As she begins to feel that her boyfriend is trying to create reasons for her to leave him, a woman tries to understand his difficult past as a child in the American foster care system.

After being disruptive in class, a child is sent to a social worker’s office and ends up telling her she is actually a 2400-year-old child. She meets the rest of the social worker’s family and gets welcomed as a foster child, but her inability to help the aging grandfather regain his youth creates so much resentment in the family that she must run away.

After their mother leaves a preteen and her siblings, the preteen must navigate her emerging adolescence by herself in an orphanage.

One day, a middle-aged couple takes in a child orphaned by a horrible crime.

After a tumultuous and difficult upbringing, a woman contemplates whether or not she should give up her newborn child for adoption.

When child protective services shows up on her doorstep with a stepson she's never met, a woman hauls the kid to her childhood home in Idaho. She finds work as a fire lookout and grows attached to the child, who is put in danger by natural disaster.

A woman addicted to narcotics works as a waitress and fixes up her apartment in hopes of getting back her son from foster care after throwing him against a wall.

Though numerous social workers try to step in, a co-dependent mother and son bounce from city to city, in search of a place where they can be together at all times.

A teacher in Washington tries to comfort one of his students—an orphan who is dying from a chronic disease—opting to be her guardian for the summer even in the face of her looming, imminent death.

A woman leaves her island home to serve at a créche on the mainland in a poor area of the city. There, she falls in love with one of the children she cares for and wants him as her own, but his mother commits a crime that puts the boy out of reach.