Focus on Fostering: Reteaching Love

Children in care sometimes seem like bottomless pits of need.  You can tell them you love them and show it, but they still may not trust that love.  Given their losses it is no surprise. So how can we change that?  Slowly and tirelessly.  We need to be able to continuously work to teach them what real love is by our words and our actions and by always labeling the words and the actions for them.  a

One of my favorite tools is to tell them love stories every night as I put them to bed.  Sometimes I read a story. Sometimes I tell them the story of how they came to me and how we welcomed them and all the ways we love them.  One of my favorite books to read them is by author and illustrator Todd Parr.  He has written a series of wonderful books that are short and easy to read, but powerful to really understand.  The first I recommend is  The I Love You Book. This book is all about the way parents give unconditional love whether kids are happy or scared or shy or friendly.  As a foster parent I wish Parr had included an angry child, but other than that it is a wonderful way to say what love is in a story. You can add things yourself to fit your family and your situation.  The illustrations are colorful, bright, and simple enough to be welcoming to young children.

Another book of Parr's that I like to recommend is his The Family Book.  This is a great book to teach a wider definition of family.  Kids in care often feel "odd-man-out" as they are not in what they think is the "typical" family.  The Family Book opens up the idea of family to include all kinds.  Using clever illustrations from the animal world [still with his simple, colorful outline style] he includes all different combinations of families. But the best part is that he keeps emphasizing the ways in which these different families are the same in the way the care for each other and love each other.  This book is NOT just for non-traditional families, it is for every family, so that children grow up with this wider acceptance of the variety of families in today's world.

Thank you Todd Parr!

Photos: from Amazon.com