When adopters adopt children from foster care?
i don’t think parents that adopt through foster care, or become foster parents view themselves as “hero’s” at all. I think they are mostly good folks that are comfortable expanding their families and provide unconditional love to all their kids and charges, including the ones in temporary placements. Like any parent, their reward is the child being successful in life. Like any government controlled system, foster care has it’s issues. There are great state run systems, and not-so-great. The issues people hear about are the ones that give the system a bad name. For every 1 bad story, case workers could probably name about 1000 good ones. Good stories aren’t ‘spicy’ enough for media coverage. I recently learned about the stigma of being labeled ‘a foster child’ from another Y!A user who spent time in the system. It’s significant, and unjustified. The last thing these kids want is pity. If anything, the KIDS deserve most of the praise. Not the parents that adopt them. The kids are the one
I don’t make any claims to being a hero because we adopted through foster care. We wanted to adopt, we looked at the options, and decided foster care was the right route for us. And, I hate it when people tell me that we are “good people” for adopting through foster care. However, there is a general consensus that adoption through foster care IS more ethical and doing what you might call ‘good’ when compared to private adoption. I am not against private adoption, and I don’t condemn people for privately adopting, but I do object to the fact it is a profit making business and that some biological mothers are pressured at a time when they are vulnerable. And, for those reasons, I have, and will continue, to tell people that adopting through foster care IS the better way to adopt. I also do this to counter the bad reputation foster adoption has among many PAPs, who have heard only horror stories about the process or have been told things like “adopting through foster care is getting someo
This answer probably will not be agreed with or liked but oh well! Ya know what, they are better! They are heroes! They deserve that title! Here in America we have over 500,000 children in the foster care system that have been abused, neglected, and left out to dry in an overwhelmed, under funded system! Many never get a home! Many never get a new family! Almost half of our homeless are previous foster kids who aged out with no one! There are thousands of children who cry themselves to sleep at night because they had a crappy home and have to get passed around from one foster home to another like it was their fault they were abused!! I hope every single parent who adopted from foster care is smug because they did save a child in need! Some of us wish we would have gotten that! Shame on you!!!
I don’t think it is fair to lump all adopting families together. I have heard horror stories,however both adopting foster families that I have known have only ever adopted out of love. My Mother-in-law has adopted several of her foster children (everyone that has come up for adoption i believe) and it is simply because she loves the children and feels all children need a place to call home and a family to love them. In fact the only time the subject of any of the children being adopted ever comes up with an outsider would be if they are brash enough to ask do to a child’s ethnicity being different from many of us or because of the age difference between all of her children. As I’ve said I’ve only met two foster families and both were wonderful loving people, I’m sure there are those out there who like to brag about “saving a child in need” but unfortunately there are people like that in the world.
