Connection Heals Foster Kids Faster Than Correction Ever Will (with Amie Huggins)
Foster parent and junior high teacher Amie Huggins wrote two rules on her Utah foster application. No adoptions. No long-term placements. Sixteen years later, she is the adoptive mother of four daughters and a grandmother of five. In this episode of Voices of Adoption, with host Donna Pope, Amie shares how each daughter arrived, why she stopped fighting the word forever, and what 25 years in a junior high classroom taught her about kids who push love away.
The Placements She Never Planned to Keep
Amie's first foster placement was supposed to last two or three months. The teenager stayed 13 years, earned two degrees under Amie's roof, and now works as a therapist. One by one, four of the five children Amie fostered became her daughters, including a seven-year-old she turned down three times before a single meeting changed her mind.
Behaviors That Look Like Manipulation Are Survival
As a TBRI practitioner and author of Creating a Connected Classroom, Amie breaks down the brain science behind hoarding food, testing limits, and pushing away affection. Kids from hard places built neural pathways that kept them alive, and punishment cannot rewire them. Connection can, one met need at a time, at home and at school.
An Adult Adoption That Became the Real Thing
Amie's fourth adoption was a 20-year-old, agreed to as legal protection for a grandbaby. Neither woman felt much affection in that courtroom. Years of showing up changed that, and today Amie counts her among the daughters who gave her more than she ever gave them, a family now connected to Raise the Future's work for waiting teens.
Listen to Amie Huggins' full conversation with Donna Pope on Voices of Adoption and learn what happens when connection outworks correction. Hear the whole story behind the foster form that said no on Voices of Adoption.
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