Michele Bachmann is best-known for being a Tea Party firebrand. Less known is the fact that in the ’90s, she and her husband opened their home to 23 foster children. From my piece today:
When most women are expecting their fourth child, they don’t decide to start taking in foster children.
But that’s what Michele Bachmann did. For six years, from 1992 to 1998, she opened her home to a total of 23 teenage girls who needed a family. She juggled raising up to nine kids at a time, homeschooling her grade-school-age and younger biological children during the day and bonding with her high-school-age foster children at night. It was a demanding life — to get a taste of the workload, consider that Bachmann was often doing four loads of laundry daily – but one that she loved. …
They never intended to take in 23 [foster kids], but the requests to find room for just one more child kept coming. “We just continued to say yes,” says Bachmann.
Taking in foster children — especially teens — is no easy task. They come from broken homes, and often face emotional struggles. With 420,000 foster kids, and a constant shortage of homes open to them, the nation could use more people as generous as Bachmann. Her own advice to those considering the idea is that “you’ll never know unless you try it.” She also told NRO that she “would challenge people to consider something like foster care if they think they have any proclivity toward it, because there are children who need loving, happy families.”