Now That National Foster Care Month is Over

May was National Foster Care Month and I was conspicuously quiet on the subject. I did link up a post to Foster 2 Forever’s blog hop, and I did a post for Amanda over at the Declassified Adoptee, other than that I guess I would have to admit I have pretty much have been avoiding the subject. It is not that I don’t care about National Foster Care Month or the state of foster care in general. It has more to do with my general thoughts on the state of the foster care system.

On some level I figured, I’d leave the happy, happy message of national foster care month to those who can cheer “we need more foster parents!” and “adopt foster kids!” Both are true, worthy and important messages. But the fact is the quantity of foster parents is not nearly as important as the quality and training of those willing to become foster parents. The fact is we do not need more families willing to adopt children…there are plenty of those as well. What we need is more families willing to adopt from foster care in this country. We need more families willing to adopt older and special needs kids.

As a society we need more not less access to family planning. We need better sex education. We need better mental health services. We need common sense and compassionate family preservation efforts. We need to stop wasting the time and lives of children with unrealistic goals. We need to understand that there are no one size fits all children and no one size fits all solutions. We need to stop shuffling children around. We need to understand that permanence and consistence are what make children feel safe and that Feeling of safety is the single most important thing that children need to be able to function as adults.

We need to start thinking outside the box. We need to think about children long term. We need to stop selling our kids and society short with shortsighted goals. We need to think about the future.