Because there are not enough suitable homes to accommodate them together, some face another painful disruption: being separated from their brothers and sisters. Children entering foster care may already be dealing with the loss of their family home.
5 Oct 2026 | 12:06 The idea grew out of a question Bale began asking in 2008: if children cannot safely remain with their parents, why should they also have to lose the comfort of growing up with their siblings? Bale, best known for playing Batman in Christopher Nolan’s films, first became interested in foster care in 2008. In a May 2025 interview with CBS News, he recalled looking at his young daughter and imagining what life might be like for her if she did not have her parents.
Bale told CBS News that he struggled with the idea of adding separation from siblings to the distress children may already have experienced. Actor Christian Bale wants to change that. Through a foster-care village in Palmdale, California, he is backing a model designed to help siblings stay under the same roof, with professionally trained foster parents and support services within the community. Nearly two decades later, that question has become a purpose-built community — and an attempt to rethink what foster care can offer children beyond a place to live. That thought led him to investigate the foster-care system. What he learnt about siblings being separated troubled him. Children enter foster care for different reasons, including abuse, neglect or situations in which their parents cannot safely care for them. Moving out of their family home can already mean losing familiar surroundings, routines and the people they rely on. For siblings, there can be another loss. Even when brothers and sisters enter care at the same time, suitable placements may not have enough space for all of them. Their ages, individual needs and the availability of trained carers can also affect where they are placed. He began working with Tim McCormick, an experienced foster-care professional, to develop a different approach. Physician and film producer Eric Esrailian later joined the effort as a co-founder, alongside Bale and his wife, Sibi. The result was Together California, a project intended to make keeping siblings together a central part of the care model rather than something that happens only when circumstances permit.
A 2022 study published in Children and Youth Services Review examined 2,297 children in foster care. That relationship can provide familiarity when nearly everything else has changed. Researchers found that children placed with at least one sibling were less likely to experience certain subsequent moves between placements than children who were placed separately from all their siblings. That finding suggests sibling relationships may contribute to stability. For now, Together California offers a different way to think about foster care: not simply as a system that finds a bed for a child who cannot stay at home, but as a community that tries to preserve relationships and build a stable future.
A sibling may be the person who understands what happened before the move, remembers the same family members and shares the same history.
For a child who has already lost the security of a familiar home, that may begin with something as ordinary as knowing their brother or sister is sleeping in the next room. And sometimes, the most meaningful promise a new home can make is that a child will not have to face every change alone. You use AI every day. Now get your AI Quotient. Take the AIQ test Get the latest Lifestyle News and more. Download the TOI app.