Creating a Trauma-Informed Home: Essential Tips for New & Existing Foster Parents
When children enter foster care, they bring with them experiences that have shaped their understanding of the world, their sense of safety, and their ability to form relationships. Many have experienced trauma that impacts how they think, feel, and behave. At a minimum, the very experience of going into foster care is traumatic because it involves loss, uncertainty, and separation.
Creating a trauma-informed home isn't just helpful—it's essential. Otherwise, many things we think are helpful can actually be harmful.
Without being trauma-aware, we can enter the foster parenting journey with the unintentional assumption that we offer a child a better family by having a nicer house, quality food, and that our role is to essentially give them a makeover with new clothes, new hairstyle, new relationships, new behaviors, and a new family. Instead, it is our responsibility to see them as a whole person and value all of the parts of their life experience to walk alongside them for connection, healthy development, and healing. We have the privilege of extending compassion, empathy, and relationship.
It is also essential to understand that being trauma-informed is not simply one more type of behavior modification intervention to make our lives easier and make a child manageable.
“If I want my child to show me the precious, amazing human that he is, I have to first show him through my eyes that I already know he is that person.”
-Robyn Gobbel, Big, Baffling Behavior
Gaining trauma training as a parent of children from hard places is an essential ongoing journey. Take advantage of the numerous opportunities. Here are just a few examples:
Trust-Based Relational Intervention (TBRI) has online and in-person training
Request additional trauma training from your licensing agency
Understanding Trauma's Impact
Children who have experienced trauma often develop survival responses that served them well in unsafe environments but may look like "problem behaviors" in safe ones. These might include:
Hypervigilance (always on alert for danger)
Difficulty regulating emotions - whether it is from a good or bad moment
Challenges with trust and attachment
Controlling behaviors
Regression to younger developmental stages
Sleep difficulties
Strong reactions to seemingly minor or unknown triggers
Food insecurity and food hoarding
Lying
These responses aren't willful disobedience or manipulation—they're adaptations that helped the child survive. This perspective allows you to respond with compassion and curiosity rather than frustration.
“What is this child trying to tell me with behavior that they don’t have the words for or can’t express?” If you remain curious about children, they will eventually give you the answers you have been looking for. Dr. Karen Purvis, TBRI
There are so many excellent trauma trainings available to foster parents beyond the foster parent licensing classes. These are important to take! Parenting will, and should, look different for our children who have experienced trauma.
Creating Safety and Predictability
A stable environment is the first step toward healing for children whose lives have been characterized by chaos and unpredictability. Stability refers to a consistent and predictable social, emotional, and physical environment. Predictable environments help children regulate their stress responses, develop healthy attachment, and build resilience. (What Happened To You? By Dr. Bruce Perry).
The lower unconscious part of the brain of a child from hard places will continuously be asking, “Am I safe?” Being safe doesn’t always equal feeling safe. This feeling of felt safety is unique to each child. However, creating safety and predictability in their environment is one important thing you can do to help.
Establish Consistent Routines
Children from hard places can thrive with structure and predictability. Consider implementing:
Visual schedules showing the day's activities
Consistent mealtimes and bedtimes
Predictable morning and evening routines
Advance notice of changes or transitions
Regular family rituals that build connection
When children know what to expect, their nervous systems can begin to regulate, reducing anxiety and fear responses.
This likely also means you must cut things out of your schedule. For a child in foster care who is new to your home, every interaction, space, schedule, person, or event is a new situation to navigate. By minimizing your schedule only to include things which are essential as a child gets settled in, you are helping them create safety and predictability in things that can be controlled. Save all of that emotional bandwidth for navigating the things that can’t be controlled - such as trauma triggers, case requirements, or mandatory appointments.
Design Safe Spaces
Your physical environment can either trigger stress responses or promote calm. Consider:
Creating a designated "calm area" with sensory tools, comfort items, and fidgets
Reduce overstimulation by minimizing noise and clutter when possible (avoid the desire to be Santa Claus!)
Providing personal space that the child can control (even if it's just a drawer or shelf)
Using soft lighting and calming colors in sleeping areas
Give a verbal and visual tour to identify the things that are in the room and in the house (explain things that may be obvious to you just because you’ve lived in this home)
Give them the ability to give their input and make choices in their environment - find out what makes them feel safe
Building Connection Through Relationship
Trauma fundamentally impacts a child's ability to trust and connect with caregivers. Building a relationship takes time, patience, and intentionality.
Prioritize Connection Before Correction
When challenging behaviors arise, focus first on connection:
Get down at the child's level
Use a calm, regulated voice
Validate feelings before addressing behaviors
Remember that the relationship is your main priority
Be genuine in your words and actions
Keep things short and simple
Do not address the why of behavior in the midst of dysregulation. Regulate first and discuss later.
Give Voice and Choice
Children who have experienced trauma often feel powerless. Offering appropriate choices helps restore a sense of control and connection:
"Would you like to wear the red shirt or the blue shirt today?"
"Would you like to work on homework before we take a walk or after we take a walk?”
"Do you want to take deep breaths or squeeze your stress ball to help calm down?"
Even small choices help children develop confidence and self-regulation skills.
Responding to Challenging Behaviors
When children have experienced trauma, traditional discipline approaches often increase fear and shame rather than teaching new skills.
Focus on Regulation Before Reasoning
When a child is dysregulated, the thinking brain goes offline. Before attempting to reason or problem-solve:
Help the child regulate through co-regulation (staying calm yourself)
Use sensory strategies that match the child's needs (movement, deep pressure, etc.)
Create safety through your presence and calm demeanor
Wait until the child is regulated before discussing the behavior
Let them know you are there but do not
Reframe Behavior as Communication - Stay Curious
Ask yourself:
"What is this child trying to tell me through this behavior?"
"What need is not being met?"
"What might be triggering this response?"
This perspective shift helps you respond to the underlying need rather than just the surface behavior. Excellent books to help you on this curiosity journey are:
Build Your Own Support System
We cannot teach what we have not experienced. Often, parenting a child from hard places brings to light our triggers and emotions. Find a way to work through those and continually learn about the message behind your own behavior and reactions as well. This may mean individual counseling, listening to podcasts, journaling, or trauma training is needed.
Connect with support resources like:
Joy Meadows' Therapy Center, which understands the unique challenges of foster care
Support groups for foster parents
Respite care options
Church Care Communities that can provide practical support
Moving Forward with Patience
Creating a trauma-informed home is not about perfection—it's about progress. Children heal in the context of safe, nurturing relationships with adults who can meet them where they are while gently guiding them toward growth.
“The more healthy relationships a child has, the more likely he will be to recover from trauma and thrive. Relationships are the agents of change and the most powerful therapy is human love. People, not programmes, change people.” Dr. Bruce Perry.
Remember that healing isn't linear. There will be good days and hard days, progress and regression. Each regulated response you provide creates new neural pathways that gradually reshape a child's understanding of relationships and safety.
By committing to a trauma-informed approach, you're giving children the most incredible gift possible: the opportunity to make all the parts of their story have purpose and discover what stability, healing, and joy can look like in their lives.
Personal Perspective
Getting Over Myself - When Helping Is Hurtful
I remember one of the first children who moved into our home.
We had barely been licensed and had taken the 8 weeks of classes through the state licensing agency, which I wrongfully assumed at the time were deep, meaningful, and would teach me all that I needed to know about helping a child. Instead of a foster placement or potential adoptive placement, which I had neatly planned out in our “Annie” or " The Blind Side” story, we ended up providing a home to a teen who found herself without a home as an unofficial foster placement.
I threw myself into redecorating a bedroom, giving opinions about the correct type of clothing to wear, and a lot of lectures about all the things she could do in life if she just worked hard. I cringe to think of the anger I expressed when she used the “decorative” hand towels for makeup removal and not the washcloths in the cabinet for cleaning. It hurts my heart to think of how overwhelming the information we were throwing out must have been for a young teen thrown into a new environment. I am ashamed to think of the numerous times I had ranting discourse running through my mind about how grateful she should be for all we were offering her, and disrupting our lives to help her out, and my disbelief at her “wrong choices.”
It wasn’t all hard and there were fun good moments too.
We loved having her in our home and still consider her part of our family. But my heart hurts to think of how much more we could have supported her, walked alongside her, and provided opportunities for healing rather than becoming—ourselves—one more obstacle or hurdle in life that she had to navigate and overcome.
God is good.
He can restore and redeem all things. I have prayed often since those early days of opening our home to children who needed somewhere to live, that God would redeem our actions, behaviors, moments, words – and would replace them with His purposes, the life-giving presence of the Holy Spirit, and the transformative love of Jesus in each memory or moment that these children recall. (Colossians 2:1-10).
In humility, I have learned so much and keep learning.
Years of trauma classes, parenting classes, support groups, and interactions with various children have taught me humility. Above all, it has taught me that the Bible is the source of wisdom and compassion. As stated by neurobiologist and trauma therapist, “Relationships are the agents of change and the most powerful therapy is human love.” Research now clearly supports this premise.
But the Bible also profoundly directs us in this position, “Let love be your highest goal.” 1 Corinthians 14:1. Throughout all of chapter 13 in 1 Corinthians, the words of Scripture show that we could have every piece of knowledge and sacrifice everything we have, “but if I didn’t love others, I would have gained nothing.” (v. 13:3). Moreover, our “knowledge is partial and incomplete,” and we are learning and growing in our love and knowledge just as a child does. (v.13:9-13). This is beautiful, encouraging, and challenging all at the same time.
It is our privilege to love the children placed into our lives and homes. It is our role to love and continually place ourselves before a loving God so He can fill us with His love and teach us more about how to love.
Sarah Oberndorfer
This blog post is part of our Foster Care 101 series, designed to provide guidance and encouragement for those considering or beginning their foster care journey. If you're interested in learning more about trauma-informed care, Joy Meadows offers resources and support through our Therapy Center and events.
