Need Right Now Greater Than Ever

It’s easy to wrap a needy child in the misty romanticism of a Hallmark card.

But the role of a foster parent requires far more than soft-hearted naivete. Once the rosy mist dissipates, foster parents must be motivated by impulses far more lasting than sentiment. They must possess qualities that endure: constancy, perseverance, determination.

Being a foster parent requires the capacity to love children in their most unlovable moments, when they batter other kids, scream defiantly, break every rule of the house. It means understanding the roots of their infuriating behavior and replacing the impulse to fight back with the confidence to set firm limits. In Washington state, it means enduring higher standards and tougher state regulations than ever.

Today, there’s a crisis in Washington’s foster care program. Strict new regulations - adopted after abuses were uncovered at the O.K. Boys Ranch in Olympia - have left foster parents living under tough new scrutiny.

Across the state, nearly 500 foster parents have quit. Yet the need rose 20 percent in Spokane this year. State workers have begun waiving their own safety limits, doubling and tripling the capacity in some homes.

This new crisis indicates it’s time for the state’s pendulum to swing again, to temper the justified concern for children’s safety and well-being with a recognition of the understandable human limitations of foster families. And it’s time for more state residents to volunteer.

This is not a task that brings a profit. State reimbursement rates - $325 a month for an infant, up to $470 for a teen - seldom cover the child’s expenses.

Fortunately, after Jonathan Martin’s story on this crisis appeared in The Spokesman-Review, Spokane’s foster care recruiters received 50 new inquiries.

Those who wind up making this commitment will discover its daunting challenges and its gentle, almost imperceptible, rewards.

A listless, underweight baby transforms into a healthy child with pink cheeks, shiny hair and sparkling eyes. A teen who tests his foster parents by repeatedly running away one day proves their commitment by graduating from high school, venturing into the world and returning proudly at Christmastime.

All of these satisfactions, and yet sometimes none of them, come to the foster parent who is wise and steady and kind.

The best foster parents aren’t looking for rewards. They’re motivated by the quiet sense they have something of value to give. Ultimately, they nurture the community’s most fragile children with those precious, yet increasingly rare qualities: wisdom and maturity.