Fostering & Adoption
If you’ve been interested in the world of fostering or adoption but haven’t any idea where to start, this page is for you!
In short, I’d give these little bits of advice:
If you’re a praying person, talk to God about it. Fostering/adoption is not something that you should ever do out of guilt or pride, and while I hold the belief that we are all called to care for the vulnerable, I think that looks different person-to-person and season-to-season.
Learn about the options, ranging from foster care to becoming a respite family to adoption, either domestically or internationally.
Promise 686 has created these incredibly helpful videos explaining everything from what foster care even is to language and why it matters. They also have an Adoption 101 course that’s so good.
Families4Families is the agency we’ve used for foster care. They have a great overview of the process on their website.
Support a foster or adoptive family. This may help you learn more about the process and options, but it will also help you play a valuable role in the current child welfare crisis. Here are a few ideas that have been incredibly helpful to us in our journey:
Drop off a meal or a box of snacks.
Send a Venmo or a gift card to Target/Amazon/Chick-fil-a.
Ask what you can grab for them while you’re at the grocery store.
If you’re close, offer to take a kid to the park or offer childcare so the parents can have a date night or a 1:1 date with a child.
Invest in one of the children, even one of the bio kids, through mentorship, tutoring, or practicing sports.
Send en encouraging text or prayer highlighting something you’ve noticed about the family.
Join (or launch!) a Care Community via Promise 686. To get started, ask your church if they have a FAM (Family Advocacy Ministry) via Promise 686. If they do, ask how you can join a Care Community! If they don’t, you can fill out this form to get info on how to start one.
If you move forward with foster care or adoption and are in the home study process, I’d give this advice:
Learn about trauma-informed care. The Baffling Behavior Show is a great podcast for this.
Build a community/support network. About 50% of foster families quit serving after the first year, usually because of isolation. But of those who have wrap-around support from a community of family/friends, 90% continue. Start building your community now.
And for a longer read, here’s a letter I wrote a month after our four kiddos joined our family in a foster-to-adopt situation, along with a link to a panel I hosted with dear friends at the bottom:
August 2025
Dear friends,
I stood in the post office this week thinking about every single person surrounding me—the guy struggling through training at the computer, his frustrated boss, the young dad behind me. What traumas had they each experienced? What learning differences did they have? Had anyone walked alongside them through either?
I question every behavior our kiddos make right now, wondering what is a trauma response or survival tactic and what is just a hangry toddler or a hormonal preteen. I think often that even if we are the most loving, earnest family, we will still disappoint and hurt and anger our kids. And I realize that as good and safe as we make our lives, car wrecks or diagnoses or bad things will still happen.
But I think just as often now of repair, of the idea that this is where healing happens—that those who experience repair (even when—especially when?—they experience hard things) are more likely to thrive in the real world, to get jobs and have healthy relationships and to raise their own happy children one day.
All adults were kiddos once. And our kiddos will one day be adults. The thought is equally encouraging and terrifying.
We try to do so much on our own. With that in mind, I am continually embarrassed at all the people involved in making our family function right now. But I feel more confident than ever that this is a communal effort, that if we want those functioning (thriving!) adults one day, they’ll need a whole village of us.
This is true of every human, I’d argue—not just those in foster care. Every person deserves a safe, loving home where their brains and bodies can grow properly.
With these past four weeks behind me, I’d say children also need permanency, the idea that the safety they feel will continue and not be ripped away at any moment. We are wired for a “forever home.” In fact, the thing I hear most often from our new kiddos right now is either, “I don’t want you to leave,” or “Will you come back?” 💔
So how do we give them that? The repair, the healing, the permanency?
I heard a stat once that blew me away, and I verified it yesterday:
Part A: There are between 350,000-400,000 children in the US foster care system.
Part B: There are between 350,000-400,000 churches in our country.
Churches: places that claim the authority of scripture, of verses like Defend the weak and the fatherless (Psalm 82:3) / Learn to do good; Seek justice, Reprove the ruthless, Defend the orphan, Plead for the widow. (Isaiah 1:17) / Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world. (James 1:27)
If every church had just one family who stepped into the calling of foster care (a soft place to land until kids were either reunited with a stabilized birth family, or adopted), every child could have that repaired safety, permanency, healing.
But of course it’s not that simple. The system is broken, as they say. Sometimes kids are placed back with a birth family that is not quite ready to parent. Or maybe they’re placed with a foster family who is unhealthy. Or maybe a very lovely and well-meaning foster family just can’t handle the increasing needs any more. (These are all very kind ways to say very hard things.)
Another stat from Promise 686, an organization we’ve long loved and now love infinitely more: Only 50% of foster families continue past their first year. Of those with a Care Community wrapped around them to support, though, 90% continue.
Imagine if every church had just one foster family and then that church committed to that family’s health. What if they brought meals to provide the parents time to actually connect as mom and dad, not just caretakers? What if they provided childcare so those parents could recalibrate, offered mentoring so the kiddos could form other healthy attachments? What if they relieved financial burdens, prayed and encouraged diligently, let the foster family know that they were not alone?
I think we’d have foster families in it for longer.
And I think, over time, we’d have kiddos that exit the foster care system because of found permanency.
And I think, over a long time, we’d have less kiddos even entering the system because we’d have more healthy, healed adults.
If just one family in a community was called to foster, and if that community then used their gifts to support them… just imagine.
(And if that family happened to have four kiddos, think of the quick work we’d make on that statistic!)
It’s happening. This is what our world has looked like recently:
Betsy is driving the magic school bus in our afternoon carpools, former teacher-of-the-year neighbor Kara is taking our son out on Wednesdays for tutoring, Trey is hanging towel racks, Jennifer is sitting in the chaos while David and I try to look at the calendar for a minute, Mrs. Thompson and Nurse Snell are loving our kids through their Big Feelings at school, LP is vacuuming and making snacks and running basically a summer camp in our front yard with a splash pad and boombox, Karly and Yana are organizing everybody and everything, Will is building beds, Chase is putting together one thousand pieces to a vanity, Callie is reorganizing my pantry, the grandmothers are running carpool routes, Pete and Emily are buying a lacrosse stick, Jonathan and Emily are dropping off a deep freezer, Will and Emily are thinking through room configurations, (so many Emilys), Hannah and Brady are taking our 5yo to gymnastics, Laura and Nicole are dropping off toys, April is curating her handmedowns, Christina is rescuing our one son from the sorority house, Michal is squeezing us into camp, Karen is sending me the most thoughtful box of mama encouragement, Chuck and Barbara are hosting us at the pool, Pam is showing up on our doorstep with three frozen pot pies, Cat is driving our oldest home from softball, Mei and Betsy are making volleyball happen, so many people are loving us lavishly with meals and gift cards and surprise snacks… and on and on and on.
It’s embarrassing, right? I keep thinking, “We’ll be self-sustaining soon.”
But maybe we aren’t supposed to be self-sustaining. Maybe we’re supposed to do all of this together.
Fostering and adoption, sure. But also, life in general.
I got to interview some friends of mine this week for a project I set up long before we got the kiddos. They’ll speak to this idea of doing it all together with more meat on the bones, as they’ve been in it even longer. You can listen to the recording here.
💛 - Callie