Who is someone you admire and would love to meet? According to a local news station, for 1-yea- old Christian, it was the players on the University of Arkansas basketball team. He loves playing basketball and it made his day when he met some of the players from the team, played “pig,” and scrimmaged with them. He even received some autographed items from the team.
Christian has been in foster care for three years and is hoping to be adopted by a family. But what if that doesn’t happen and he stays in foster care until he ages out at eighteen? There are a lot of reasons that teens need families just as much as younger kids. Foster/adoptive mom Jessica Good writes, “Less than 3% of those ‘aged out’ kids failed by the system will earn a degree, but 75% will deal with post-traumatic stress disorder. 20% will find themselves homeless.” It is unbelievable that our society allows this indifference.
It may be easy to think that teenagers only have a certain number of years left in foster care, so why adopt a teenager? The need for a family does not go away at eighteen. A family provides them with a support system. Every day in foster care, 64 kids turn 18 and age out, often without a support system in place.
Teenage adoption is about their the life of a child well after 18 years of age and providing them with a family that can be there as a support system for the rest of their lives.
So Christian wants to find his forever family. He hopes to find a family that will appreciate his Hispanic culture. He also said that he values having positive role models. He is a very polite young man who, as his caseworker stated, “just would like a mom and dad to really help him out.”
