Liam

Article written for Missouri Baptist Children’s Home

While the child they loved set his own heart ablaze, Kyle and Amanda were not afraid. 

Adoption always sounds sweet from the outside. No one tells you about the children who don’t act grateful, blasting their trauma across your living room in a rage of defiance and broken picture frames. At the age of nine, Liam had already found two families who offered him forever—and then brought forever to a sudden end.

It’s easy to judge those families when your only experience of foster care and adoption has been syrupy memes on social media. The movies make adoption look straightforward, if not easy. In the real world, both families loved Liam enough to grit their teeth through his storm, but they didn’t feel equipped to help him process his trauma in healthy ways and gain better functioning skills. It was time to try something else. 

That’s when Liam made his way into the care of Missouri Baptist Children’s Home (MBCH). We train foster parents to jumpstart the process of healing through the Treatment Family Care (TFC) program. The goal is always long-term placement, ideally reuniting the child with parents or relatives. If parental rights have been terminated, adoption becomes the next-best outcome. 

In the meantime, TFC uses foster care to help kids gain hope and practice constructive behaviors so that when the doors open for permanent placement, they feel confident enough to stroll inside and claim a chair at the dinner table.

All TFC foster parents complete state-required training as well as our Trust-Based Relational Intervention training, which coaches parents to respond to trauma with connection, empowerment, and correction. MBCH provides each family with 24/7 support from a TFC specialist, who meets with TFC families in their home at least once a week.

TFC parents understand that with every child, they’re facing uncharted terrain. Even though no clear map exists, their training serves as a compass helping them feel their way forward as they invite kids into the risk of relationship. And whenever exhaustion makes them shake, their TFC specialist is right beside them with the support they need to take one more step for one more day.

Before Liam connected with TFC, the only way he knew to protect himself was by striking first, before anyone else could. He stole, broke things, and hurt himself and others. The neglect and physical abuse that had dragged its claws across his past didn’t let go when he moved roofs. He acted out abuse against himself—all he’d ever known—and chased his own pain into a hospital bed, surrounded by the same sirens and beeping that had played all his life as lullabies.

Kyle and Amanda helped him process mixed feelings of loss and prepared him for the idea of calling someone else Mom and Dad. When Liam’s emotions overwhelmed him, they used strategies they’d learned through TFC to help him reroute anger into better responses. They knew to calmly wait through the worst of the thunder before trying to engage in a conversation. They understood when to ask key questions versus when to sit beside and not have to know. Of course, all they could offer most days were their best guesses; this kind of healing looked more like the Oregon Trail than a straight-shot highway. Whatever color the weather turned that day, they simply kept their direction and plodded on.

When the time came for Liam to meet his new parents, he was ready. Kyle and Amanda tagged along on visits so he’d feel safe. By now, Liam had the emotional capacity to form a positive attachment, setting the whole family up for the kind of closeness you can’t just wish into existence.

One day, Kyle and Amanda pulled into the garage, took a deep breath, and walked into a house that had found a new silence. Liam wasn’t coming home anymore. He was home, of course, unpacking his t-shirts into a bedroom that would start to feel normal in a couple of weeks. He was stable enough to be off medication. These days, he used his words to talk out big feelings and resisted the behaviors that used to define him. 

Many foster parents don’t have the satisfaction of a happy ending. Kyle and Amanda felt privileged to know their boy was growing in the right direction. Still, the quiet that filled up their kitchen was a strange thing. Some hard nights, before, it had been all they’d wanted, but now the peace was making them restless.

Every week after that, they met up with Liam and his parents, and he told them his adventures and frustrations. They’d take pictures together with silly filters and high five him for his grades. One afternoon a few months down the road, they would answer a call, put it on speakerphone. And before they even heard the next child’s name, Kyle and Amanda would already say yes.