'A Stepping Stone in their Journey'
UMFS Seeking Foster Families for Area Youth.
By Adele Uphaus
MANAGING EDITOR AND CORRESPONDENT
Email Adele
Editor’s Note: May is Foster Care Awareness Month
Brittany Flowers’s very first foster sibling came to live in her home when she was 8. It was a respite care placement, so he was only with her for two days, but when he left, “I just cried and cried,” Flowers said.
“I just knew I had a little brother,” she said.
That boy was the first of 45 foster siblings that Flowers now counts as part of her family. Whether they stayed in her mother’s house for a weekend, a month, or—in the case of two of them—forever, they’re all still part of her life.
“I consider all of them my siblings,” she said. “Nobody even knew that my mom did foster care because I always just called them ‘my brother’ or ‘my sister.’ It was only after people met like eight of them that they started wondering!”
Flowers’s experience of growing up in a family that provided foster care was so influential that she now works as a family systems coordinator for UMFS, where she approves new foster homes and liaises between foster parents and children.
And according to UMFS, there is a great need for more foster families in Virginia.
“UMFS has seen a 40% decline in … foster parent inquiries over the last few years,” according to the organization’s website.
Right now, according to UMFS, there are about 4,800 children and teens in foster care with the Virginia Department of Social Services. Sixty percent are White, 28% are Black, and 11% are Hispanic. Parental rights have been terminated for about 1,700 of these youth, meaning they are waiting to be adopted.
Almost half—48%—of children in foster care are aged 13 and up, meaning there’s a great need for families who are willing to take teens.
The outcomes for children who age out of foster care without achieving permanency—returning to their families of origin, being adopted, or having a permanent guardian appointed—are bleak. Twenty percent of youth who age out become instantly homeless, and 70% of women who age out will become pregnant by age 21.
But none of these outcomes came true for Flowers’s foster siblings. Most of them, she said, returned to their families of origin, showing that “foster care can be really beautiful as long as you have a team that is dedicated to the child.”
Flowers said her mother’s goal was always to provide respite care—to be “a stepping stone in their journey,” as she explained it to Flowers. While they were with her, she’d be their fiercest advocate.
“My mom, she’d be talking in the IEP meetings, she’d be in the treatment meetings, going ‘I noticed this and this’ and ‘We need to address this and this,’” Flowers recalled. “She’d also stay in touch with the parents [of origin]. She still talks to some of them.”
Flowers saw first-hand how children thrived in her mother’s home.
“I think the best part [of providing foster care] was seeing their growth over time from being in a loving environment,” Flowers said. “The hardest part is when they left. I’m not going to lie.”
Stories of foster care successes don’t get as much publicity as those that fail, so there’s a misconception that it’s always “a traumatic experience,” Flowers said.
“There are some bad apples out of any population, but our parents are very dedicated,” she said.
UMFS’s Fredericksburg office currently has between 14 and 16 approved foster families.
“Recently, we just had a lot of families that stopped fostering because they adopted,” Flowers said. “So in Fredericksburg and Stafford especially, we’re really trying to get more parents.”
Laurie Loving is one of the local UMFS foster parents who’s currently taking a break from fostering because she recently adopted her daughter.
“I’ve always wanted to help children that came across my way,” Loving told the Advance.
Loving said she decided to foster through UMFS because of the support provided to families and because the organization is familiar with trauma-informed care.
“Any child that comes into foster care has experienced trauma” from being separated from their birth family, she said.
Loving started fostering her daughter when she was 6 and she always intended to adopt. Because she’d received thorough training, she knew that there would be difficult times.
“The hardest thing you experience being a foster parent is the transition stage,” she said. “Kids who come into foster care—they’ve got to build that trust with you. When they come to you, they test you to see if you can get through their tests and not give up on them. Once they realize you’re not going to give up on them, then things start to fall into place.”
The transition stage for Loving and her daughter lasted for about a year, she said, but it was worth it.
“On her adoption day, seeing her face light up because she knows I’m her forever mom—it just brings me joy,” Loving said.
Flowers said it usually takes 90 days or less to get approved through UMFS as a new foster family.
For more information about becoming a foster parent, visit the UMFS website.
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