Jeanine and Marty White met in a Tampa church and knew of each other because their families were closely connected. After three months of realizing they wanted to expand their friendship to something more, they married.
During their first year of marriage they had a friend recommend that they should be house parents because they were good with kids and heavily involved with the kids at their church.
Jeanine and Marty, having a passion for children and being newly married, soon found a group home that allowed them to help children in a direct way. They went from being newly married with no children to being newly married taking care of 16 teenage abused children for a year.
“Marty and I grew up very poor, and that’s where we felt God was leading us,” says Jeanine.
This transition was difficult for them. Many times they felt exhausted and stressed because of all this commitment required of them, but nonetheless they stayed committed to the children.
A year later, the group home leaders came to Jeanine and Marty and gave them notice that they would be closing in three weeks. This meant that they would need to find somewhere else to live and be employed. The young lovers had to quickly move and make arrangements.
A few months after moving out and finding a new apartment they realized they wanted to get involved in the foster care system and continue to help children. This was when an 11-year-old girl with bangs came to them and lit up their world.
“She was kind of like our “Oh, this is why we do this,” you know?’ says Jeanine. They later adopted her. Today she is 20 years old.
The Whites are now therapeutic foster parents. They work with children who have dealt with severe mental health, self-harm, or even baker acts.
Many of the children that came into their home after they became foster care parents weren’t necessarily from homes of neglect but from homes of parents that simply made a few mistakes at parenting and as a result, lost their children.
“They are not given, in my opinion, and my experience with my kids, they are not given the tools to know how to be good parents,” says Jeanine.
Oftentimes–the parents aren’t perfect but it is traumatic for a child to be essentially raised with strangers.
“Statistically, and I’ve looked this up, a child that’s raised in foster care or a group home their chance of success like having a successful life, having goals, dreams, jobs, they drop off dramatically compared to living their biological parents,” Marty says. “Most of the parents are just normal people dealing with stuff who love their kids who are not perfect, and want to but are struggling.”
Though the system is not a perfect one–Jeanine and Marty have decided to at least make the children they that come into their care recognize that their is light at the end of the tunnel.
The foster care system is extremely overwhelmed. When you compare the amount of kids in foster care versus the avaliable homes and avaliable foster parents–there isnt enough of anything.
You have kids who have lost everything and are forced to live with strangers and that’s the reality. Even if their home is crazy that’s their home. And many times the system regulations that are in place–aren’t really as benenfitial to the children as they may seem.
There’s so many resources for foster children but because they don’t have a family or friends they can lean back on–they sometimes feel unmovitated. Many children come from homes where they haven’t had access to basic living nessecities like food. They will sometimes take that frustration out on their foster parents. Jeanine and Marty tell me that they have learned to not take the response to what’s happened to them personally.
Throughout their journey, the Whites have now adopted two children and are in the process of adopting their third.
“I’d would rather give up my whole heart just to know that these kids felt love one time in their life,” says Jeanine.
In systems that run for a long time sometimes there are rules just to be rules. Many times these rules should evolve and mainly be created to help reunite parents with their kids.
The goal needs to be to create a person not just to take care of the kids the best way that we can.
“I wish there was no need for foster care, I wish every single child could live with their family,” says Jeanine.
“Our job is not to fix the system, but the kids that come into our care–that’s what my concern is,” says Marty.
