November was National Adoption Month and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, AdoptUSKids, and the Ad Council created a new PSA campaign that encourages prospective parents to adopt older youth from foster care. There are 428,000 youth in the U.S. foster care system and 112,000 are waiting to be adopted. AdoptUSKids’ maintains a national photo listing service for children waiting to be adopted. Since the project launched in 2002, more than 26,000 children who were once photo listed on adoptuskids.org have been adopted and nearly 39,000 families have registered to adopt through the website. Nevertheless, older youth are disproportionally represented – approximately 43% percent of children and youth photo listed on adoptuskids.org are between 15 and 18 years old, but only 17% of those adopted have been in this age group.
Older teens have lower adoption rates than younger children, and they often wait longer to be adopted. But no matter their age, all kids need a supportive, loving home, and the teenage years are a critical period.
The new TV PSAs depict parents exploring creative solutions to parenting challenges, including a father helping his teen daughter improve her grades in French class, and a mother with a cat allergy trying to accommodate her son’s request for a family pet. The humorous, lighthearted scenarios show that even teens still need their parents’ help sometimes. The PSAs end with the tagline, “You don’t have to be perfect to be a perfect parent,” reassuring prospective parents that even if they are not ‘perfect’, they have the ability to provide the stability and security that older youth in foster care need and deserve.
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The PSAs direct audiences to visit adoptuskids.org or to call 1-888-200-4005 (English) or 1-877-236-7831 (Spanish) to receive the latest information about the foster care system and the adoption process.
Check out the PSAs below and link to the Online social toolkit for testimonial videos and images, and social messaging.
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And here are a few additional facts about domestic adoption possibilities.
Why Older Youth?
· All of us – and that includes older youth in foster care who are waiting to be adopted – need and want families throughout life to support us and to share important life events. Learning to drive a car, applying for higher education, and birthday and holiday celebrations are just a few examples of the times in life we need and want to share with family.
· Older youth generally wait longer to be adopted, and have lower overall adoption rates.
· On AdoptUSKids.org, roughly 43 percent of the children and youth actively photolisted are between the ages of 15 and 18 years old. (Most recent stats as of September 30, 2016)
· Families who adopt older youth are providing them with the support and stability of a family during a critical period of normal adolescent concerns and additional self-identity issues.
A Few Facts about Adopting from Foster Care:
· Adoption isn’t expensive. Most adoptions from U.S. foster care are free. The minimal costs that can be associated with them are often reimbursable. In addition, the vast majority of youth adopted from foster care are also eligible for monthly adoption assistance up to the level of the foster care rate.
· Kids are in foster care through no fault of their own. Children and youth enter foster care not because they’ve done anything wrong, but because they have been abused, neglected, or abandoned by the people who were supposed to care for them. Over 100,000 are waiting for the love and security that a permanent home provides.
· Many different kinds of people can adopt:
o In most instances, you’re eligible to adopt regardless of age, income, marital status or sexual orientation.
o You don’t need to own your own home, be wealthy, or have a college degree to adopt. (However, you do need to demonstrate that you can support yourself without any additional income, such as adoption assistance.)
o You don’t have to be a stay-at-home parent or have children already. And you don’t have to be of child-bearing age—experienced parents and empty-nesters are encouraged to adopt.
o In most states, you do not have to be married to adopt. Many children have been successfully adopted by single parents.
o Even families living outside of the United States, including military families stationed overseas, are eligible to adopt from the U.S. foster care system.
