In Your Early 20s? Why Not Foster Four Children?

A story of chosen family – plus, thinking about foster children without feeling guilty.

Modern Family, Milena Filipova via The Greats.

Choosing Where to Put Our Attention

It’s such a hard time to know where to put our attention. Here in the U.S., horrifying catastrophes keep unfolding daily – at a rate purposely designed to flood the zone and render us unable to respond. I certainly don’t feel up to responding right now, so I’m truly grateful to the people who are staying on top of things, keeping us informed, and offering guidance for what we might do. One resource I’ve recently come across is Frazzled About Education, by Mrs. Frazzled, who also does amazing, funny, short, watchable explainer videos about education issues that are probably also on TikTok or somewhere but I watch them in the Substack app. You should totally subscribe.

What I do feel like I can contribute are visions of a better world. As I’ve written before,

Here at The Auntie Bulletin, we’re going all in on envisioning and building alternatives. Rather than responding to each new catastrophe as it arises, I see this newsletter as a place to keep steadily banging the drum for the world we want to live in. I aim to help slowly, purposefully, and lovingly change the cultural narrative about what’s possible – so that two or twenty or even two hundred generations from now, all people might be able to live well supported by their communities, free from exploitation, in a clean and safe and healthy world.

In a time of seemingly-unfettered greed, violence, delusion, and ugliness, I’m trying to not let the forces of evil decide where I put my attention. I want to make my own choices about where my attention goes. So today at The Auntie Bulletin – as usual – I have no reactions to the news.

Instead, I want to share a beautiful story of intergenerational chosen family. It’s a story about two of my sister’s friends, Ana and Skye¹ – a queer, interracial couple who left the red states where they grew up as soon as they could, found beloved elders in the form of my sister Becca and her friends, and dove headfirst into giving and receiving care. And as soon as they were old enough (21, literally!) they became foster parents.

I share this story for two reasons. First, it just blows my mind. When Becca and her buddies first befriended Skye and Ana I was like, “Really? You’re truly friends – like friends friends – with these women who are barely out of childhood?” And Becca was like, “Really. I really am.” And then these friends were coming over for dinner several nights a week and contributing significantly to helping raise my nieces – all while in and out of in-patient mental health care and rehab programs. And then they were fostering kids. And then they were fostering four kids who were all very little. The whole time I’ve just been like, “Wow. Geez. Really? Wow. Geez. How is all of this happening??”

Second, I think that if we take seriously the aim of loving other people’s children, then we need to turn our attention toward the most vulnerable children in our society – and those are foster kids, no doubt. Queer and transgender youth and kids of color are overrepresented in the U.S. foster care system, often by a wide margin.² Kids can be placed in care because their parents have been deported,³ or – in 22 states – because a parent has been deemed unfit due to disability.⁴ Most kids with siblings are separated from their siblings while in foster care.⁵ When young people in the U.S. age out of foster care at 18, an estimated 1 in 5 immediately become homeless.⁶

Real talk, Aunties: when I encounter statistics like this, it can be hard not to feel guilty that I’m not taking immediate steps to become a foster parent. But something I’ve been realizing is that there are lots of ways to support foster kids and foster families, even though fostering itself isn’t a feasible option for me. I believe that even if we can’t participate directly in a worthy endeavor, we can still be boosters for it.

One of the most important things we can do is simply to pay attention to the world of foster kids and foster families, and to let them be important to us. Foster children and foster parents are so often pushed to the margins of conversations about kids and families, but they are out there doing hard things that really, really merit our attention and support. When we spend time with their stories – when we start to feel that they are part of our community story – we may be invigorated to pitch in. At the end of today’s interview, I’ll offer a short list of ways you can support foster children and foster parents – and if you have some perspective to share, I hope you’ll chime in in the comments.

Now Let’s Get To It

My sister Becca is a total village-builder. Several years back, she and some friends welcomed into their circle a young couple who worked at their babies’ daycare. Skye and Ana are 15 years younger than Becca, and closer to 25 years younger than some of Becca’s friends, but they all just connected. At first, Becca et al appreciated Skye and Ana because they were such great care providers for their children, but soon the couple were joining the friend group for meals several nights a week and frequently pitching in to help care for the babies – free of charge – and they had all become close friends. Really, they’d become more like kin.

“As you put it in The Auntie Bulletin,” Skye recently told me,

We spent a lot of time with other people's children. That’s where we built our chosen family – through helping people we care about with their children. I would skip back and forth. I would go to Becca's because she had migraines and I had to watch Grace and then I'd go give our other friend’s daughter baths because they sometimes didn't get home in time.

Although they weren’t even out of their teens when they met my sister, both Ana and Skye had been through a lot in their lives – both grew up in red states where their identities were not fully welcome, and both got out of their hometowns before they turned 18. Both struggled with serious mental health issues. Once my sister and her friends came on the scene, they jumped into care mode.

Ana: Becca and some other close friends got together when we were in the thick of our struggles with mental illness. It was a bad time, a really horrible time, and Becca and her family and her friends, we were all in different life stages. We weren't parents yet. They got together and –

Skye: Parented us. Dropped us off at hospitals and stuff.

Ana: They were like the parents we needed at the time. They took me to the airport so I could go to treatment for disordered eating, because I would not have taken myself.

Skye: That’s kind of how this all started. I think we've always just been really drawn to that life.

The life Skye refers to here is that of building a village – of being taken in and cared for in times of need, and of taking care of others in their turn. By the time Skye was 24 and Ana was 22, they had become foster parents to four children, all aged two and younger. Last year, they adopted two of those kids, siblings Chloe and Caden.

I’ve been hearing Skye and Ana’s story unfold, via Becca’s account, for several years, and as soon as I started The Auntie Bulletin, I knew I wanted to talk to them.

Lisa: You've always had such a village. Even when I first met you, you were talking about fostering and adopting.

Skye: At the same time I worked at the daycare, I also worked at an at-risk youth center. I actually worked there all through college. A lot of the kids there were in foster care, and I would have foster parents tell me, “You need to do it, you need to do it.” I wasn't even old enough yet. I was like, “I don't own a house, you guys.” They said that was okay, and walked me through the process of becoming a foster parent.

My aunts and uncles were all foster or adoptive, my grandma was a foster parent, so I was really drawn to it. And then my experiences at the youth center, and our experiences with Becca’s kids, and Mike and Miranda’s kids –

Ana: And our mental health stuff – can I say it was shitty on here?

Lisa: You sure can.

Ana: It was shitty. It was not good. But it also gave us more knowledge, and taught us to see things differently.

Lisa: Can I ask about a bit of backstory? Were you even in your 20s when you met Becca?

Ana: I had just turned 18. I met Grace [note: my sister Becca’s oldest, my niece] when she was 9 months old. I was working in the infant room at her daycare. I had never worked with babies. I just needed a job so bad.

At that time, I hadn't yet come out. Becca was an adult that I felt safe with quickly because I knew she knew, but she didn’t tell me she knew. I only wore button-ups at the time, I was a baby dyke. I remember one day she was talking about her friends’ wedding, and she was like “she and her wife,” so it was like she went out of her way to subtly let me know.

Skye [laughing]: Becca had her little rainbow pins and her little stickers.

Ana: With white women, it can be hard to know.

Skye: Especially there.

Lisa: That was a Christian daycare, right?

Ana: Yes. And there was discrimination. When Skye started working there too, they told me, “Don't tell anyone you two are together because it will upset the parents.” I also had a coworker who was making inappropriate sexual comments. I had come out to her because I thought I could trust her. I told the director and he completely took her side. She started saying really vulgar things to me, and she went out of her way to tell me that if her kids were gay she would feel like she failed them and they failed her. HR ended up getting involved but nothing came from it because that person was also not supportive.

But also – all of our strongest relationships are from that daycare. It’s where we met all of our best friends, literally.

Skye: Our flower girls were from that daycare.

Lisa: When you started fostering, what was that like? You had done so much childcare work already, and had been part of this wraparound, intergenerational village with Becca and others for a few years. Were there surprises when you started actually fostering? Was it like what you expected?

Skye: It was lonelier than I expected. It was during the height of COVID and our roles had to shift. In these relationships with the people we spend the most time with, we were able to be a helping hand, but now we didn't have that ability anymore. We went from seeing Becca and Mike and Miranda four or five or six times a week to maybe once every six months. For me that was the most challenging part. I could take care of kids, that wasn't so difficult. There was a lot of emotional turmoil with the court stuff, but I think the loneliness was worse, and I think a lot of people experience that no matter how their children come into their lives. It hit me like a train.

Ana: I didn't expect the court involvement that was unique to Caden and Chloe's case. If it was just taking care of the kids, it would’ve felt more manageable. But it was everything else, all the adults. You have people in and out of your home all the time.

Lisa: And you were so young when you started fostering.

Skye: You can’t start in our state until you're 21, and we got licensed once Ana turned 21. I had just had bilateral hip surgery, and it took us a while to finish that process, so it wasn’t until right before Ana turned 22. When we finally got licensed, I was a week post-op and sleeping on a twin-sized bed in the living room downstairs. In the morning we had to send in proof of flu vaccination. I remember not sleeping very well in the living room, so I sent it in at 7am. By noon, the supervisor approved it, by 4pm we were licensed, within a couple more hours we got the call for 2 year old twins, and by 8pm they were on our doorstep. I ditched the crutches and we made it work.

Lisa: Oh my gosh! Did you anticipate that it was going to happen that fast?

Both: No!

Skye: Because of our age, we had to license for a small age group, only up to 6 year olds, and we were only taking two kids.

Ana: They called us and said there were twins, and they were in the hospital, and they were having all these exams done. We just looked at each other, and we both nodded before we even talked. Then they were ultimately with us for a little over a year.

Skye: Well, at first they were actually only with us for a week. They had an older brother who had been in foster care before the twins were born. He was going to his former placement, and the former placement took all three of them. So they were with us for a week that time, and then about an hour before the twins were picked up [to go join their brother], we got a call for Caden and Chloe.

Ana: Who are our adopted babies now.

Skye: So we said yes to them. Ana was in the middle of finals week, senior year.

Lisa: And Chloe was a newborn, wasn't she?

Ana: She was 3 days old, and she was withdrawing and she had gastroparesis.

Skye: And then Caden was 17 months old, so they were super close in age. Everyone was telling us this was a terrible idea. We called Becca and she was like, “Guys, you can't handle this right now. You have too much going on.” She was like, “it's okay to say no.”

Ana: She says that was the best argument she ever lost.

Skye: We said yes. The next day Caden came, and the day after that Chloe came. And then that week the foster parent of the twins said that she couldn't handle all three of those siblings, so then we were also doing supposedly respite care⁷ for the twins 5-6 days a week.

Ana: We were over our licensed capacity.

Skye: So we got our license changed, within that first month, for up to 4 children.

Skye: So we had four children 2 years old and under, and the twins had just turned 2 that week. They were 2 years, 2 years, 17 months, and 4 days old. I cried every day.

Ana: I don’t know how we did it. It was like, we had the passion, and there was no burnout yet. At the time we had it in us.

Skye: I don't think I'd ever have it in me to do something like that again. We were averaging 22 appointments a week, not including visitation. They all had special needs, all of them. Chloe was medically fragile. She had a gastroenterologist and a neurologist and all sorts of stuff. She was detoxing. Caden has profound global delays. He was doing feeding, speech, OT [occupational therapy], PT [physical therapy]. And then the twins were doing all four therapies, plus family therapy with their parents that we had to transport them to. And then Chloe had five [parent] visits a week, Caden had three, and the twins had four – and then that changed to six when their dad came back into the picture.

Lisa: How on earth did you manage that??

Ana: Skye ended up nannying for Becca.

Skye: Ana was nannying for another family, and they were turned off by the idea of their children being around foster children. We had a very different set of values and we just couldn’t do that anymore. So Ana left that job and was staying at home with the kids.

Fortunately, Becca needed help because all the daycares got closed due to COVID. So I would take Chloe with me to Becca’s house, because Ana couldn't take care of all four kids by herself at our house. I would babywear Chloe on my front and Lucy [note: my sister Becca’s younger child, my niece] on my back, because Lucy wasn’t even one year old yet. That was the only way we could do it, because I could bring my kids to work with me. So while Ana took kids to appointments, I would take whichever selection of children with me to Becca's house.

Ana: It was an iconic time, but not for a good reason. I didn’t get ready in the morning for years. We had to learn that we have to prioritize ourselves individually, and also us as a couple.

Skye: We were also dealing with very heavy legal cases. Not all cases are like that, but Chloe and Caden’s case had a court date probably once a week, with different motions.

Lisa: You ended up adopting Caden and Chloe recently, which is so wonderful! But am I remembering this right, that there was a time where you thought you actually might be adopting the twins?

Skye: Yeah. The twins’ mom had had a previous case where it was pretty horrific abuse. And this time with the twins was really bad. They thought for sure that they would never go home. In fact, the older brother, who was only 22 months older than the twins, did not even have visitation for three years because of the trauma. Which is very rare where we live – we're a super parent-forward state. They thought these kids would never be going home, but then that switched very, very, very quickly. We don't know what happened.

Ana: It taught us to expect the unexpected, always.

Skye: They would tell us, “This is an awful human being. This person is not to be trusted with their children.” They never had any unsupervised visits, no movement in a positive direction. But then we went to court, and the department agreed with sending the kids home. We had thirty days from when the kids were going from fully supervised visits to fully home. We did not expect that at all.

Their mom stopped responding about a year ago, so we haven't heard from them.

Ana: But she knows where we live. She used to leave notes at our door when she'd get a new number. But now we just haven't heard back. I've texted all her numbers. So we don’t know.

Skye: It’s concerning, because usually that indicates that things are not going well, and they don't want mandatory reporters around their family for a reason.

Ana: We saw a mutual friend who told us that things weren't going well and we should check in, but we can't.

Lisa: That’s so scary.

Both: Yeah.

Skye: In Chloe and Caden's case, on the other hand, we thought they were returning home for sure. But then they had three failed return-homes, because secrets would keep coming out every time the kids were about to go home. It was failed return-home after failed return-home. But their case wasn't seen as severe enough to go to adoption. No one thought that was going to happen. They told us it would be six months max.

Ana: Their case was neglect and domestic violence.

Skye: Which, in our state, is rarely a reason to keep children in care, because the idea is that you can safety-plan around domestic violence. Theoretically, you can take the children and separate them from domestic abuse, as long as the children themselves aren't being harmed. So it took a lot of advocacy from a lot of people.

Ana: The kids’ therapists went to court for them. Caden's teachers from preschool would talk to the caseworker and the guardian ad litem.⁸

Skye: Chloe was going for her first overnight, and the office closed at 5pm. I got a call from Chloe's feeding therapist at 4:55. She was like, “Wait a minute. She's going to an overnight visit and they don't know how to administer her GI meds.” Chloe was aspirating at the time, like suffocating.

Ana: She would get blue spells.

Skye: I was like, “There's nothing I can do, man, they ordered overnight visits. I can’t do anything about it.” So the feeding therapist called the guardian ad litem to get an emergency order within those 5 minutes saying that Chloe can't go to overnight visits. Caden went to one, and the next day the parents were arrested for domestic assault.

Ana: Caden has seen a lot, he had been through a lot before care.

Skye: There was a lot we did not know until we got full disclosure of their files.

Lisa: You get that when you adopt?

Skye: Right before. Basically, they're like, “do you still want these kids when you know how messed up their lives have been?” And you have to sign saying that you agree to still adopt them, based on their history.

Lisa: I'm curious how you think about fostering kids when you either know they’re going to return home and you’re not going to adopt, or it’s unclear. How do you think about them in terms of being “my child” versus “somebody else's child”?

Skye: Well, they’re our children in that we love them that way, and we provide for them that way, and our job is to take care of them that way. But they're not our children in that we don't have a right to be territorial. We recognize that they are someone else's child, and we are stepping in to help, but they are not ours. They do not belong to us.

Ana: With the twins, when we thought we were going to adopt them, that was hard. But also, you bond to kids differently. We've had kids that we had for a couple of days that we bonded so strongly to and we think about them all the time. And we had a kid that we had for a year, and I never had a strong bond with her, and it was hard and unfair. But they’re so limited in the foster system.

Skye: They only have 30 licensed, open foster homes in our whole county.

Ana: And we're the only LGBT one.

Skye: I see it at work all the time, because a lot of my patients go into foster homes, and they're trans or queer, or some flavor of LGBTQ, and I know they’re going into homes that are not affirming.

Lisa: I can imagine you really wanting to be able to wrap your arms around those kids.

Ana: I do. But our kids would not feel – Caden is functionally nonverbal, and we have to be able to protect our kids.

Skye: We don’t have the ability right now. But it does make me sad that the availability is so limited here.

Ana: Especially for teens.

Skye: We have a youth shelter but there are no beds.

Ana: The group homes are full. We have one for young children here and it’s been full. We’ve gotten kids because they were full. The foster system is so under-resourced.

Skye: There've also been some new House bills in the last couple of years that are not child-forward, and it's getting increasingly difficult to support a system like this.

They passed a bill that said newborns cannot be removed for the reason their older siblings were until that thing happens to them. Chloe was removed for domestic violence at birth even though, technically, that had not happened to her. She wouldn't have been removed until she was exposed to domestic violence. And Caden was exposed to domestic violence for like eight months before he was removed, so she would have been exposed to a significant history of this stuff before she was removed, had she been born after this bill. So that's a really big challenge, because there are parents with long histories, with 5, 6, 7 children in foster care and very little evidence that they're going to be able to take care of these children, but until it happens to that specific child, the department won’t intervene.

When we started, parents started out supervised and then had to prove themselves before they went to unsupervised. Now the policy is the first visitation is supervised, and then it automatically goes to unsupervised visitation. That’s unless a social worker takes it to court and fights it, and then a judge passes it. But they have to have their first visit within 72 hours, and it's pretty difficult to get in front of a judge that quickly. And that’s concerning because they literally just got their child taken away, and now we're talking about unsupervised visitation.

Lisa: So am I understanding right that the state and the legislature are going in a direction that's causing you to fear for the safety of the children?

Both: Yes.

Skye: Which is sad, because we try to be very family forward, but not at the expense of their safety.

Ana: And we've seen beautiful reunifications, like our foster daughter who reunified in June right before the adoption.

Skye: It should have happened way sooner than it did.

Ana: Her mom was a teen mom. She's 20 now, and we have her over here for holidays and we text her and she updates us on things. We saw her for Christmas. That was ideal. But then there are some that are scary. With the twins, that was scary.

Skye: And there were times that we supported reunification for Chloe and Caden because we didn't know all the details that we got later. I remember driving over to their house and dropping off a crib and sheets and a sound machine and food and a high chair, because they were about to start overnight visits. We sold them one of my cars for dirt cheap so they didn't have to take the kids on the bus during COVID. So we try to be very family forward, but we’ve also seen some scary stuff.

Lisa: Is there anything that you want prospective foster parents to know or understand? A lot of people who read The Auntie Bulletin tell me that they think about fostering.

Skye: I think that you have to drop the savior complex before you get into this. That’s so important because these kids are not ever going to feel like you saved them from something that was bad, right? In their minds, they were taken from someone they love.

You have to figure out how to be okay with the fact that they love their family and that your job is not to replace them. We reconciled that long before we started this process, and had we not, I think it would have been a lot harder. I have no qualms about my daughter talking about her mom and her dad, or how much she loves them. It actually brings me such great joy that she has those connections, because wow! How much trauma did she get to avoid by having those connections?

Ana: You can read, you can take the classes, you can have a license, but you don't really know until you're in it. You can't plan for anything. You can be told there's a court date for a certain thing, and it's really stressful, and then the next day the case is dropped. With all the return-to-homes for Caden and Chloe, we had the dates, we were packing things up, and they wound up staying with us instead. You don't know until the day comes.

Skye: Especially if you want to adopt.

Ana: They told us, “not until the ink’s dry.”

Even a year ago last January, there were family members that came forward for Caden. This state is very family-forward, and I was told they'll go back like nine generations. Even if parents in our state sign open adoption agreements –

Skye: That’s a sticky situation too. When parents sign open adoption agreements, they’re also relinquishing their rights. So then if a parent goes to trial and fights for their rights, the state automatically closes the adoption. But even if they sign those relinquishment papers, and you’ve come to an agreement with the parents over the terms, the state can also decide, “we're not going to give these kids to these foster parents that you just agreed to, we're actually going to send them to their ninth cousin twice removed.” Some parents have been coerced into signing away their rights.

Lisa: Because they think they know what’s going to happen?

Skye: Right. And then the open adoption agreements are also not legally binding. So even if we agreed with the parents on twelve visits a year, if we as foster parents decide not to, there’s nothing the parents can do. So it’s a very coercive process.

Ana: But I also don't want to sound so negative, because there's a big need. I'm glad we did it. It was a season that was important in our lives. And now it's time for other people to have their time.

Skye: Empathy fatigue is real. You can get like, “I just don't have it in me to care right now.” When you get hit with that pretty intensely, you have to give yourself a break. In those cases, you are not the person these kids need.

Ana: Breaks are okay. It’s okay to take a month, or years.

Skye: We might go back into it when our kids are older and more independent. We keep our license open just in case – in case they have siblings.

Lisa: So you are not fostering now?

Skye: According to our licensors, we technically have two beds open. We are open to former placements and then any siblings of Chloe and Caden that ever come. But as of right now, not really.

Lisa: I feel really happy for you that you get to take a break and just have two children at once.

Skye: It's hard, though. I have a really hard time with it. We got a call not too long ago for an 8 month old with HIV. It's hard for me to say no.

Ana [laughing]: It’s easy for me.

Skye: I work at night, so I'm not home to take care of a baby. It's harder for me [to say no] every time than it is for you. But I've always been more passionate about this.

Ana: And I am so glad we did it. It was the most amazing experience, and we are so privileged that we get a choice to take a step back from it, because the kids don't. They're just in it. But also, I just know I couldn't be who I needed to be for our kids and for other people's kids.

Lisa: I'm curious, what are the biggest misconceptions that you've encountered about fostering?

Skye: People talk about “foster-to-adopt,” but that's not a thing in our state. You can foster children who are “at risk” of dependencies ending: that's when their parents retain rights, but the state has a dependency case open. You can foster in hopes to adopt children who are “legally freed for adoption.” Usually those are large sibling sets, and/or kids with disabilities – factors that make them “difficult” to place. But in the traditional form of fostering that we've done, you don't ever go in with that goal.

Ana: Another misconception is that foster kids won't like their parents anymore, or won't want to go back to a home that is unsafe. There is so much research showing that kids, no matter what, have an innate love and connection to their biological families and where they came from, even if they've seen a lot.

Skye: We had one older sibling set – twin 6 year olds and a 9 year old – that we had a few times for a combination of emergency and respite care. They had been removed from their home something like four times. Their parents were living in tents in an encampment, and they still very, very much wanted to reunite. They went from this big, beautiful foster home with incredible foster parents who they got along with well, but all they wanted was to go back to their parents.

Lisa: Becca sent us pictures of your adoption day. Everyone in our family was so excited for you. I have so many different questions in my mind right now, but I kind of just want to know, like, how do you feel about all of this? It feels like that's such a huge question.

Skye: We feel both super super lucky that we got to be the people who get to love them forever – but also, it shouldn't have ever happened to them.

Ana: There’s inherent trauma in adoption, no matter how ideal.

Skye: And we do really have one of the most ideal sets of circumstances. We've had Chloe since birth, and we have regular contact with their mom. Right now they talk to her every Sunday. We send pictures and text. We visited her a few states away this summer. We've always been very close. It’s not lost on us that this is both a huge blessing and a tremendous loss for our kids at the same time.

Ana: Chloe is able to verbalize more than Caden, and she asks questions. She has a friend who’s just obsessed with his dad, and he always asks, “Where's your dad, Chloe? Do you have a dad?” So she asks questions. She has good questions.

Skye: She asked if he was in jail. I was really surprised by that.

Ana: He is currently. His family is here in our city and we have a really good relationship with his parents. They've been so kind. Their dad also has a 9 year old sister, so she’s Caden and Chloe’s aunt, and Chloe looks just like her. She loves Chloe and Caden both, and the family treats them completely equally. So we’re lucky that we have that relationship. It’s complicated, but also worth it.

We have complicated feelings about the situation, obviously it’s been a lot. But we will never, ever, ever tell the kids that. We will never talk badly about their parents or where they came from.

Skye: But at the same time we think they are entitled to their own story. We're not going to hide the reasons why they ended up in care.

Ana: And we're not going to glorify anyone.

Skye: Right now, Caden and Chloe idolize their parents a lot, and that’s okay. But eventually they're going to have questions, and we’re going to have to give them those answers. It’s their story and they're entitled to it. It’s going to be complicated. I think it's just going to be changing for their entire lives.

Ideas for Supporting Foster Kids and Families

I am not an expert on the foster care system in the United States or anywhere else. The following suggestions are options I’m exploring for myself, and they are specific to the U.S. Your corrections and/or additions are welcome in the comments!

• Take an interest in any foster parents or foster kids in your life. Check in. Ask open-ended questions about how things are going. Listen. Set a reminder for yourself to check in regularly.

• Donate. Supporting foster youth and foster families is a really good place to put your money, even if it’s only $5/month. Making your donation monthly lets organizations plan a little further ahead, which is especially helpful in a volatile funding climate.

  • Foster Club. Providing direct services to youth in foster care, and advocating for policy solutions. Focus on Lived Experience (LEx) Leadership.

  • Foster Care Alumni of America. By and for alumni of the foster care system in the U.S. Donations support policy and advocacy work, scholarships, or where need is greatest.

  • Search online for organizations supporting foster youth in your area.

• Volunteer. Opportunities are regionally specific. Try searching online for “volunteer” + “foster” + your area. Volunteering opportunities might include:

  • Tutor kids in reading, writing, math, science, or other subjects. (Try searching for “volunteer tutor foster kids”).

  • Provide transportation to and from school for kids whose care placements are outside their school’s busing zone. (Try searching for “volunteer driver foster kids”).

  • Just hang out, as in the Big Brothers Big Sisters of America model. Some kids enrolled in BBBS are in foster care, although many are not.

  • Your community may also have other cool programming for kids in the foster care system.

• Contribute to the foster care system.

  • Become a Court Appointed Special Advocate. This is a heavier lift. After going through training, CASAs get assigned to a specific child (or perhaps a group of siblings) and act as their advocate in the court system and among stakeholders in their case.

    • Learn more

    • Find out why this role is hard but also beautiful

  • Get licensed as a respite provider to offer short-term substitute care for kids in the foster system. This process is state-specific. Search for “respite provider foster care” + your state.

Related Reading from The Auntie Bulletin

The Auntie Bulletin Strategic Plan for 2025 and Beyond

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Collecting the Wisdom of the Aunties: Complicated Mother’s Day

Here in the United States, Mother’s Day is coming up. This holiday can be hard for a lot of people, including those who have hard or nonexistent relationships with their own mothers, those for whom the label “mother” doesn’t quite fit, those who would like to be mothers but are not, those who are parenting under impossible conditions, and those who have lost a child. My friend Ryan Rose Weaver, who runs a support group for survivors of perinatal loss, refers to this holiday as Complicated Mother’s Day, which seems just right to me.

If Mother’s Day is complicated or rough for you, how so? This month’s survey consists of just this one open-ended question. Feel free to think outside the box. The responses I’ve gotten so far are wonderful.

I’ll be collecting your ideas for the month of April. As always, when you complete a reader survey you’ll be entered to win a 12-month paid-tier subscription to The Auntie Bulletin.

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Thanks for reading all the way to the end! You get the secret scoop that if you can’t afford a paid subscription due to financial hardship, you can reply to this email, shoot me a message in the Substack app, or email me at auntiebulletin at gmail dot com and I’ll comp you a 12-month paid tier subscription, no questions asked.

1. All names are pseudonyms.

2. Children’s Rights (2023), LGBTQ+ Youth in Foster Care Fact Sheet. Annie E. Casey Foundation (2023), “Foster Care Race Statistics.” National Indian Child Welfare Association (2025), “What is ICWA?”

3. Boundless (2025), “What Happens to American-Born Children When Their Parents Are Deported?”

4. Jessica Slice (2025), Unfit Parent: A Disabled Mother Challenges an Inaccessible World.

5. Casey Family Programs (2020), Joint Sibling Placements.

6. National Foster Youth Institute (2025), “Housing and Homelessness.”

7. Respite care is short-term substitute foster care so that primary caregivers can take a break, or when they need to go out of state. Within the foster care system, other licensed foster parents will fill in to provide respite care for children.

8. A guardian ad litem is a paid (usually) professional appointed by the court to represent the best interests of a child.