The world of foster care has been given a wonderful gift in the new movie Instant Family. It does a better job covering what to expect as a foster parent than any of the material my husband and I encountered during our own licensing process five years ago. Instead of having prospective caregivers go through their orientation process, state agencies should just hold regular screenings of the film.

Instant Family, starring Mark Wahlberg and Rose Byrne, follows Pete and Ellie, a childless couple who decide to start a family by adopting children through foster care. After meeting a teenage girl at a picnic designed to allow prospective parents to meet foster children, they pursue becoming her parents. When they learn that she has a younger brother and sister, the couple, who are white, agree to take all three children, who are Hispanic. Overnight, a transracial family of five is born.

Our foster care journey began much the same way. Before we were married, my husband and I had already decided that we planned to be a foster family. I had read some stories in the news, years before, about children who were abused in foster care, and I decided that rather than add more children to the population, I wanted to be a mother to children in foster care — whether or not I ever adopted them.

After two years of marriage, we began the process of becoming licensed, and before our third anniversary, we had our first placement: a “sibling set” of two. Within a year, their mother had given birth to another baby, and he joined our family too. Two years after our older children entered foster care, we adopted them. Nine months after that, we adopted the baby as well.

Unlike the family in the film, we have continued to open our home to children in foster care. In addition to our three adopted children, there was the premature baby born with opiate addiction who was with us for seven weeks; the 11-year-old boy discovered living with a pedophile in a homeless camp in the woods behind a grocery store who was with us for eight days; two brothers who, after spending two years in foster care, had recently been reunified with their mom, only to be returned to foster care a few weeks later; and more than half a dozen other children who have come and gone, each with his or her own unique, yet somehow universal, story.

Having seen the need, and having learned so much about caring for children with trauma in their backgrounds, we plan to continue fostering for many years to come. Being a foster family is our normal. We view it as practicing hospitality — entertaining angels unawares.

It might feel like an unusual family setup. But for us it’s our way of life. So when I saw Instant Family, finally seeing our unconventional lifestyle — the ups and downs, the challenges and triumphs — depicted so accurately onscreen felt like a relief. It doesn’t get everything right, but it comes awfully close.

Instant Family uses humor to tackle the foster care system

Instant Family captures the magnitude of the challenges of America’s foster care system without being preachy. We learn that more than 500,000 children are in foster care in the United States, and that older children and teens, despite making up the largest percentage of children in the system, are harder to place than children under 5.

We learn that siblings usually benefit from being placed in the same home, leading some who think they’re signing up for one child to find themselves welcoming three. Like Pete and Ellie in the film, and many other foster parents we know, that was our experience.

The film quickly delves into the diverse types of people who are foster parents — single, married, gay, straight, brown, white, affluent, lower-income — and the reasons they do it: infertility, being older when they decide to start a family, straight-up altruism, and, yes, sadly, “for the paycheck.”

(The government pays foster parents for child care costs. In the state of Washington, where I live, the basic foster care rate for a child age 5 or under is $562 per month, or around $18 per day, and that rate goes up for older children or children with significant behavioral or medical needs.)

I recognized many of the people from our new foster parents orientation in the characters onscreen. And while the film does depict at least one stereotypical set of jaded foster parents who are clearly only in it for the money, most of the foster parents I know are more like Pete and Ellie: well-meaning people who genuinely want to make a difference in the lives of children by welcoming them into their family.

The film is self-deprecating in all the right places. From calling out The Blind Side (the 2009 film starring Sandra Bullock that depicts an idealized transracial adoption story and for which Bullock was awarded an Oscar) to an awkward exchange between social worker Karen (Octavia Spencer) and Pete acknowledging the stigma of the “white savior complex,” I found myself nodding in recognition throughout the screening.

Teenage Lizzy, played by Isabela Moner, voices another sentiment common in the transracial adoption world: “You’re just another white lady who wants to adopt charity orphans to make you feel good about yourself!”

The honeymoon stage of fostering

When children arrive in a new home, they need time to figure out the rules and expectations in this foreign environment, and they deal with their discomfort in many different ways. Some are cooperative yet guarded, while others lash out or throw tantrums. Either way, the idea of children settling in quickly with “new parents” and accepting their love easily is repeatedly debunked through many scenes, particularly between Lizzy and Ellie.

I confess that prior to becoming a foster parent, I naively imagined a scenario in which a child who had been removed from an abusive or neglectful home would be relieved to be in a safe environment and would trust our motives and intentions immediately. I could not have been more wrong. Children who have experienced trauma do not trust anyone easily, let alone a stranger whose home is so foreign to them.

Foster parents typically don’t realize this at first. When kids are brought to the home, there is often a “honeymoon period” — during this time, children are often on their best behavior precisely because they do not trust their new caregivers. Only as they begin to be able to predict their day-to-day circumstances a bit and become familiar with their caregivers do they start to let their true feelings show.

The filmmakers, including director Sean Anders — himself an adoptive parent via foster care — depicted this honeymoon period in Instant Family with humor and compassion. Right after their foster kids move in, Pete and Ellie go to a foster parent support meeting and describe their well-behaved new foster children only to be met with laughter by the rest of the foster parents who know the phase will come to an end. Sure enough, the kids begin to act out the longer they are in Pete and Ellie’s home.

With our first foster child, who was 5 at the time we took him in, the honeymoon ended on day six of his placement with us, when he was told “no” and instructed to go to his bedroom for being defiant. He pulled his mattress off his bed, flipped his bed frame over, and pulled everything out of his closet, screaming the whole time.

We’ve been through this cycle with many of our foster kids. Trust between a foster child and a foster parent takes time, and in my experience, weathering the season immediately following the honeymoon period is an important part of how that trust begins to grow. It isn’t easy, but I’ve come to learn that as children begin to feel safe and as foster parents gain tools for responding to their child’s unique emotional needs, things do get better with time.

Fostering often ends with reunification with the child’s birth parents

Instant Family also delves into a sad reality that many foster parents experience: the resurfacing of a birth parent out of the blue that can stop a family from adopting a foster child. It is vital for prospective foster parents to understand that — except in cases where parents’ rights have already been terminated — children in foster care are intended to be reunified with their parents.

Of the nearly 500,000 children in the US foster care system on any given day, only about one-quarter of them are available for adoption. Most of the remainder of those children have a court-ordered plan of reunification with their parents. Foster parents must understand that their role in that child’s life is to care for them only until they are able to reunite with their parents.

Of course, this is easier said than done. It is nearly impossible to care for a child for six months or several years and not become attached to that child. When they call you “Mom” and you are the one getting them toilet-trained, documenting their first tooth lost, throwing their birthday parties, showing up for parent-teacher conferences, comforting them after a bad dream, and administering Band-Aids to their scraped knees, you are profoundly invested in their well-being.

Beyond the challenges, there are also many beautiful moments with children in foster care. Books at bedtime, snuggles in the morning, picnics, dance parties, and introducing them to new experiences are some of my favorite things about foster parenting, let alone taking part in helping children overcome academic and developmental delays and watching them begin to heal and flourish.

Yet more than half of children in foster care will ultimately return home. In the film, Pete and Ellie, eager to adopt their foster kids, must navigate the return of their foster children’s mother when she is released from prison. Suddenly, the possibility that their foster kids will leave their home and reunite with their birth mother is very real.

After two of our children had been in foster care with us for more than a year, a new case manager informed us that their mom wanted to start having regular visits with them again. Suddenly, we had to adjust our expectations and get behind the new plan. The complex emotions of wanting so badly to “keep” these children you have grown to love as if they were your own, while at the same time realizing that they have a mom who gave birth to them and loves them too, is a terribly hard place to be.

This is the experience of many foster parents I know. But it’s no reason not to do it. As Pete and Ellie grew to love each of the children in their care, they ultimately wanted what we all want for our foster children: whatever is best for them, whether that means adoption or reunification (and our own broken hearts).

Instant Family falls short on its depiction of the birth parents

Instant Family isn’t perfect. It should have given more screen time to the foster children’s birth mom, Carla, played by Joselin Reyes. Too often, birth parents are overlooked or dismissed by parents looking to foster or adopt. In the film, Carla is described by one of the caseworkers as “a product of the system (who) never learned to properly care for herself or her kids” — a stereotypical drug addict who vanishes from her kids’ lives.

While I recognize the narrative well from my experience fostering, it is important that birth mothers not be reduced to such two-dimensional caricatures. If I’ve learned anything from getting to know some of the women whose children have been in our care, it’s that there is always more to a person than their biggest mistakes or merely being “a product of the system.”

The birth parent is present, in spirit if not in person, in a foster and adoptive family’s life forever, whether the adoption is open — meaning adoptive parents maintain contact with birth parents — or closed. As the children grow and mature, they will wonder about their birth parents and imagine what they are like. Conversations about genes and DNA, among other things, will prompt hard questions that may or may not be possible to answer. My 5-year-old daughter is grappling with her growing awareness of her life story right now. She talks about her birth mom, whom she has not seen since she was six months old, with increasing frequency.

I maintain that foster care and adoption can be a beautiful thing, and I would not want our family to have been formed any other way. That said, my husband and I often acknowledge that our beautiful family, which is so full of love and joy and laughter, was formed because a woman lost her children and her children lost their birth mother. Our gain was their loss. That truth is always simmering somewhere under the surface, even as we delight in our children and give ourselves fully to raising them as our own flesh and blood.

Still, the last thing I wrote in my notebook as the credits rolled on Instant Family was, “It rang true.” Anyone interested in a primer on the ins and outs of foster care would do well to get themselves to a theater and see the film.

Christy Tennant Krispin is mom to three and foster mom to many. She founded A Fostered Life, an online resource for new and prospective foster parents. She and her family live in Seattle.

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