THE PRACTICAL purpose of foster parenting is to provide hurting children – anywhere from birth up to age 19 – a welcoming but temporary family environment. The goal, whenever possible, is to reunite them with their parents once authorities believe it is safe to do so.

But for many foster parents, what began as a relationship that was expected to last maybe just a few months or a year at most can become life-long, even without the children being formally adopted.

“I have kids that come back Christmas, Easter, their birthdays, my birthday,” says Burnaby foster parent Jan Chapman.

“I do have some [to whom] I really became a parent. . . . They’re grown up, they have children, but they still need that sounding board.”

One girl in Abbotsford foster mom Judy Harder’s care was eight years old when she arrived. Now 34, she remains very much a part of the Harder family.

“She’s married,” says Harder. “We’re mom and dad [to her] and we’re grandparents to her children. . . . [She had] no known father and her mom died when she was with me, when she was only 12.”

Like many foster parents as well, Harder and Chapman are Christians. In fact, Harder has found in her 33 years of foster parenting that “a majority” of them have some faith background.

“They see a lot of children hurting . . . and they hear, ‘Oh, he’s in a foster home, but the foster home is not very good’ – there’s a lot of not very good ones out there – and then they sort of feel, ‘Well, maybe we could foster,’” she says.

“And often that’s how some of them get into it . . . out of care and love, really.”

“I think that the most successful foster parents have some kind of faith in their background,” says Melanie Filiatrault, a foster mom in Kelowna and president of the British Columbia Federation of Foster Parent Associations (BCFFPA).

“People that stick with it tend to . . . have something they can grasp onto that will help them through the rough times. I’m a Christian myself and I truly believe it’s helped me.”

More than 6,400 children and youth are currently cared for in about 3,200 foster homes across the province, according to B.C.’s Ministry of Child and Family Development. And still the demand for foster families always exceeds the supply.

“That continues to be a challenge,” concedes Child and Family Development Minister Tom Christensen, “particularly for those children that may have very special needs, and that then requires obviously additional qualifications and training for those foster families.”

The ministry pays foster families based on the particular needs of the children in their care. This year’s provincial budget contained rate increases that will amount to $200 more per month per child for the majority of foster families by April 1, 2009.

“You are a 24/7 parent for the province. You are a public parent,” says Filiatrault, “and a lot of people don’t want that. . . . It just takes a special person to take children into your home and deal with their family’s issues and their disabilities.”

“There are many, many . . . children,” says Chapman, “that are into [risky] things . . . and there are children that are just sick, maybe with mental illness or other sicknesses, where families just have grown to the point where they can’t cope with it. Fostering really does cover all the things that can happen in life.”

For the past eight years, Chapman herself has specialized in caring for children with mental disorders.

Some of the most pressing needs involve Aboriginal kids, who comprise about half of all the children and youth in care.

The main reasons for removing so many of them from their homes, says Gary Mavis, executive director of the Federation of Aboriginal Foster Parents (FAFP), is parental neglect and child abuse.

“The problem with some of the parents,” he says, “is they were never parented because they were in residential schools, so they have difficulties with being parents themselves.”

“I wish there was sort of a simple, quick answer to that. If there was, in all likelihood it would have been followed already,” says Christensen.

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“I have nothing but praise and admiration for the social worker involved and for the . . . support from them – and the way they respect and treat their children,” she says.

Filitrault knows foster parents who show “phenomenal” sensitivity to Aboriginal traditions. “They have no Aboriginal background, but they make sure that a child is very aware of what their heritage is,” she says. “And [these children] are very proud of their heritage.”

FAFP and others give these parents the training and information needed to expose these children to their heritage. “Even if it’s not their [specific] tradition, the kids at least get some understanding of the different Aboriginal cultures and traditions,” Mavis says.

Yet the need for sensitivity applies to every child, no matter what his or her background.

“You need to respect the fact that you might have children of another religious background. You need to respect that family,” says Chapman. “I’ve had Muslim children, Sikh children. And I’ve taken them to their synagogue, to their temple.”

But neither are foster families expected to suppress their beliefs or alter their practices – such as going to church – in order to accommodate a foster child whose background may not be theirs. And that can create a whole new family dynamic, especially for kids who end up in longer-term foster care.

“Out of my 35 kids, I would say about 29 have become Christians,” says Harder. “It’s wonderful. . . . You’ve planted that seed. They’ve seen a different way of living. And that’s exactly what it’s about.”

In fact, Filiatrault says these bonds often become so close that “a very high percentage of our foster parents end up to be adoptive parents eventually to these children.”

And even if the foster parents themselves do not adopt a child, they will still be that child’s advocate with the ministry to make sure he or she is placed in a suitable home.

Once, when Harder found unacceptable the list of prospective adoptive families presented to her for a couple of her boys, “they gave me like a deadline of two weeks to come with a home that I wanted. So I did,” she says.

“I just broadcast [the need] to our church . . . and the next day I had over 50 calls, and within a week I had over 200 calls.”

Yet the majority of children do at some point return to their own families. “Most of the [Aboriginal] kids that go into care go back home [in] six months to a year,” says Mavis. “That doesn’t say they go home permanently. Some may come back into care.”

For families that have developed a close bond with the kids in their care, that can be particularly wrenching. But Harder insists that foster parents who claim to truly love and respect their child’s natural family really have no choice in the matter.

“If their family has made a change for the better, then you need to be able to let them go,” she says. “That is the number one thing that I hear from people – ‘I could never foster, because I couldn’t let them go.’ But you have to be able to do that.”

But whether the child comes to stay permanently or just for a while, the real joy in foster parenting comes in being able to help that child be restored to good health, be it physical, mental or emotional.

“It’s really very rewarding,” says Chapman, “particularly when some of them have gone through trauma in their life. . . . It’s wonderful to see what God can do and how resilient he has made human beings. It’s marvelous to see that.”

This month marks the BCFFPA’s 40th anniversary. It will be, says Filiatrault, “a great opportunity to thank all the foster parents that have gone before and that are going to come” as well as to celebrate countless success stories.

“We have kids,” she says, “that no one thought would ever finish their education, and they’ve come into homes and get stabilized and graduate from high school and go on to university. . . . And we have kids that become foster parents after they become adults.”

The federation itself, Chapman adds, “has been able to find that middle ground and to be able to represent the foster parents [to the ministry] and to do a lot for the youth and for the children. They’ve been the ones that have been able to emphasize what’s needed.”

May 2007