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The Untold Story of National Adoption Awareness Month
Cringeworthy Headlines, Controversial Omissions, and Crazy Hopes for Next Year
Celebrate and celebration are the most popular words in the headlines of articles about National Adoption Awareness Month. For the month of November I signed up for Google alerts on the subject for adoption, and every day my inbox overflowed with dozens of articles, topped with happy headlines. Adoption! What an excellent solution to everyone’s problems, you might think if you’d fallen to Earth from Mars in November. What is this practice that is causing so much joy and so many smiles? Regular families in every state are doing it, and celebrities are doing it too — in fact these famous people can’t seem to get enough of it. Forever homes for everyone!
The sad reality is that scores of children do end up in foster care, removed from birth families that don’t make it to forever. According to child welfare.gov, only three in five children in foster care will be reunited with their parents or other relatives. That leaves over 100,000 children in the U.S. available for adoption. Roughly a third of them will spend at least three years in foster care. For many of these children, and the new parents who love them, adoption is indeed something to celebrate. Other children will endure the tragedy of re-homing…
