When Amy and Cory Flynn started dreaming together about how to share their love and resources by expanding their family they asked a simple question:
“Could we really consider foster care?”
Discover The Surprising Answer
It all started with a simple question. Great journeys in life often do.
When Amy and Cory Flynn started dreaming together about how to share their love and resources by expanding their family they asked a simple question:
“Could we really consider foster care?”
The question prompted a Google search, which turned up a foster care Q&A panel, hosted by Tennessee Kids Belong, with a title using the exact same question!
Soon the Flynns were licensed foster parents, which led them to meet and eventually adopt their amazing daughter, Della, who at 17 was on the verge of aging out of foster care.
Since embarking on their foster care journey the Flynns have become avid travel guides to fellow sojourners ,sharing stories of the courageous and resilient kids in foster care, who are in a vulnerable place and trying to navigate tough circumstances in their lives. The Flynns ask other parents to seek their own answers to the same question and consider if they might lean in to foster care.
The right person at the right time can make a huge difference.
Cory Flynn
Foster Care Takes Heart And Often A Bit Of Heartbreak
To open ourselves up to the possibility of engaging with someone new and unknown is to risk. And as the saying goes:
To be brave means to be ready to sustain a wound.
Being a foster parent takes heart…and it often involves sustaining a few heart wounds. Wounds that come from hearing and leaning in to sad stories of lost innocence. Or, getting yelled at from a hurting teenager trying his best to cope with uncertainty, fear, and grief.
It’s the heartache of getting “too attached” and having a child in your care whom you deeply love, and who has become part of your family, leave to go back to her bio family, Yet, people willing to get too attached, even when it means getting hurt, is exactly the kind of foster parents kids in foster care need and deserve.
The Flynns know all too well all that being a foster parent comes with, but that doesn’t dampen their message to folks across the country to consider becoming a foster parent. If anything it has sharpened the clarity of their call and gives it urgency. They know the journey is so worth the difficult moments that come with it.
Foster Care Helps Kids Move From Hurt To Hope
The wounds foster parents face are minor when compared with the wounds suffered by the kids in their care.
When kids enter foster care they often have been deeply wounded by neglect, abuse and the resulting trauma that become their entry point into the system.
Wounds of the separation from their biological families.
Wounds from multiple placements in different foster homes and the heartbreak of separation from siblings, and even school buddies.
And the ongoing wounds of living a story in which the outcomes may not be decided for years. “Will mom and dad complete their treatment plan so I can go home?” “Will I always be in foster care?”
As the Flynns frame it, being a stable and loving presence in a child’s life says, “I’m here with you.” And that has great power to help kids cope with fear, uncertainty, pain, and grief.
Hope is not lost. This is where the healing power of your presence as a foster parent comes in. It’s giving the gift of your presence and joining your life with theirs to face the tough questions and stand in the gap of pain, grief and uncertainty…together.
One thing is clear; doing nothing is a firm “no.” So instead why not take a next step to learn what a “yes” might look like for your family:
Could YOU Really Consider Foster Care?
- Learn more about becoming a foster parent or adoptive parent or supporting those who are.
- Watch our panel discussion: “Could We Really Consider Foster Care?”
- Or take a couple minutes right now and watch our interview with The Flynns:
