If you are plugged into the adoption community at all, you probably know that November is National Adoption Month. Even for me, the idea of an entire month being dedicated to adoption can seem a bit much. Do we need an entire month to talk about adoption? How about just a day? If I’m being honest, I think the answer is yes. If we only rely on the media and the Hollywood views of adoption, we don’t end up knowing anything relevant about it.
Hollywood often makes adoption look like some silly, simple, and happy thing. The media hardly talks about it at all. Unless, of course, it covers only the extreme positive or the extreme horror stories. Adoption does need more representation. The “in-between” normal stories need to be told too. The best people to get adoption information, and correct information, are directly from those of us who have experienced it: Adoptive parents, birth parents, and adoptees. Especially adoptees can educate us on what adoption is like from personal expereince. How it feels to be adopted, what could be done better by adoptive and birth parents, and how to move forward with healthier adoptions.
One of the things that National Adoption Month sheds a light on is the foster care system. Adoption from the foster care system is not always the first route a hopeful adoptive parent will take. I completely understand the couple who cannot have a biological child and turn to adoption. They want the same experience, or as close as possible, to their best friend who gave birth to the perfect little baby. They want the experience. They want to bond immediately with no lingering ties attached to the child. The problem is this is a false notion. Babies who are placed as infants have backgrounds too. There are even some studies that argue that a baby who spends more time with their biological mother will have less long-term issues. To quote an article from the National Library of Medicine, “Mothers and babies have a physiological need to be together during the moments, hours, and days following birth, and this time together significantly improves maternal and newborn outcomes.”
In my opinion, this is in reference to biological mothers and their biological children. A mother bonds to her baby for 9 months while pregnant. The baby needs the biological connection of their birth mom after birth. There is no way to fully avoid the primal wound. A baby separated from their birth mother immediately after birth is still separated. That separation lasts a lifetime. Babies are not a blank slate, and they will come to their adoptive parents with a separate medical history, different facial features, different personality traits, and a different beginning of life. An adoptive child’s life may begin 9 months before the placement into the adoptive family happens. That 9 months makes a difference. And I say that from my own personal experience as an adoptee.
The foster care route is not often pursued by hopeful adoptive parents because people aren’t interested in older children. This deeply grieves me as someone who is the older sister to 4 children adopted through foster care. As of 2022, there are close to 400,000 children waiting in foster care. Many of these children have spent their lives bouncing from home to home. And roughly 120,000 of these kids are already eligible for adoption. These children deeply need us to step up and give them a loving home.
If you want to make a difference for a child in need, sign up to be a foster parent. Hopeful adoptive parents need to broaden their horizons beyond just infant adoption. There are older children who need a family right now. Adoption will always cause some sort of separation, a primal wound in a child’s life. Whether the child is adopted immediately after birth, or adopted as a teen. Some sources suggest that there are close to 2 million families waiting for an adoptive placement. Imagine if only a quarter of those families gave up on infant adoption and turned to foster care. Our foster care system would be drained of neglected children. The parentless epidemic in America would be solved.
A few more adoption statistics that I did not know about but that I found fascinating are the number of people that are adopted in America. Nowadays, 1 in 35 people in America are adoptees (from lifelong adoptions). That means if you walk into the grocery store, chances are you will encounter multiple adoptees. Adoption for me is a deeply personal experience. It has impacted me in more ways than I can ever describe. I think about it every day, sometimes multiple times a day. The fact that I most likely encounter other adoptees almost weekly is crazy to me: 1 in 35 is a huge amount of people! Only 37 percent of adoptions in America are through the foster care system (national surgery of adoptive parents). This is a sad fact. For me, someone who has been deeply impacted by the foster care system, I would love to see that number rise in years to come.
I hope some of these statistics helped to educate you going into National Adoption Month. If you are pursuing adoption, I hope you look into some of these stats yourself. More than 20,000 children age out of foster care each year never to be adopted. That means that 20,000 people are left fatherless and motherless every year in America. Statistically, people who age out of foster care without a support system in place are more likely to experience hardship and poverty in their adult lives.
Imagine if these teens had a safe and solid place to land? Imagine if they had someone that cared for them deeply? A place to call home, and a warm meal waiting at the end of the day? I know that having a family would change the course of their lives, even if that family stepped in and intervened when they turned 18. Older teens need adoptive homes too. Even younger kids thrown into the foster care system need mothers and fathers. I hope if you are thinking about adoption, you pray and consider fostering as an option to grow your family.
