Wonderland 2020

A-2: Find the Key to the Garden

WONDERLAND
A. "Down the Rabbit Hole" | 2. "Find the Key to the Garden"

Prompt ▼

Create a blog entry (or static item) about an opportunity of a lifetime – a key to achieving something very important. Do not drop your gloves and fan! (<1000 words)

According to UNICEF, there are roughly 153,000,000 orphans worldwide.

According to the Department of Health and Human Services, there are approximately 443,000 kids in the foster care system of the United States on any given day.

According to the Adoption Exchange Association, 55,000 of those foster kids are in my home state of California.

These statistics are some of the many reasons my wife and I decided to grow our family by undertaking the journey to foster-to-adopt. We spent 2018 getting certified and cleared to accept children into our home, the first half of 2019 waiting for the right placement, and the second half of 2019 acclimating to the addition of a five-year-old boy and his (now) eleven-month-old baby sister into our home. We became parents literally overnight, and the past eight months since then have been an absolute blur.

It wasn't too long ago that my wife and I were pursuing our own biological children. Not for lack of ability, nor for lack of trying, that reality never materialized for us. When faced with the possibility of invasive and expensive fertility treatment options, we kept going back to the statistics I listed above, and thinking about all of those amazing kids who were already born and in need of a stable, loving family. We put the fertility plans on hold and started filling out our paperwork to become foster parents, with the intention of hopefully adopting our children out of the foster care system.

This blog post isn't about how becoming a parent has filled a missing piece of my heart. (But it has.)

This blog post isn't about how you should really consider fostering kids yourself. (But maybe you should, if you can?)

This blog is about the important work of caring for orphans. There is a substantial shortage of good homes to take in these kids, and an even more pronounced limitation on resources available to help those who do, which is why so many of them bounce around from bad foster home to bad foster home, why so many of them live in dangerous group homes, and why the foster system has such bleak outcomes for kids who find themselves - for various reasons - in that system for an extended period of time. These kids, the vast majority of which did nothing to bring their circumstances on themselves, need dependable people to help them break the cycle.

Not everyone is able to actually take foster children into their homes. But there are myriad other ways that you can make a difference, including:

          Donating money to a nonprofit or charity that provides resources for foster kids and families.

          Donating time by volunteering for said nonprofits or charities.

          Donating goods or services or time to the foster kids and/or families themselves.

There are approximately 4,464 towns or cities in the United States with 10,000 or more people living in them. If each of those towns or cities took responsibility for 100 kids, the U.S. would have ZERO orphans. Even in the smallest town of only 10,000 residents, that's only 1 in every 100 that would have to commit to caring for a foster kid.

There are also 400,000+ churches, mosques, and other religious institutions in the United States, which means that if every religious community took in one child, there would also be almost no orphans in the country.

This is not an insurmountable problem.

One of the things about our family's foster-to-adopt journey that's always made me incredibly uncomfortable is the praise we've received for doing it. People are constantly saying things like, "You guys are exceptional" and "You're doing something that not a lot of people can do." And while some of that discomfort comes from me generally being praise-averse, it's also uncomfortable because my wife and I aren't doing anything exceptional... we just said yes.

We agreed to step outside our comfort zone and help in whatever way we were able. For us, that mean taking in two foster kids who needed a home. For someone else, that might mean four kids. Or no kids, but instead volunteering to babysit for a neighbor who does have foster kids and needs a break. Or donating a few bucks, or some old baby clothes, or toys your own kids have outgrown, to someone in the foster system who will be able to put those resources to good use.

I'm not going to pretend like fostering children isn't difficult. (It really is.) In addition to standard parenting fare like feeding, clothing, disciplining, and basically keeping your littles alive, you also have to contend with seemingly endless social worker visits. And court hearings where there's the constant risk of them giving the kids back to the birth parents to make another go of it. And keeping a log of all the medications you've administered to the kids ... and the clothes you've bought ... and the allowance you're setting aside for them. There are a hundred annoying little rules you have to follow to be in compliance with state and federal law that no biological parent ever has to even think about.

But, at the end of the day, I suspect being a foster parent is a lot like being a biological parent in that it all comes down to just buckling down and doing the work. You do whatever you have to do in order to raise children as best as you know how. No matter how many hoops, or setbacks, or surprises, it's a matter of survival. One day at a time, doing the best you can.

Caring for foster youth has been the opportunity of a lifetime.

It's the key to something very important for the world at large.

You can play a role in that important work and opportunity of a lifetime too. You just have to say yes, in whatever way makes sense for you.

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999 words