A Home Built Twice: Syrian American Families Who Are Choosing to Foster and Adopt

There is a particular kind of knowledge that comes from having been uprooted. It is not the knowledge you find in a parenting manual or a trauma therapy workbook, though those have their place. It is the knowledge of what it feels like to be a child in a world that has stopped making sense—to need someone to simply stay.

For a growing number of Syrian American families, that knowledge has become a calling.

Across the United States, Syrian Americans who survived displacement, war, and the long uncertainty of refugee resettlement are now choosing to foster and adopt children—both Syrian-born and American-born—bringing to that decision a depth of experiential understanding that few prospective parents can claim. Their stories are not simple. They are marked by bureaucratic exhaustion, emotional complexity, and questions about identity that have no clean answers. But they are also stories of profound, deliberate love.

The Decision to Open the Door

Fatima and Yusuf Nassar arrived in Columbus, Ohio, in 2014 after spending two years in a Jordanian refugee camp with their three biological children. By 2019, after stabilizing their household, learning English, and securing steady employment, Fatima found herself unable to stop thinking about the children she had seen left behind—in camps, in overcrowded shelters, in the overburdened American foster system.

"I kept asking myself: what did we survive for?" she says. "Just for us? That felt wrong."

The Nassars became licensed foster parents in Ohio in 2020 and have since cared for four children, two of whom they are currently in the process of adopting. None of the four are Syrian. "People sometimes ask why we did not specifically seek a Syrian child," Fatima says. "I understand the question. But a child who needs a home does not have a nationality requirement. Neither does love."

This perspective—that the impulse to provide safety transcends ethnic or national solidarity—appears frequently among Syrian American foster and adoptive parents, even as many also feel a particular pull toward Syrian children specifically, particularly those displaced by the ongoing conflict.

Trauma Recognizes Trauma

Child welfare professionals who have worked with Syrian American foster families describe a recurring dynamic: these parents often arrive with an intuitive, embodied literacy around trauma that accelerates their effectiveness as caregivers.

Dr. Hana Qassem, a clinical psychologist in the Chicago area who works with refugee and immigrant families, has observed this pattern across her practice. "When a child in foster care acts out, shuts down, or cannot trust," she explains, "a parent who has experienced displacement often recognizes those responses viscerally. They do not pathologize the behavior. They understand it as a reasonable response to an unreasonable situation."

This does not mean the journey is without struggle. Dr. Qassem is careful to note that unresolved trauma in the parent can also complicate the caregiving relationship, particularly when a foster child's behaviors trigger the parent's own unprocessed grief or fear. "The work these families are doing is extraordinary," she says, "but they also need support. They cannot pour from an empty vessel."

Many Syrian American foster parents interviewed for this article described seeking out therapy—both individually and as couples—as a condition of their own sustainability as caregivers. The willingness to do so represents a meaningful shift in a community that has historically approached mental health care with significant cultural reluctance.

Identity at the Intersection

For Syrian American families who adopt children of different ethnic or cultural backgrounds, the questions of identity formation become layered in ways that require constant, thoughtful navigation.

Karim Saleh, a Syrian American father in Atlanta who adopted a Black American infant three years ago, describes the deliberate work he and his wife undertake to ensure their son grows up with a full understanding of both his birth heritage and his adoptive family's Syrian roots. "He will know about Syria," Karim says. "He will also know about the history of Black Americans in this country—the full history, not the comfortable version. We owe him both."

The Saleh household speaks Arabic at meals, observes Syrian cultural traditions alongside American ones, and has built relationships with Black American families in their community to ensure their son has mirrors that reflect his own face. "We cannot be everything for him," Karim acknowledges. "But we can build a community around him that is."

This intentionality—the refusal to assimilate a child into a single cultural narrative at the expense of their full identity—echoes the Syrian American community's broader negotiation with belonging in the United States. These families are not simply building homes. They are constructing philosophies of identity in real time.

The System and Its Walls

The path through American foster and adoption systems is not designed with immigrant families in mind. Language barriers, unfamiliarity with American legal and social service structures, and cultural differences in parenting norms can create friction at every stage of the licensing and placement process.

Fatima Nassar describes attending foster care training classes where she was the only non-native English speaker and where some of the cultural assumptions embedded in the curriculum did not map onto her own experience of family life. "They talked about boundaries, about independence, about how children should be encouraged to make their own choices from a young age," she says. "In Syrian culture, family is more collective. I had to learn how to translate between two ways of understanding what it means to raise a child well."

Advocacy organizations working at the intersection of immigrant communities and child welfare have begun developing culturally responsive training materials and support networks specifically for families like the Nassars. The work is nascent but growing.

What They Are Building

At its core, the choice that Syrian American foster and adoptive parents are making is a choice about what home means—and who deserves one.

It is a choice made with full knowledge of what it costs to be without safety. It is made with the memory of checkpoints, of camps, of the particular loneliness of being a child in a place that does not know your name. And it is made with the conviction that surviving such things does not merely entitle you to build a life of your own. It obligates you, if you are able, to extend that life outward.

"Syria taught me what it means to lose everything," Fatima Nassar says, her youngest foster child asleep in the next room. "America gave me the chance to give something back. I am not going to waste it."