When stepping into the role of a foster parent or stepparent, you may hear that all you need to do is love your kids. Love is wonderful and essential, but it is not enough. Love alone won’t sustain your challenging relationships with children who have suffered trauma. Commitment — unwavering, realistic, and bone-deep commitment — is the only foundation for building a healthy relationship.
Commitment Wavers Less Than Love
Saying “all you need to do is love your kids” shortchanges the complexity of the challenges we face raising other people’s children. We must learn how to show up every day, whether or not we feel love in the moment. Love can fluctuate, but commitment is more in our control and a choice we can (and must) make every day.
Commitment is also proactive. Once when I complained to my grandmother that I didn’t like a child in my class, she said, “Act like you do and someday you will.” I didn’t understand what she meant at the time, but now I realize that emotions usually follow actions. When we commit to unloveable kids, we usually find things to love about them. By making the commitment to care about them, no matter how we feel, we can develop deeper bonds and learn to love them.
Commitment Builds a Stronger Foundation Than Love
Children who have experienced trauma need more than affection or love; they need stability and security. They need to know that, no matter how they behave or test our resolve, we are not abandoning them. Our commitment reassures them that they are safe, valued, and worthy of care.
Unlike adult relationships, where we expect equality, children who have suffered trauma often do not show gratitude or affection. They very well may reject us or act out as they process past trauma. However, when we maintain commitment despite these challenges, we reassure our children that we value them for who they are, not just how they act. Our commitment helps them feel safe and able to learn how to grow past momentary conflicts.
Commitment is Realistic and Rooted in a Child’s Needs
Commitment focuses on prioritizing a child’s well-being. It is a one-way street in the sense that children are not developmentally capable of reciprocating at the same level as adults. Our commitment is to care about them anyway. We focus on what they need, which will vary from time to time and require different levels of care at different developmental stages.
However, committing to our children does not mean we unconditionally tolerate whatever behavior they throw at us. Just as healthy adult relationships have boundaries, commitments to children also need healthy limits. I’ll discuss in my next blog post how to protect our commitments with healthy boundaries. For now, simply recognize that when our children push against those boundaries—as they inevitably will—we can reaffirm our commitment to them while maintaining the boundaries necessary for a healthy relationship. Our children need to know that we will protect both them and our relationship with strong and healthy boundaries.
The Heavy Lifting of Commitment
Making a commitment to a child, especially one who has experienced trauma, is challenging. It requires patience, resilience, and an understanding that the journey may be difficult. We must accept from the start that it will take a long time, if ever, for our kids to appreciate our sacrifices. Being the adult in the room is difficult, but it’s the only way to build a relationship.
Our children, especially those from hard places, will test us. They want to see if the commitment is real. We may see that probing in the form of defiance, withdrawal, or emotional outbursts. We should anticipate these tests and prepare for them, knowing that passing the tests requires committing in spite of the hardships. It’s a heavy lift but it is the only way to provide the stability that they need.
Conclusion
Love may be what inspires us to open our hearts to another person’s child, but it is commitment that builds the foundation for trust and healing. It is commitment, not just love, that turns us into Plan B parents. To help children who have suffered trauma, we need to start with commitment and let love find its own way into our relationships.
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Interested in learning more?
• Download my free e-book to learn how to stop being the villain in your child’s story.
• Learn more principles of foster parenting and step-parenting from my online courses at YSO Academy.
• Buy my book, Raising Other People’s Children, for more thoughts about how to be the person who’s not supposed to be there.
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