Caring Heart: Boomerang Children [failed reunification]

The primary hope of foster care is that it will be temporary, that the broken family can be healed, educated, and eventually reunified.  In reality that does not always work. Sometimes, like a boomerang returns to its sender, the reunified child comes back into care.

Boomerang Children [failed reunification]

He is coming back tomorrow.  He must be so sad.  He wants to be with them so badly, but they need to be the right kind of parents. He wanted it to work with his parents. We all did.  I think they tried.  I guess they just weren't ready or ale.  The caseworker called and asked if we would be wiling to let him come back here. This way he will at least be returning to a family he already knows, who already cares about him, not a new set of strangers.  Guide our words as we pick him up tomorrow. Help us not to sit in judgment of these people he still loves so much.  Help us comfort him, and make him feel welcome.  Give him peace, acceptance, and strength to rejoin us, knowing that the real peace and acceptance will take so, so long. Give us the strength to face the new wounds on his heart and the effect this failed reunification will have had on him. He needs us for now.  He needs this family.  Let  him allow us to be his family. Amen.

Excerpted from "The Caring Heart Speaks: Meditations for foster, kinship, and adoptive parents" by Gail Underwood Parker   Artwork by Anna Parker David from the book cover.