Should Single Women Foster?

There is a particular kind of grief that doesn’t get a funeral. No casseroles show up. No one sends flowers. It’s the quiet ache of a life that didn’t unfold the way you expected, the husband who never came, the children who weren’t born, the milestones that passed without you. For many single Christian women, that grief has a way of becoming background noise, a low hum running beneath every sermon, every wedding invitation, every well-meaning comment from someone in the church lobby.

Stephanie Haenchen knows that grief. And she also knows what’s waiting on the other side of it if you’re willing to loosen your grip on the story you had planned.

Kelly sat down with Stephanie for a conversation that is equal parts honest and hopeful. Stephanie doesn’t offer tidy formulas or easy answers. What she offers is a life that looks nothing like what she expected, and a faith that has only deepened because of it.

The Stories We Tell Ourselves

Before Stephanie ever got to the topic of foster care or faith or singles in the church, she said something that framed the conversation.

Running her own marketing business taught her one lesson above all others: most people really aren’t thinking about you that much. “We get so in our own heads,” she told Kelly with a laugh. “We send someone a message, and they haven’t replied, and we think, maybe they’re mad at me. But most of the time, they’re just wrapped up in their own lives.”

It sounds like business advice. But for single women who have constructed elaborate internal narratives about why they’re still unmarried (narratives borrowed from culture rather than Scripture), it lands differently. The stories we tell ourselves about what others think of us, about what our circumstances mean, about what God must be doing or not doing, those stories have enormous power. And most of the time, they’re fiction.

Stephanie came to faith in her early twenties, after what she lovingly calls a “religiously confused” upbringing. Her dad was Lutheran; her mom, Mormon; neither was particularly consistent. It was her sister who introduced her to a faith community and, ultimately, to Jesus. Stephanie began learning what it actually meant to follow Christ not as a cultural identity or a set of inherited rules, but as a living relationship.

When she first came to faith, singleness didn’t feel unusual. “Everybody kind of thinks they want to get married,” she said. “So it didn’t seem weird.” But as the years passed and marriage didn’t come, she started noticing a gap between what the church seemed to be saying and what Scripture actually taught.

What the Church Gets Wrong

Stephanie is gracious when she names the problem. The people who said harmful things didn’t intend harm. But intent doesn’t neutralize impact.

“Just pray harder,” she’s heard over the years. Her response is pointed: “Okay, so I’m not praying hard enough? Something’s wrong with me and that’s why I’m still single?”

Then there’s the unspoken theology baked into so much of Christian culture: graduate, go to college, get married, and then, and only then, you will be a complete person. Stephanie pushes back on this firmly and with love.

“I’m never a complete person unless I’m leaning into God and His strength and who Jesus is and what He provides in my life. It won’t matter who is, or isn’t, by my side.”

She points to Job’s friends as a mirror for how Christians sometimes respond to suffering, whether grief, illness, or prolonged singleness. Those friends sat with Job in silence, in the ashes with him, sharing his pain. “They were doing it right until they opened their mouths,” Stephanie said. The moment they started talking, they implied something must be wrong with him. The church is still learning that lesson.

Completeness in Christ is not contingent on marital status. It was never supposed to be. And the sooner the church reflects that more fully, the more its single members will be able to breathe.

An Unexpected Call

Stephanie never had a strong desire to be pregnant or have babies. Teenagers at church tended to drive her a little crazy. So when a quiet, persistent sense began growing within her that she was “supposed to work with kids somehow,” she was, as she puts it, skeptical to put it mildly.

She turned to her best friend Molly and said, hesitantly, that she thought she might be supposed to work with kids. Molly’s reaction was polite bafflement. Stephanie’s own reaction wasn’t much different. “That doesn’t make any sense,” she told herself. “I don’t work in kids ministry. The youth at the church tend to drive me crazy.”

So she let the idea sit.

Then she came across a video about the one to two percent of children in the foster care system who age out, who are never reunified with family, never adopted into a permanent home. It broke something open in her.

“It broke my heart in a way that was unexpected and set me on this path.”

She began exploring what it would look like to become a licensed foster parent as a single woman. She pursued licensure for older children. Her second placement became her oldest daughter, a girl who was eventually available for adoption. And then came a second daughter.

Neither daughter arrived without difficulty. Neither story is simple. And Stephanie would be the first to say that’s exactly the point.

No Rose-Colored Glasses

One of the most valuable things Stephanie brings to this conversation is her refusal to soften the truth about foster care and adoption for the sake of a prettier story.

“The topic of adoption is often presented as, we’re doing this great thing, adopting a child who doesn’t have a home, and it’s always wonderful,” she said. “And that’s just not the truth.”

Both of Stephanie’s daughters are of a different race, and she has had to grow culturally, socially, and personally in ways she didn’t anticipate. She has had to learn to look beneath behavior and ask what’s underneath it. Foster children carry real trauma. When they act out, it isn’t a character flaw. It’s a response to experiences no child should have to survive.

She is also fiercely protective of her daughters’ dignity. If someone tells them they are “lucky” to have their mom, Stephanie corrects them immediately. “Please do not tell my child that she is lucky for having to experience a level of trauma that made her have to be removed from her home and separated from the family that she knew.”

Before You Fill Out the Application

Kelly asked the question many listeners were likely holding: should a single woman pursue foster care or adoption?

Stephanie’s answer is worth sitting with slowly.

“If you’re bringing a child into your home in order to complete yourself, that’s where it gets sticky. We start to become our own God a little bit.”

Stephanie Haenchen

First, the practical: it is exhausting. Single parents typically still work full-time. The foster care stipend helps, but it doesn’t stretch far. Community is essential, but the people who actually step up may surprise you in both directions.

Second, a more nuanced word specifically about fostering: the primary goal is family reunification. The child in your home could be returned to their biological family at any point during the case. For a woman carrying a deep, aching longing for a child of her own, this can become emotionally dangerous territory quickly.

“If you’re bringing a child into your home in order to complete yourself, that’s where it gets sticky. We start to become our own God a little bit.”

She has seen it happen. A foster parent who begins villainizing biological families because attachment to the child has overtaken compassion for the whole family. Stephanie sees that as a contradiction of the very gospel Christians claim to believe. Christ came to redeem. If we look at biological parents and decide they are irredeemable, we are denying something central to our faith.

“We have the opportunity as Christians to show the love of Christ by loving families, not just a child, but a whole family, if we can.”

If your primary motivation is to fill a longing or complete yourself, pause. Examine that. Find trusted people who have already walked this road and ask them to shatter your misconceptions before you take the step.

Let’s Just Be People

One of the most refreshing threads woven through the conversation was Stephanie’s reflection on friendship with married couples built on genuine mutuality, not pity or obligation.

She has had those friendships. The kind where she could call during a snowstorm and ask for a ride to the pharmacy, and her married friend would zip over without a second thought. When she asked that couple what made them so naturally inclusive of single friends, the husband’s answer was striking: they had dated through high school and college and had always been surrounded by single people. It simply never occurred to them to draw a circle that excluded her.

His summary was simple: “I think we just value people more than we value following the rules of culture.”

Those unspoken cultural rules, like the idea that a single woman around a married man is a threat, that including her is inviting temptation, end up excluding people rather than building genuine community. Stephanie’s current small group is mixed in gender, age, and life stage, and she loves it precisely because of that variety.

“Let’s just be people,” she said. “Let’s hang out together. Let’s have coffee together. Let’s go to the zoo together.”

What a Thriving Life Actually Looks Like

Kelly closed with a question that gave Stephanie pause: what does a thriving life look like?

Her answer was clear-eyed and anchored.

A thriving life is intentional about staying connected to God through His word, through prayer, through abiding in the Holy Spirit. And then staying intentional about being in community with the people God has placed in your proximity.

She had a particular word for women whose gifts are nurturing and caregiving, who always imagined those gifts would be poured into a husband and children, and are grieving because that hasn’t happened yet.

“Start praying to Him every day: show me how to use these skills. Because He didn’t do it wrong. He made you the way that you are on purpose, and He gave you the experiences you had for your good and for His glory.”

“If we just turn towards God and say, okay, these things I thought were going to happen aren’t happening. Now what? We might be completely blown away and surprised by what He puts in our path.”

Stephanie Haenchen

And then this: when we stay so focused on what we don’t have, we risk missing the extraordinary things God is placing right in our path.

“If we just turn towards God and say, okay, these things I thought were going to happen aren’t happening. Now what? We might be completely blown away and surprised by what He puts in our path.”

Stephanie Haenchen’s story is not a formula. It will not hand you a plan for singleness or a checklist for when to pursue adoption. But it will do something better. It will invite you to loosen your grip on the life you planned, and open your hands to the one God is actually writing.

Sometimes the most beautiful thing God gives us is a “no” that becomes, in time, a “watch this.”

This article was adapted from an interview with Stephanie Haenchen. To hear the full conversation, watch the complete episode on the Mission Single Podcast, hosted by Kelly Werner