Fostering and Adopting — with the Blanchard Family
Four years ago, I was pushing three kids in a stroller with two more in tow when I ran into Lindsay with her own small army at our local recreation center entrance.
She said, "I have five kids too, we should be friends.”
It was settled!
One of the first times we hung out she whipped up stacks of pancakes, so the kids and I could stay for supper since my husband was away on a backcountry trip.
Lindsay’s casual hospitality was refreshing and I learned a lot about her big heart, as I asked questions about their family’s fostering and adopting story.
Today you get to eavesdrop on some of the questions I asked at our playdates and glean some great tips if you are on the journey of fostering and adopting, or desire to support a family on this journey.
You also will hear our Heavenly Father’s heart!
The Blanchard Family
Why did you and David begin fostering and how did this lead to adopting?
David and I had always talked about adoption being a part of our story from the time we were dating, though we weren’t sure when or in what capacity. I went to school for child and youth care counseling in my early twenties.
Shortly after we got married I was working as a youth and family counselor with an agency that worked with high-risk and homeless teens, they also had a crisis fostering program. David and I talked about how it would be fun to have teens come and stay with us for a few days or weeks at a time through the crisis program. We also ran a youth program at our church at the time, so it was a good fit for our life.
We signed up as a crisis foster home, and over two years, had close to 20 youth come and stay with us short-term while they were in-between placements.
We also gave birth to our oldest bio-daughter during this time. We really enjoyed fostering teens, but the stress of new people coming into our home in crisis all the time became a bit too much as our daughter was turning into a toddler, so we started to talk about transitioning out of fostering, but then a girl who had come to our youth program (who we had known since she was 10) ended up coming into the crisis bed and we felt called to become her long term home.
Over the next year, we also welcomed our second biological child—a son, as well as our foster daughter’s biological sister.
David ended up getting a job offer in another city. So we moved but our “big girls” decided to stay and graduate with their friends. Since they were 16 and 17 at the time, we felt it was important to allow them the choice to come or go. We have remained in contact with them over the years.
After taking a break for a year we decided to take infant foster placements to help them reunify with their birth families. If reunification wasn’t an option we planned to pursue adoption.
After having a newborn for a few months and helping her successfully reunite with her bio family, a newborn baby girl, just two days old, came to us as a foster placement.
Over the next 2 years, we ended up taking 2 more of her full biological siblings from the same birth parents.
We were very fortunate to be able to adopt all 3 girls.
Our bio daughter and son are now 12 and 10, and our 3 adopted girls are now 7, 6, and 5!
How has adoption impacted your relationship with God and the way you view and relate to Him?
I often share with people that all the children who come through our home are “ours” for the season we have them.
We can’t hold back love because we don’t know what the future will bring.
This reminds me so much of Christ. He fully loves us, he sacrifices for us—and yet there are no guarantees we will choose to follow him.
I also really believe that God has shown and taught me so much about compassion, about understanding the story that we each carry and how that story forms us—both good and bad.
He comes as this perfect father to carry us through our hardship, and in some ways adoption, though not the perfect plan for our children (as perfect would mean there was no need for adoption in the first place), allows a covering and space for children to be held and surrounded, to be loved, and hopefully heal from their past trauma.
What were the biggest struggles and victories as your family grew over the years?
Walking into fostering with the hopes of adoption was an emotional process.
Trying to love fiercely and hold a child loosely was a constant struggle.
For a few years, we didn’t know what the future would hold for our girls.
Would they be reunited with their birth family?
Would they be ours forever?
It was a challenging time which stretched and grew our faith, as we had to just fully trust the Lord that each child that came into our home was ultimately ours to love for the season He gave them to us.
Our bio son (who was 3 at the time) was diagnosed with cancer just two weeks before our 11-month foster daughter’s younger sibling was due (our birth mom had asked us to take her next baby while she was pregnant with her)!
I remember crying to God:
“Really? Are you going to prove this point in my life?”—that our children are ours to love well for the season we have them.
In advocating for fostering and responding to questions about how we could love and let a foster child go, I often told people that we don’t just half love our bio children, even though we don’t know what the future holds: if there will be sickness or accidents or death.
This season was an incredibly challenging one for our family as we juggled our 5-year-old daughter starting school for the first time, our 3-year-old son being in the hospital with a critical illness, our 11-month-old foster daughter, and then adding her newborn bio sister, but we really felt these girls were meant to stay together and wanted to honor our birth mom’s request for us to take her child.
Thankfully, our son survived cancer, and we have moved forward eventually adopting the two girls and fostering their newborn bio sister the next year.
What has surprised you the most on this journey?
I think a lot of people assume that children who are placed at birth have less trauma and challenges, and while this might be true in some cases, I think it’s been surprising to live out how prenatal trauma/substance abuse and being marinated in a womb of toxic stress for 9 months can permanently affect a child.
Our children can often require a lot of “scaffolding”, and support; but we are helping them break off generational cycles that their bio family has likely carried for a long time.
My hopes and prayers are that they will live life to their full potential, love Jesus and be able to prevent trauma and harm for my future grandchildren.
If you could do anything differently, what would it be?
Oh man, this is a hard one. I know so much more about trauma and attachment than I did when we had our teens. I think looking back is tricky because we did the best we could with the information we had at the time.
If I could do anything differently it would be with our long term teens, to just sit in the hard with them more, and I wish I would have brought them with us when we moved (though we wanted to honor their choice to stay and graduate with friends as they were 16 and 17 at the time) but looking back now I realize they were so very young to make that choice.
I also think I would have advocated for our littles to get earlier access to mental health professionals to support their developing brains so they didn’t have to live in such toxic stress.
What advice do you have for someone considering fostering or adopting?
1) It’s hard but SO worth it to help families break generational cycles.
The legacy and impact will be so profound and forever change the course of their family of origin.
Often success can look different for our children with complex needs but loving them is so worth it.
2) Remember that you are giving your family for a child, not getting a child for your family.
Adoption needs to center around that child.
They have experienced a huge loss (whether they are separated from their birth family as an infant or as an older child there is grief that comes with that).
Do whatever is necessary to keep them connected to siblings, to birth parents (if it’s healthy to do so), and especially to cultural identity is so important.
3) Fostering and adopting families can NOT do this alone.
They need to be surrounded by people who care for their hearts and support them in practical ways.
They also need a community of other foster and adoptive families because it can be a hard and sometimes lonely road.
4) We need to love and have compassion for the child and their birth parents, family, and culture.
You can not love a child well if you do not have compassion for the trauma and generational cycles that lead that child to require removal from their birth family.
I often say birth parents are just grown-up versions of our children but without the support and scaffolding of healthy families that they so desperately needed.
5) There is an overrepresentation of Indigenous children in foster care.
This is a direct result of residential schools and systemic racism.
Learn and familiarise yourself with their history, and with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s calls to action.
Be willing to continue to immerse and teach your child about their rich culture.
Honor the communities they have come from, no matter how broken, and help grow a strong sense of cultural identity in your child.
What resources would you recommend?
1) We took a Trust-Based Relational Intervention (TRBI) course from Karyn Purvis and the Institute of Child Development.
—This was a great course that teaches real-life strategies for fostering and adopting families of children who had trauma.
2) The Honestly Adoption podcast has been another great resource.
—Hearing other families talk about and tell their stories has been so healing for my heart to know I am not on this journey alone.
3) Surrounding yourself with a community of other foster and adoptive parents, form a prayer group.
—Make it a priority to surround yourself with other families who are built through adoption or fostering.
How can friends and family support families who are fostering children or on the journey of adoption?
Make a meal, offer to do lawn work, or laundry…
Often caring for children who have developmental trauma means that caregivers spend a great deal of emotional and physical energy co-regulating their children, and being their external brain.
Pray for your foster and adoptive friends…
Offer to pay for a babysitter so the parents have time to reconnect and recharge…
Offer compassion and support to the parent if you see one of their children having a hard time or melting down...
Sometimes the best thing to do is let them know their child is not a bother, that it’s OK they’re melting down. Give them emotional support and space while they calm their dysregulated child.
Children from trauma or who have prenatal exposure often have sensory sensitivities and social anxiety. So while it may appear to be behavioral, often a foster or adoptive parent is working hard to teach that child to co-regulate, as these skills are often very lagging for that child whose brain functions differently from neurotypical children.
When I have a child melting down in public it can feel so overwhelming and embarrassing. When others around me (especially at church) tell me it’s OK, that my child is not a bother, it helps me to feel better at that moment, and to feel that we are welcome even in the hard stuff.
Isn’t this family and their story beautiful?
Thank you for sharing with us Lindsay! God is pouring out His love in and through your family.
Feel free to put any questions or share your experience with fostering or adopting in the comments.
