Fostering LGBTQIA+ Youth
My husband, Zach, and I have been foster parents for six years, doing placements and respite for many children, and we recently fostered a transgender 16-year-old. Fostering an LGBTQIA+ child was a meaningful experience for us because we learned a lot about developing connected parent/child relationships in any scenario.
While we have always been proud allies, this was the first time we have welcomed an LGBTQIA+ child into our family. Being a child in the foster care system can already be a complex, scary experience. Adding on the day-to-day complications and discrimination that some LGBTQIA+ children face can cause fear and anxiety around being accepted in their new world. We were proud to be able to advocate on behalf of our foster daughter with her school, her job and her extracurricular activities. We had meetings with her school counselors to discuss school regulations about which bathroom she should use, and who to go to if she experiences bullying or negative behaviors from other students. We talked to the manager at her summer job to make sure that had processes in place if a customer in the business were to say something negative to her. And we were careful to talk to all leaders and coaches at her extracurriculars to be sure that those adults were advocating for her while we couldn’t be there.
During her placement with us, she attended church with our family, got involved in youth group and went to summer camp with her new friends. We were able to support her as she navigated life, just like we would with any child in our care. As a teenager, she needed lessons on money, independence and budgeting. She attended classes on some things, and we worked with her at home on other things.
The reality is, LGBTQIA+ children need the same things as any other child in foster care – parents who are patient, who listen to them and who love them for who they are. And importantly, they need to spend quality time in families whose focus isn’t solely on their LGBTQIA+ identity. These children are happy, creative, smart and caring people, who simply need to be welcomed as part of a stable family. Their LGBTQIA+ status is not the only thing that defines them. They are normal kids who are in the process of figuring out where they fit in the world, and it's the responsibility of the foster parents to guide them in love.
I believe that defending, protecting and building relationships with children is the calling of every foster parent. One thing that helped us understand our foster daughter and parent her better was to keep open communication with her. Every Sunday night, we met with her to talk through how things were going in her life, what was coming up, what was making her anxious, and what she was excited about. At the end of this time together, we always asked her one question: Is there anything you want to talk to us about, but you’re not sure how? Or, is there anything you want to ask, but you’re afraid? Sometimes she would bring up a hard topic, sometimes not. But it always gave her a safe space to be honest with us, and it always guided us in how to parent her better.
Fostering LGBTQIA+ youth was a rewarding experience for us. It made us better foster parents and better, more empathetic people. But, it’s important for foster parents to remember that being part of the LGBTQIA+ community is just one of the facets of the child’s identity. There is so much more to who they are – they are someone’s biological child, a foster child, a sibling, they have an ethnicity, a religion, an age, maybe a diagnosis, and so much more. They need parents to allow them to be who they are, which may shift over time as they grow into their identity and discover themselves. Parent should not expect them to hide parts of who they are to be accepted into the foster family. No child should have to hold back their personality to belong, and it’s our responsibility as parents to provide safe spaces for them, even (and especially) when it stretches us outside of our comfort zones.