Love Is All Around?
By Erica Fischer-Kaslander
The modern Valentine’s Day is about love in all its different forms – when I was shopping for a Valentine’s Day card for my husband, I saw cards meant for friends to send to other friends, for grandparents to give to grandchildren, cards from parents to sons and daughters, and even cards from your pets to you! It would be easy to think that love is happening everywhere for everyone. But for children in foster care, it’s not so simple.
For children whose early lives have included maltreatment, neglect, separation, and placement instability, the experience of love is deeply affected.
Developmental Harm
Early relational experiences shape a child’s capacity to trust, to regulate emotion, and to seek connection. For children impacted by abuse and neglect, love has often been inconsistent, unsafe, or conditional at best.
Research suggests that repeated disruptions in caregiving relationships can leave children caught in what trauma clinicians term “attachment ambiguity,” where the brain’s patterns for seeking closeness are intertwined with the fear of loss. This means that for many children in care:
Trust is tentative. Children may hesitate to seek comfort because prior bids for support were met with neglect or harm.
Attachment cues can be confusing. Behaviors that appear withdrawn or reactive may be survival adaptations of self-preservation rather than oppositional conduct.
The Effects Of Trauma
Trauma research demonstrates that abuse and neglect can profoundly disrupt a child’s internal working models of relationships, leading to confusion between care and harm and difficulty distinguishing healthy attachment from coercive control. In this context, expressions of affection, even when genuine and safe, may trigger fear, avoidance, or dysregulation.
For children who have experienced sexual abuse, the concept of love is often additionally deeply distorted by exploitation, grooming, and betrayal by trusted adults. Abusive dynamics frequently involve deliberate manipulation in which affection, attention, or perceived care are used to normalize boundary violations and secure compliance. As a result, love may become neurologically and emotionally associated with danger, secrecy, obligation, or shame rather than safety and mutuality.
Understanding Love as Action, Not Just Feeling
Love is not a static feeling, it is a pattern of behavior that reinforces safety and predictability. For children who have experienced trauma, love is not “instant” or intuitive: it is built through repetition, reliability, and attuned responses over time. Restoring a healthy understanding of love requires consistent, boundaried, and non-exploitative relationships that reinforce safety, choice, and respect over time.
Empirical studies on interventions for foster-involved youth underscore the importance of stable, nurturing relationships in fostering resilience. Youth with at least one consistently supportive adult demonstrate:
Improved emotional regulation
Higher educational engagement
Stronger self-concept and future orientation
These outcomes reflect the profound impact of secure relational attunement on developmental trajectories — impact that Child Focus programs help catalyze through persistent, child-centered advocacy and connection.
The Advocate’s Role
Child Focus’s Court Appointed Special Advocates (CASA) and Safe Babies Court Team Coordinators are uniquely positioned to operationalize developmental science into everyday advocacy. At a time when a child’s biological attachment systems have been disrupted, the consistent, attentive, and responsive presence of an advocate becomes not merely supportive, it becomes corrective. Consistency over time helps reshape neural pathways toward safety, trust, and co-regulation.
This work aligns with trauma-informed frameworks recognized across child welfare fields:
Predictability and Routine reduce stress and help children anticipate safety.
Empathic Listening strengthens internal models of being understood and emotionally supported.
Non-Judgmental Presence lowers threat perception and enables regulation of affective states.
In effect, what the CASA and Safe Babies programs offer is not only support and care but regulatory scaffolding—helping children move from survival responses toward positive relational engagement.
A Community Committed to Transformative Care
Child Focus’s mission, operationalized in both the CASA and Safe Babies Court Team programs, rests on the belief that every child deserves more than survival; they deserve the foundation for thriving. That foundation is relational: consistent presence, attuned interaction, and repeated demonstration that love is safe, predictable, and unconditional.
When we view love through the lens of developmental science and trauma-informed practice, we understand it not as a single moment or sentiment, but as a series of relational experiences that reshape a child’s internal world. For the children we serve, this reframing is transformative.
Sharing the Love
This Valentine’s Day, YOU too can be transformative. Support the work of Child Focus by making a donation that honors the love that you have received and that you have given. Your support champions a child in foster care.
Thank you, and Happy Valentine’s Day!
xxx