07/08/2026
There’s a significant aspect of foster care that isn’t talked about nearly enough: a child's idea of home.
Before I became a foster parent and adoptive mom, I never really understood it.
By the time a child enters foster care, their definition of home may have already been formed. Maybe home is chaos. Maybe it’s loud voices, constant conflict, and uncertainty. Maybe it’s an empty room with only a few belongings. Maybe it’s sleeping on a couch, a recliner, or the floor with a blanket. Maybe it’s being huddled together on a twin mattress with two siblings. Maybe home is having the TV on all night because silence feels unfamiliar. Whatever they’ve always known becomes their normal. It becomes their comfort.
Then, overnight, it’s gone.
They’re moved. The foster parents are excited. They’ve spent days or weeks setting up a bedroom, carefully picking out stuffed animals, blankets, and clothes. They’ve stocked the pantry with snacks, bought toys they hope the child will love. They’re praying this child will finally feel safe.
But the child walks into something that feels anything but safe. They’re walking away from everything they’ve ever known into a situation that has comfortable material items but no true sense of comfort. The plush blankets made to feel soft and inviting feel smothering and unfamiliar. The silence is deafening. The clean bedroom doesn’t feel peaceful – it feels lonely. The comfort we so carefully prepared doesn’t feel like comfort at all because comfort isn’t found in things. It’s found in what they’ve always known. They crave the familiar because it feels safer than the healthy. And, we judge them for wanting to leave this safe, comfortable place that we have made. We judge them for being ungrateful.
Then look at the biological mother.
The one who grew up in foster care and has lived the last few years homeless, moving from couch to couch, floor to floor, sidewalk to sidewalk. The streets are what she knows. The people there are familiar. The darkness has become predictable. It’s terrifying to us, but it’s comfortable to her because it is what she knows.
Then we take her baby.
We tell her to get sober. Get a job. Find housing. Fix her life. We give her a list of items to check off and brochures on ideas to get these tasks accomplished. But no one shows her how. No one walks her through the unpredictability and discomfort.
We then send her back to the streets while she waits for housing that isn’t available yet. We tell her to get a job, but she has no address to put on an application and nowhere to shower before an interview. We tell her to stay clean, but she has no stable place to sleep and only the friends or acquaintances she’s had the last several years. And we write a report every month on how she's making no progress. Somehow she's supposed to find a place to lay down at night without money and without any connections. She is expected to rebuild her life while trying to simply survive each day.
Eventually, she slips back into what she knows. She trades a hotel room for the street corner. She trades a little progress made for the next fix. And then people say she didn’t love her child. But, I witnessed her with that baby. I saw her determination and focus to get clean. I know she loves her baby.
But love alone isn’t enough to overcome addiction, trauma, mental illness, poverty, and an entire life built on survival.
And back on the street, she’s home.
Not because it’s a good place to be, but because it’s familiar. And it's what she has.
Healing isn’t just giving someone a better house. It isn’t replacing chaos with calm overnight. Healing means teaching someone that peace is safe. That quiet doesn’t have to be scary. That love doesn’t have to be earned. That stability can become normal.
That’s why change takes so long. That's why we lose so many kids and parents in the system.
We’re not asking children or parents to leave behind a house.
We’re asking them to leave behind their only sense of comfort and home that they’ve ever known.
And maybe we should stop judging and stop handing them brochures and ideas. Maybe we should leave our comfort and take their hand to walk them through.
Because real healing begins when someone patiently walks beside you long enough for safe to finally feel like home. And if we want to see any real change, it's going to take more than opening our doors. It will take stepping into someone else's reality long enough to understand why they keep going back.
