I know a lot of people who foster. There’s generally two situations, ‘foster to adopt’ and ‘emergency placements.’
Emergency placements are when a 13 year old shows up in the middle of the night with a trash bag holding the sum total of their belongings because they were in a dangerous situation and while the courts figure things out they need a place to stay for a couple weeks.
Long term fosterage is often done with the hope to one day welcome the child legally into your family. I know two different young couples who raised infants into toddlers and had to ‘give them back’ to families who were strangers to the child.
They knew the risks, that doesn’t mean it hurts any less
“Have you tried not being poor? No? How about forgoing a creature comfort to spite a big company in an ineffectual boycott?”