Kira Higgins is a foster mom who has a calling to care for teen moms in foster care. She has been fostering since April of 2022. Originally from North Carolina, she always had the call to help children but it took a few years for the right time and opportunity to arrive. 

The first opportunity came when a family friend found herself in some unfortunate circumstances and called Kira to ask if she could take in her four children. At that time Kira was married, and her husband did not want to take her friends’ children into their home. “And I just remember calling my best friend, and she was boo-hooing, and I was like ‘I’m sorry, I really want to help’. She of course understood and said, ‘I know it’s in your heart to take care of children.” 

Later, she had another friend who had just started fostering and asked him for some more information. She was still living in North Carolina, and her eldest children were still coming and going living with her for periods of time, so it wasn’t the right time. 

Then she and her youngest, her son who was nine years old at the time, moved to Tennessee.  “I had extra rooms in my home. So I said, now is it. This is the time Lord for us to open our home.” 

How Kira talked to her son about foster care

It was important to Kira to talk to her son about it.  

She explained to her son what foster care was. “I explained that other children, who are no longer able to live with their parents, will come in our home and live with us for a period of time.” 

She explained that there was a lot that they don’t know. The child could come live with them for a short time – a month or two, or much longer. They wouldn’t know everything about the child’s background or what they have experienced. “So we’re going to have to go with the flow,” she told her son. Then she asked if it would be something he would be interested in. 

“The thing with him is that his biological siblings are at least twelve years older than him, so he kind of grew up as a single child. So to have a sibling… He said ‘yeah, lets try it!’ and here we are a couple years later and he’s loving it. He refers to them as ‘my brother, my sister’” 

“You would think that they were biological brother and sister,” Kira continues. “The way that they treat each other, the way that they joke around… because you know, they don’t treat each other any differently. He treats them the way that he treats the older kids. I’m telling you he aggravates the seventeen-year-old (the teen mom), he aggravates her to no end, all in her face, all over her.” 

Kira’s calling to care for teen moms in foster care

Kira had a particular call to take in teen moms because she was a teen mom, having her first child at 18, after graduating high school. 

“And I had so much support from both sides, from my family, from her father’s family, just out of this world support. That’s what I wanted to give a teen mom in foster care. I wanted to give them the same support that I had – being able to go to college, with a baby. Being able to hold down a job, with a baby, being able to run errands. All of these things that you don’t realize that you’re going to need when you have a baby. So just being able to do that with a child, I wanted to be that same person for someone who didn’t have that.” 

Are you interested in starting your own journey to becoming a foster parent? You can learn more about what the process looks like and read some of the most common questions here. 

Maybe you would like to find ways to support foster parents like Kira! You can check out volunteer opportunities in your area.