Your Seat at the Table — Founding 100 Reader Edition

Your Seat at the Table — Founding Reader Sample

Real tools. Real scripts. Real life with teens in foster care.

Your Seat at the Table: The No-Nonsense Guide to Fostering Teens is a practical, lived-experience resource for foster, adoptive, kinship, and relative caregivers who need more than theory—they need to know what to actually do and say when real life happens.

Written by Brooklyn Matthews, former foster youth and foster & adoptive mom, this Founding Reader Sample gives you an early look inside the resource she wished caregivers had when the training ended and real life began.

Inside, you’ll find practical guidance for preparing for a teen placement, navigating the first hours and days, setting boundaries without turning the home into a power struggle, responding when emotions get loud, repairing when you get it wrong, and using real-world scripts when you’re standing in the kitchen thinking, “Okay… but what do I say now?”

At the center of the resource is the Seat at the Table Framework:

Love Without an Invoice. Leave Space. Flip the Pot. Hold the Line. Stay the Same Parent.

This isn’t about becoming the perfect foster parent. It’s about becoming a safer, steadier, more prepared one—while remembering that the young person in front of you has a voice, a history, dignity, and a seat that they should never have to earn.

Love Deeper. Leave Space. Hold the Line. Stay.