Attending Wounded Hearts

Abstract

    In Japan, where the birth rate remains very low, most children are carefully nurtured by their parents. Yet a number of children continuously have to live in a residential care institution for children or a foster parent's household as a result of parental child abuse or other reasons. I have been rearing such children as a foster parent for the past twenty years. I have had some hard times and I have sometimes felt like quitting, but now I feel I was right in deciding to be a foster parent. I learned that a child who had been in a state of chaos at the beginning would change as she/he grows older and as reliable relationships are gradually built between the child and her/his foster parents. After the big earthquake of 2011, the Japanese word “kizuna” (bonds) has been the focus of social attention. This is an opportunity for us to rethink important matters in this increasingly individualistic and nuclear-family-oriented society. No one can live alone. As long as you respect others, you can build reliable bonds with others. A nonbiological relationship between a foster parent and a foster child can grow to be a family bond.