I’ve mentioned before that I work 2-3 days per month assessing children from birth to six years as part of a multidisciplinary team, and today happened to be one of my workdays. Probably 50% of the children we evaluate are either current foster children, or were adopted from foster care, and we occasionally see children who were adopted privately as infants as well as a few (mostly mine!) who were adopted internationally.

Today, two of the three children we assessed were biological brothers who currently reside in different foster homes. They are numbers three and four of six siblings we have assessed or will be assessing, and each of the children’s foster parents (there are three sets, each with two of the children) hope to be able to adopt the children currently in their care.

One of the foster dads commented this afternoon that many of their friends and acquaintances think he and his wife are crazy to consider adopting children when they already have seven, two of whom that are already grown and out of the house. He added that people are forever insisting that they have “enough” children, and that they shouldn’t feel obligated to add to their family. His standard reply, he related, is, “I agree with you. We do have enough children. It’s just that they don’t have enough parents.”

I thought this was the most perfect of all possible replies, and told him immediately that I would be stealing it! I also found myself becoming quite emotional because it’s so rare that I run into people who think about adoption the way that we do. His comment also got me thinking, again, about what our obligations are (if any) to the parentless children of the world.

I wrote last month on the topic of adoption as a form of charity, and I suppose this man’s response could be interpreted as coming from a charity perspective. To me, however, it comes across as simple fact: there are many children in the world who need parents. Maybe my perspective is changing a bit because I’m starting to wonder, is it really so wrong to want to adopt out of a desire to do something good?

continued