrogacy, even birth workers, who you’d think would be the most educated on the sacredness of the mother-baby bond, now sometimes avoid ever uttering the term “mother,” instead reducing us all to “birthing persons” whether we are gestational surrogates or not.

    This feels like part of that tradition to me. I don’t want to be mean to foster parents, or aunts/uncles/grandparents, or nannies, or gestational surrogates. And I agree that all but the last one should exist and is deserving of respect and gratitude. But I think something is wrong with society if we start to see parents, and especially birth mothers, as just another type of caregiver.

    Maybe my concern here is misplaced. Maybe it actually preserves that sacred distinction to not expect a foster child to categorize their legal guardians as parents by answering “yes” to the question at hand.

    But I nevertheless feel like explicit instructions to not say the word “parents” in as many situations will have a chilling effect on saying the word – or thinking positively about the concept – at all.

    Maybe it’s worth it, maybe it’s not, like so many language battles today. But that’s the feeling that came up when I read that.

    1. A child’s immediate physical safety is most important but a child’s emotional health trumps everything else. And the child should be allowed to define the relationship with his foster parents. In all likelihood, a child may respond, “it’s my mom,” or “it’s my foster mom” or maybe even “it’s my friend,” but declaring this strange woman a child’s mom MAY be extremely triggering and confusing to some kids. And that’s ok too.

    2. Several of my kids were born in another country. We knew that my husband would go from being called “Daddy” (by our older kids) to being “Papa,” because they were already being taken away from so much…. changing our terms of address to give them comfort and familiarity was the absolute least we could do.

      My FIL had been called Papa, but happily switched to Grandpapa. However, some in the family were upset by the change, and that we were allowing our children to dictate other people’s lives. And some in the family just didn’t bother or care to learn or change.

      Fourteen years later, my son STILL remembers how scared he was when Random Relative saw him with my FIL and said, “You’re so lucky! You’re here with your Papa!” He was 6 years old, struggling to learn a whole new language, culture, family, food….. and he thought this person was telling him he was being taken away from his new Mama and Papa, and being left with another family.

      The pain and suffering of children who have lost their parents can never be comprehended. Any amount of sacrifice we can make to help heal that wound is life-giving. Jesus didn’t say “No greater love hath a man than this: that he insists everyone cater to his worldview” Yes, language matters. But “using the correct phrasing” isn’t one of the Works of Mercy, while “Comforting the Afflicted” is.

    3. Yes, it’s your feelings that should be considered and not the child’s. You are so right. Birth mothers are practically victims in society and trying to respectfully be aware that a child has the autonomy to say “that’s my mom” or not is just another attack on motherhood. Those foster kids are so sensitive, we should be teaching them to fight the culture war instead.

      1. Why do you have to be mean? She asked her question respectfully, she’s entitled to respectful responses.

    4. Your concern is misplaced. It’s reasonable to get upset when society is using language to steer us toward believing that parents aren’t important, but that is not what’s happening here.

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