Back-to-school season can create anxiety, even among children from stable families who have friends in their classes with whom they are looking forward to reconnecting.
However, for the 450,000 kids in U.S. foster care, the back-to-school season can bring not only high anxiety but also added trauma.
For many of these children, they have just recently met another new family, changed schools, and become acclimated to yet another place to sleep at night.
Imagine starting a new school year without knowing any peers or any teachers and not knowing if you might finish the semester with your new family before another sudden move.
The school supplies these children received from the backpack drive at the local church are nice, but they are merely a distraction from the disorder.
Children in foster care need permanence and stability above all else.
Their foster families benefit tremendously from the help during the back-to-school season, but a backpack full of new notebooks doesn’t help a child develop safe attachments to a family and community, or replace loving relationships.
We can’t stop at supporting foster children through backpack drives and engaging them during the back-to-school season. We can and must be a present force of constant love and support for all the youth who find themselves in foster care.
Lifeline Children’s Services seeks to engage and equip the church to invest in and make an impact in the lives of children impacted by the foster care system, and by God’s grace, these interventions are making a huge impact.
Harbor Families is one such program that aims to keep families together by offering interim care and tangible support for families at risk of losing their children to foster care. Families provide temporary shelter to a child while providing love and support to the child’s biological parents in a symbiotic relationship that allows for consistency and openness.
While preventing entry into the foster care system is the ideal, when it’s not possible, churches and similar dense communities can build support networks around parents who’ve already lost their children to foster care through programs like Families Count.
The goal of Families Count is to restore parents and reconcile families.
Participants engage parents by teaching parenting classes needed as part of their reunification plan with the state.
These classes provide the opportunity for relationship building and gospel engagement through one-on-one mentoring, all conducted within the local church or community.
In addition, there may already be families caring for children in foster care within our communities and churches.
We have the opportunity to come alongside these children and families who need community and consistent help and support.
Several methods of healthy intervention include providing meals on a consistent basis, providing childcare for date nights, and even becoming a certified respite care provider in order to offer the child and the families nights away.
We must find ways to strengthen vulnerable families, support foster families, and bring stability to youth in foster care.
All of these vital ministries are essential in providing for the true needs of children in foster care: permanence, stability and predictability.
We can provide so much more than a backpack at the beginning of the school year.
Vulnerable children and their families need communities to intentionally and strategically walk alongside them and help them heal and grow.
Although tangible needs are less emotionally and mentally draining and can be more sharply obvious at times such as back-to-school and Christmas, the needs which remain are those that, if not met, will greatly impact these vulnerable children today and in the future.
The fact is that kids who age out of foster care are 70% more likely to have a child themselves who also will enter the foster care system in the future.
We must engage deeply because the underlying issues don’t only impact the child in front of you today, but generations of children to come.
Start with a backpack — but don’t stop there.
Make yourself available for true life-changing intervention that may cost you your peace and comfort, but will indelibly create a positive impact that will ripple throughout the foster system today, impacting those not yet born.
Herbie Newell is the president and executive director of Lifeline Children’s Services, the largest Evangelical Christian adoption agency in America, host of The Defender Podcast and author of "Image Bearers: Shifting from Pro-Birth to Pro-Life."
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