Foster Care Isn’t Perfect: Retired Doctor Shares the Joys and Challenges of Fostering Adolescent Boys

When Timothy Murphy, MD, decided to become a foster parent, he knew that he wanted to provide a home for adolescent boys.

It wasn’t just because teenagers, especially teenage boys, are disproportionately represented in the U.S. foster care system, and he wanted to fill a need. Tim chose to foster adolescent boys because he had experience working with this population as a doctor and knew this was where he could make the greatest impact.

Tim spent the first part of his career as a teacher in St. Joseph and Kansas City before he pursued his medical degree. In 1987, he graduated from KU School of Medicine and did his residency at Children’s Mercy Hospital before spending the next twenty years as a general pediatrician in St. Joseph, Missouri. While in practice, he began to recognize the unique needs of adolescents and how different they were from younger children.

He pursued that interest and opened the Heartland Health Ten-Twenty Adolescent Clinic in St. Joseph, named for the age range the clinic was to treat.

Clinics focusing solely on adolescents are rare, and the Ten-Twenty Clinic was even more an exception in how it combined general medicine with mental health. Instead of referring kids for mental health services, the Ten-Twenty Clinic staff met most of their needs on-site.

“That was a winning formula,” said Tim.

While practicing at the Ten-Twenty Clinic, Tim encountered a lot of foster families and learned more about the needs of those in the foster care system. This planted the seed that led to Tim’s decision to become a licensed foster parent following his retirement from medicine.

Tim’s first foster care placement was unconventional at best. It was the summer of 2022; he was halfway through the licensing process when he got a call about a unique foster care opportunity – a 16-year-old boy that Tim knew from his practice.

“Interestingly, I was the first one to hotline his mother,” he explained. In other words, as a Mandated Reporter, Tim had to call Missouri Child Welfare to report suspected child abuse.

The last time Tim saw the boy in question, he was 12 years old. Since then, he had been in a total of 42 foster homes in four years. Tim would be home number 43.

Despite his best efforts, the boy was very belligerent and challenging to work with. After the boy’s third suspension from high school in three weeks, Tim and his case manager decided that it wasn’t going to work.

“It was an untenable situation,” said Tim.

Even with his challenging first fostering experience, Tim remained committed. He officially finished his foster parent training and earned his license in November 2022.

*Emory, his next placement, was eight years old and in the second grade, but cognitively was closer to four and had many needs to address. 

The first thing that Tim did was enroll him in school. Then, he did what he could to connect Emory with peers to help him learn how to develop friendships. Emory connected well with the three young boys next door, so Tim and the parents made a “free-range arrangement” to let the boys come and go between the homes as they pleased.

Tim went the extra mile to ensure that Emory received the quality of care he needed. Every night, he read to Emory from the Chronicles of Narnia book series. Once they finished a book, Tim would surprise Emory by announcing that there was a movie, and they would watch the film together.

“In the course of his half-year here, he progressed one full year behaviorally and cognitively,” said Tim proudly.

During this time, Emory’s biological mom voluntarily terminated her parental rights, which opened him up for adoption. The adoption process went quickly, and Emory was scheduled to move in with his forever family in mid-May.

“They are tremendous people,” said Tim. Tim played an active role throughout the adoption process, offering tours and visits and befriending the adoptive parents. 

Everything was set for a smooth transition when Tim experienced a major heart attack requiring quadruple bypass surgery. Thankfully the surgery was successful, and Tim returned home with support from his son and daughter-in-law. To manage the time that Tim was in the hospital, Cornerstones of Care team members moved Emory to his new home two weeks early. *Shawn, Tim’s third foster care placement, was allowed to remain in the home for the week Tim was hospitalized with a special agreement that he would be supervised by Tim’s 35-year-old son, who kept in communication with Tim.

Shawn was 17 when he came to live with Tim and had been in the foster care system since he was 12. Tim immediately got to work.

Due to a lengthy suspension from another school district, policy did not permit Shawn to enroll in any local high school. And yet, attending in-person school had been a condition of Shawn’s placement. To help Shawn honor that commitment, Tim helped Shawn get involved with Youth Alliance, a locally-funded nonprofit organization that provides services to kids through the age of 24 in five core focus areas: crisis prevention, early childhood education, substance use prevention, youth asset development, and youth empowerment.

For Shawn to qualify for services, Tim had to help him obtain a withdrawal letter showing that he “officially” dropped out of the high school from which he had been suspended. At Youth Alliance, Shawn developed his construction skills and was paid minimum wage for his work. He also worked on his High School Equivalency Test (HiSET). Tim felt that having both an educational credential and a marketable skill were keys to Shawn’s future success.

“He’s like an expert drywaller now,” said Tim.

Tim also helped Shawn get a state ID and open a bank account. On his 18^th birthday, Tim bought Shawn a new longboard after his previous one was accidentally run over by a car.

“He said to me, ‘This is the first foster home I’ve been in that I like,’” said Tim.

And then, Tim found Pivotal Point Transitional Housing.

At first, Shawn was against the idea of moving out on his own. He was considering moving back in with his mom, but his abusive stepfather was still living there. He didn’t want to go through the required life skill meetings, budgeting classes, and drug tests. He’d been in a transitional home before and didn’t want to do it again.

But Tim helped him weigh the costs and benefits and helped convince Shawn that this was a great opportunity.

“He can be there for over two years if need be. They provide a fully-furnished apartment rent-free and all utilities – what a way to start.” 

Unfortunately, when the time came for the interview to move into the apartment, Shawn changed his mind. He had been using marijuana and revealed that he didn’t intend to quit. Despite Tim’s best efforts, Shawn knew he wanted to move back to Southern Missouri and live near his mom – so he did.

“He was 95 percent of the way there,” said Tim. “He just couldn’t get past that finish line.”

Shawn’s story is a reminder that foster care is complex and that sometimes our best efforts with kids can only go so far – but that doesn’t mean it didn’t make a difference.

Two months after moving in with his adopted family, Emory is progressing rapidly and doing better than ever. His adoptive parents send pictures and updates to Tim regularly.

“I got him on a bike with training wheels, and now he’s riding his bike without training wheels; he’s learning to swim,” said Tim. “That’s really a success story there.”

For Tim, the joy of foster parenting is seeing the kids make real progress in life, and he enjoys helping to make those moments happen. Despite his health scare in May, he has no plans to discontinue his work as a foster parent and intends to stay connected with Emory as he navigates the next years of his life.

“I love seeing the kids acquire a sense of stability and knowing that’s possible,” said Tim. And for now, that’s more than enough to keep him going.

*Names changed to protect privacy