Somebody to love me….

Wondering if you are worth anything to anyone…

Wondering if anyone cares about your future….

Wondering if this is what the rest of your life will look like…

Wondering if there is a point to even trying to do your best because no one is there to notice….

I will never forget the year+ that I spent in the US foster care system.  It was a scary and lonely time, full of disappointment, full of experiences I would rather not remember.  I was moved to three different homes in that short period of time (the last family was a sweet Christian family that I will always remember with fondness) and I was separated from my brothers for the first time in my life.

People forget that the majority of children in the foster care system are there because of something their parents did or did not do, not because of something the children have done.

These are not “bad” children, they are children that need to know what unconditional love and permanency look like.

November is National Adoption Month.  Obviously, children in the foster care system are close to my heart due to my personal experience as a child.  I am also an adoptive parent of a child who needed a mom after his biological mother’s parental rights were terminated due to her abuse and neglect.  I am proud to use my platform, my blog to tell you about an organization dedicated to helping foster kids find their forever families.

The mission of AdoptUsKids is to recruit and connect foster and adoptive families with waiting children throughout the United States.  Funded by the Children’s Bureau of the Administration for Children and Families, the national photolisting website contains photos and information about children in foster care. A national adoption public service advertising recruitment campaign was launched in July 2004 in a partnership of the Children’s Bureau, the Ad Council, and AdoptUsKids, with the goal of raising awareness of the significant number of children in this country waiting to be adopted. New PSAs have been developed as an extension of this highly successful campaign. The latest series of ads in this award-winning campaign target the African American community, in keeping with the effort to diligently recruit from communities representative of the children in care.  Thirty-one percent of the children in foster care waiting to be adopted are African American; African American children are overrepresented in the foster care population relative to their percentage in the U.S. general population. Because of this, African American children often wait longer to be adopted.

Please take a moment and visit http://www.adoptuskids.org/adoption-and-foster-care-advocacy/ to learn more about adoption from foster care and how to help spread the word about children in care waiting for a forever family. You can also search for children in their area by visiting: http://www.adoptuskids.org/Child/ChildSearch.aspx.

If you are on Twitter you can follow @perfectparent (http://twitter.com/perfectparent or http://twitter.com/adoptuskids) and become a fan of AdoptUsKids on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/AdoptUsKids.

I was fortunate enough to have grandparents that were awarded custody of me so I didn’t have to spend a prolonged period of time in the foster care system.  There are MANY children that are not that fortunate.  Please consider how you can help them.

This campaign is brought to you by Global Influence, the former Momfluence network.