Worth Staying For: Love, Foster Parents, and the Work Systems Cannot Do

Abstract

Foster parents occupy a critical, but frequently overlooked, position at the intersection of the child welfare and education systems in The United States of America. Despite the central role of foster parents in the lives of children in the foster care system, foster parents are frequently underprepared for the demands of navigating schools, under-supported by the various institutions designed to support them, and systemically excluded from the decision-making processes that shape the children in their care. This study uses narrative inquiry to explore the schooling experiences of four foster parents in three foster families: Peg, Steve and Katie, and Kate. Their stories illuminate what it means to advocate for children across complex, and often unresponsive, bureaucratic systems. Grounded in bell hooks' (2018) conceptualization of love as active practice, and Motta and Bennett's (2017) pedagogy of care, this dissertation examines how foster parents experience the intersection of child welfare and education, what supports they find useful, and what their experience reveals about the demands providing care places on them. Across all three narratives, foster parents encountered schools and child welfare agencies designed to manage compliance rather than cultivate care. Formal supports, such as trainings, caseworkers, and special education processes, were consistently inadequate, performative, or absent. The most meaningful support in each case was informal: peer relationships, trusted professionals who worked outside their institutional capacities, and communities built through shared experiences rather than mandatory attendance. This study contributes the concept of love as an epistemic stance. A way of knowing children that formal institutions consistently fail to see value in. Furthermore, this study offers a critique of the compliance architecture embedded in both educational settings and child welfare agencies. The findings suggest that love, in its most rigorous and unconditional form, is not peripheral to the work of foster care. Rather, it is the central work of foster care. Implications for foster parent training, school preparation, caseworker roles, and the formation of peer community are discussed, and ultimately, a set of conclusions is drawn regarding the reimagining of the foster care system.