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Healing Through Connection
There are 400,000 youth in the foster care system, and yet 50-60% of foster care families quit within the first year, leaving children with deep wounds
Jenni Lord, Founder and CEO of Chosen, reminds us how important healthy family connection is for a child's well-being. She shares how healthy relational connections can impact families and help them flourish as God designed.
Recently, I read about a county in California that had massive juvenile probation issues. They did a deep dive on the data and realized that every single youth in juvie had one thing in common: they were from a shattered family.
I could have been one of those in juvie like them. I was from a shattered family. The antidote to shattered families is connectedness—togetherness—the power of relationship.
Much brokenness is perpetuated because healthy family relationships are lacking at home. We know this. Childhood wounds can fester and grow unhealthy root systems, splintering into the next generation. Cycles get repeated. We are living in the most fatherless generation in U.S. history, apart from the Civil War. We can trace all moral decay in society back to the breakdown of family.
The first institution that God created in the garden was the family. Clearly, it’s important to Him.
For 15 years, I’ve been professionally connected to the foster care space, and I’ve realized that solving the problems that plague the child welfare system have nothing to do with foster care. It simply is a result of the same problem: shattered families.
In 1995, my own family welcomed a new brother into our home through foster care. He was 17 years younger than me. While he was delightful and dearly loved, we had little understanding of how the first 18 months of his life left deep internal wounds inside of his tiny body. These invisible wounds had rewired his brain to cope, to survive—impacting the way that he relates to the world.
In the U.S., neurological and developmental research has only become mainstream—showing us the impact of trauma on the brain—in the past decade or so. Did you know that the root word of trauma is literally the Greek word for “wound”? Relational wounds can only heal in the context of relationship.
My brother’s adoption would take four and a half years to complete. During this time, I saw the inside of a system that’s intended to protect children, yet I witnessed how they could so easily fall through the cracks and even experience more harm.
God birthed a burning desire in me to transform the system. In my youthful zeal, I thought law school was calling my name. Made sense, given that my mother had always said I would make a good attorney with my argumentative skills. Surely the laws and policy need to change to transform a system. But just a few years later, God would give me a deep conviction—really, it’s His Kingdom that has the power to influence a systemic change so desperately needed.
What do I mean?
The state of foster care in our country is pretty wretched. Today, there are nearly 400,000 youth in the foster care system, and yet 50–60% of foster families quit within the first year. Adoptions are also failing. More than 100,000 children are waiting for adoption, yet USA Today reported that more than 66,000 adoptees entered foster care in a 12-year period.
Many states don’t track failed adoptions, and some families break outside of the system’s view. When a child moves, that is another loss—another wound that they’re experiencing. Why is this? Abuse. Neglect. Abandonment. A shattered family.
Those wounds fracture the heart and leave a pile of internal rubble. The way a child expresses the fractures of his heart is externally—through behavior. Rarely do children have the cognitive ability or the language to express such pain or grief from the loss they’ve experienced. More often, pain looks like big behaviors that cause chaos in families: things like lying, stealing, manipulation, food hoarding, sexually acting out. These are problematic.
And not knowing how to navigate those behaviors causes many families to tap out.
But remember what heals—it’s connection. Forming healthy attachment actually rewires the brain where trauma has laid its survival train tracks, and creates new neurological pathways that affect behavior. Neural pathways that are intended for survival can be replaced with new pathways from repeated healthy connection.
Unfortunately, you don’t learn this in foster care training or in parental training. None of us got that type of instruction when they handed us our first 8lb bundle of joy.
What happens when your seven-year-old foster son is raging at bedtime for an hour and becomes a danger to himself or to you—mimicking the domestic violence that he saw in his first family? Or your teenage daughter is seeking validation with her body and self-harming? Sometimes the heap of fragments reaches out their destructive tentacles and begins to choke the life out of marriages or compromises the safety of other children in the home—and it feels like too much to keep going.
What if the child welfare system wasn’t just focused on physical safety, but on their well-being too?
When my husband and I were licensed to foster, the state made sure that the meds were locked up, the outlets were covered, the lawn was fenced in, no weapons were accessible. But they did not prepare us for how to handle our foster daughter’s night terrors and the catatonic responses that she had—because she had witnessed the murder of her little sister.
What if we prioritized educating families about the power of connection to heal? What if we equipped them with strategies and tools to lean into connection versus backing away when it got too hard?
Connection has the power to heal. It’s not enough for a child to just have physical safety. They must also have psychological safety—meaning they feel safe—which comes through connecting. Connection is actually what calms behaviors down and helps not just children, but us too, to emotionally regulate.
However, pursuing connection in the face of rage, disappointment, heartbreak, a child clawing at you—that is not intuitive. And it can be really hard and scary.
My brother and I don’t share the same DNA, but I’ve learned we have more in common than you might imagine. While I have two parents who love me, my own family of origin was shattered. Born into a trailer to a teenage mother, multiple divorces, 14 moves in 14 years—that brought instability into my life that bred insecurity.
What if the child welfare system wasn’t just focused on physical safety, but on their well-being too?
I was spared from juvie, but I was imprisoned by self-sufficiency. Maybe you can relate.
My entire adult life has been undoing those well-laid tracks in my own brain to learn dependency on God and dependency on others—learning to pursue connection when my default was self-protection.
God has shown me that He is always pursuing connection with us. He is always pursuing our hearts. He never gave up on me, even when I was running away from Him, ignoring Him, or disobeying Him. He relentlessly pursues connection.
You see, I wasn’t in foster care. But what is true of the foster child is true for every single one of us: we are made for deep, committed connection.
Many of you have heard the harsh stats. Up to 80% of children in foster care have significant mental health issues due to the brokenness in their lives. The majority of those who age out of care will be on drugs, incarcerated, or homeless by the time they’re 21 years old. 90% of youth who are involved in human trafficking were engaged in child welfare in the past.
Today, we have a child welfare system that focuses on a child’s physical safety. It’s important. But what if we took a broader view—to focus on the well-being of the child within the system that God designed: the family?
What if we prioritized relational connection as the gold standard and acknowledged the griefs that come from broken families?
What will transform the system is the same thing that would prevent foster care. It’s a paradigm shift—a shift that would focus on healthy relational connections. This shift has the potential to even transform the face of our country.
Connection allows us to flourish in the system that God designed—the family.
Healing families will come through prioritizing connection. This device in your pocket offers us a counterfeit. We are artificially connected to more and more people than ever before, yet disconnected relationally from the people most proximate.
God’s heartbeat is for the restoration of families. Let’s pursue connection to the hearts of those in our own home the same way He is always pursuing us.
As Mother Teresa said, “The way you help heal the world is you start with your own family.”
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