November is National Adoption Awareness Month and this year the theme is: “You don’t have to be perfect to be a perfect parent. There are thousands of teens in foster care who would love to put up with you.”
Every year an estimated 300,000 children in the United States enter the foster care system. The current reports indicate there are 518,000 children in the foster care system today and approximately 118,000 are waiting for an adoptive family.
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Each year nearly 9,000 foster children “age out” of the system without having a family to call their own permanently. No family to watch them go on to college, no parents to help plan the wedding, no place to go for the holidays and no grandparents to make their children’s lives special.
The majority of children currently in foster care tend to be minorities, with older African American boys waiting the longest for adoption. Older children and teens often have longer stays in foster care, and age out before a family is found. These young adults leave the system with higher risk for drug use, poor work performance, jail time, and parent more children who often enter foster care as well.
The United States Department of Health and Human Services’ Administration for Children and Families (ACF) has launched a series of public service advertisements (PSAs) to encourage the adoption of teens from foster care.
This campaign uses multimedia PSAs to help prospective adoptive parents understand they don’t need to be perfect to be a perfect parent to a teen from foster care. These ads let the public know there are thousands of teenagers in foster care who “would love to put up with you”.
These PSAs are designed to address prospective parents’ fears and encourage them to realize that they have the ability to be great parents, by taking a humorous look at everyday teen situations. The National Adoption Awareness campaign also provides a call-to-action for prospective parents to adopt and offers important, accurate information about the foster care system and the adoption process.
You should be seeing these PSAs on television, in newspapers and magazines, and on radio. The Advertising Council hopes that through its time tested donated media model they will reach prospective parents from all walks of life and every demographic. Please be sure to come back here and post a comment if you see or hear any of these ads.
For more information about National Adoption Awareness month be sure to visit www.adoptuskids.org. This site provides information on how to become an adoptive parent and features children available for adoption across the United States who are waiting for loving homes. The purpose of the site is to link eligible children with qualified parents and to promote national recruitment efforts to reach prospective parents for children awaiting adoption.
Related Blogs:
- November is National Adoption Awareness Month
- All I want for Christmas is a Forever Family
- Perfect Parents are Not Required
Special Needs and Adoption-Related Terms: Adoption terms and special needs words may vary from agency to agency. The terms used in this Special Needs Adoption-Related Glossary may be slightly different from one State to another.
A | B | C | D | E-F | G-H-I | J-K-L | M | N-O | P | Q-R | S | T-U-V-W-X-Y-Z
For more information about parenting special needs children you might want to visit the Families.com Special Needs Blog and the Mental Health Blog. Or visit my personal website.
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