How This Website Is Organized

Foster care is complex.

On this website, you’ll find four main categories: Facts, Feelings, Guests, and What You Can Do.

• Facts

  • How Child Welfare Operates

    • bureacracy, process, norms, law

    • roles and who plays them

    • how the system works with other systems (schools, medical, judicial, etc)

    • glossary

  • Abuse, Neglect, and Their Impact: Trauma

    • the brain science behind trauma, childhood development, and how it impacts children and adults

    • what we know, what we don’t

• Feelings

  • how it actually feels to live through foster care

  • reflections and my personal observations

  • the lived experience and emotional impact of any of the above

• Guests

  • posts by guest writers about their experiences

• What You Can Do

  • mindset changes

  • things to be aware of

  • concrete ways to contribute

Together, I hope that these sections will make a complex topic manageable.

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In order to provide accurate information to you while still protecting confidentiality, when I give examples they will be fictional, based on composites of stories, or on themes I have repeatedly come across.

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Also note: I fostered and adopted in California and now live Virginia. Due to the fact that foster care is administered on a county-wide level, there is significant variation in how foster care works across the country. The information I provide, and my guests provide, is accurate to our experience - however, things may be very different where you live.