Dear Editor,
Krish Kandiah’s article in the Dec. 2022 issue was a great, upbeat encouragement to Christians to consider fostering and adopting. Your anonymous correspondent’s response (Feb. 23) to it was a painful eye-opener to the costs that fostering and adoption can have. Did you read that letter and think: ‘Oh, I’m just glad we never had to go down that road’; ‘I knew adoption wasn’t for me’; ‘What a brave person X is to have taken on fostering/adopting’?
I, too, am an adoptive parent. Twenty years ago, my husband and I took in two children who had had a very difficult start in life. We were brimming with optimism and confidence. We had prayed and our church family had prayed for this for so long. And we are still here today, all of us much changed by the experience. The 20 years have included quite a few brutally difficult times for all of us. I read that letter and was struck again by my own pain and the raw honesty of some of the difficulties that we have experienced.
My point is that churches need to be adopting and fostering communities. Not just communities some of whose members foster or adopt. Not just places where we think adoption or fostering is a ‘good idea’. Damaged children are waiting in greater numbers than ever in the care system. And they bring their damage with them to their new homes. Ask yourself: how bad do you have to feel about yourself to take your own excrement and smear it over your safe haven? If you believe you are going to be rejected and moved on, doesn’t stealing from, swearing at and lying to your current caregivers make sense? If you crave the affection you missed out on in your early years, won’t you run into the arms of anyone who is willing?
Now ask yourself: if a family in my church had fostered or adopted a child/children with problems like these, how ought I to respond; how could I offer support? (Clue: don’t say ‘you’re so brave, I couldn’t do it!’). Could you have a cleaning kit by the front door and be on call to do the dirty work whilst parent calms down with a cuppa? Could you be checking in on the parents with a quick ‘How’s things?’ WhatsApp every couple of weeks, giving them opportunity to vent a little to you? Could you educate yourself about trauma and attachment and brain development and therapeutic parenting methods and emotional and behavioural difficulties and whatever psychiatric illnesses and disorders are relevant? Could you respond to a child who has just sworn and shouted at you in Sunday School in a way that says ‘I hear you, you are safe, I know you are hurting’ and sit with that child until the anger subsides? Could you regularly let the parents know you pray for their marriage as well as their children? Yes, whoever you are, you can do at least one of these things!
The burden of fostering and adopting many of these children is immense and, frankly, scary. But God uses these experiences to sanctify us by making us more reliant on Him, especially when we find we are at the extreme limits of what we can bear. Churches are uniquely positioned to be the support network for these children and their carers. But churches that wholeheartedly and intentionally cultivate this atmosphere in their congregations are actually not that common. Could you be the person in your church who sparks a change?
Yours sincerely,
Jenny Whalley Leicester
