 Harper Audio presents 13 Things Mentally Strong Parents Don't Do. Raising Self-Assured Children and Training Their Brains for a Life of Happiness, Meaning and Success. By Amy Moran. This is the author. To all those who seek to make a difference in the life of a child. Introduction Early on in life, I decided that when I grew up, I was going to help kids in need. Throughout my childhood, my parents always helped anyone they could. Both of them were postmasters who seemed to have a special knack for recognizing an underdog. Whether they made anonymous donations to someone in need. Or they lent a helping hand to someone down on their luck. They were generous with whatever we had. It's no wonder both my sister and I became social workers. Both of our parents were unofficial social workers for years. But long before I ever got my social work license, my goal was to become a foster parent. I had grown up knowing that there were kids who didn't have families. Some of them didn't have homes, and many of them never felt loved. So I decided that someday, when I had my own house, I'd take in kids who needed a place to live. When I was in college, I met Lincoln, my future husband. He was an adventurous person who loved to travel, meet new people, and try new things. Early on in our relationship, I told him my goal was to become a foster parent. Fortunately, he loved the idea. Right after we got married while I was still finishing graduate school, we bought a four bedroom house and started the foster care licensing process. We chose to become therapeutic foster parents, which meant we would raise children with serious behavior problems or emotional issues. There were classes to take, a home study process to complete, and modifications that had to be made to our home to meet the foster care licensing requirements. But about a year later, just as we were finishing up the licensing process, my mother passed away suddenly from a brain aneurysm. At her funeral, I heard countless stories, many of them from people I'd never met, about how she helped them in some way or other. Hearing those stories of all the lives she touched reminded me about what was really important in life, the legacy you leave behind. My mother's generosity fueled my desire to help children more than ever. Within a few months, our therapeutic foster care license came through, and our journey as foster parents began. By then, I was working as a psychotherapist at a community mental health center. I worked exclusively with children, many of whom had behavior problems, and their parents. Becoming a foster parent gave me an opportunity to apply the principles I was teaching parents in my therapy office to the children who came into our home. Lincoln and I loved being foster parents, and we began to talk about adoption. None of the children who stayed with us were available for adoption, however. They all had plans to return to their birth families or to be adopted by relatives. So we started looking at the adoption waiting lists to see if we could find a child who might fit into our family well. But on the three-year anniversary of my mother's death, all of our hopes for adopting a child changed in an instant. Late that Saturday evening, Lincoln said he didn't feel well. A few minutes later, he collapsed. I called for an ambulance, and the first responders rushed him to the hospital. I called Lincoln's family, and they met me in the emergency room. I wasn't sure how to explain to them what had happened, and it all happened so fast. We just sat there in the waiting room until a doctor came out and invited us into the emergency room. But rather than take us to see Lincoln, he took us to a small, private room and sat us down. The words that came out of his mouth changed my life forever. I'm sorry to tell you, but Lincoln has passed away. And with that one sentence, I went from planning to adopt a child to planning my husband's funeral. The next few months were a blur. We later learned he died of a heart attack. He was only 26, and he didn't have any history of heart problems. But ultimately, it didn't matter how he died. All that mattered, and all I knew was that he was gone. Fortunately, we didn't have any children living with us at that particular time. I could only imagine how traumatic it could have been for a foster child to have been there. We'd actually had plans for a little boy to move in later that week. When his guardian heard the news, he found him a different foster home. For a while, I wasn't sure I wanted to be a single foster parent. I worked a full-time job, and with foster children, there are always lots of appointments, visits with birth... Sample complete. Ready to continue?