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Imagine you’re sitting in a small room shared with other kids. Some are older, some are younger. The beds aren’t all that great, you get fed but it’s not exactly a warm family meal like you see in movies, and you don’t always get the attention you really want or need. Those around you are busy doing their own thing and the adults have to take care of each kid, not just you. Suddenly, one day, a miracle has happened. You’re told that you’re going to be adopted. You feel nervous and excited. Who are the parents? Will you finally have a good home? But at the same time, you’re scared. What if they don’t like you? You meet your new parents, and after mutual liking and agreements, papers are signed and you’re on your way to your new home. You might feel one of three things:

A. Willing to accept your new family and act like you’ve been their kid from the start
B. Have a hard time adjusting and might feel anxious and resentment for a while, but there is a possibility that you may or may not feel that you fit in in your new home at all
C. Be naturally accepted as the adopted/foster kid right off the bat and all is well.

The answer is B. Adoption and foster care is not how it is like in the movies. Kids sometimes wait for years to be put into a good home. Most families want their own kids. Most families aren’t keen on bringing in an adopted or foster kid. Not everyone is accepting of the child or teenager which can create problems for the children.

Creating characters that are adopted or foster kids is a very messy thing to do. Naturally, you want to dive right into the stereotypes: horrid orphanage, kids long for their parents to come back and get them, foster kids are put into foster care for committing crimes...erase that out of your head. Now. Whatever you know about it from movies, just trash it while you still can.

Foster care is defined as a place designed to be a temporary living
situation for children and youth who have been removed from their homes due to abuse, neglect, abandonment, or the death of their caregivers. Adoption is permanently keeping a child that is not yours in your own hom and treating them as though they are blood related.

Not all orphanages are bad. In fact, in America, we lack the right resources to give the right care and need for the kids, but not in the abusive way movies make them to be. Or books. We have limited amount of adults to care for the children and limited amount of teachers. Who wants to teach and spend time in a place where kids are parent-less? It’s sad, but not in the ‘oh god orphanages suck let’s make our characters have a rotten time’ kind of way.

Once kids are in the adoption and foster care system, parents can’t come back to get them, despite little orphan Annie’s dream. Biological parents have no way to gain back custody of the child or children once their parental rights are terminated. So even if the parents want to take their kids back, they can’t. There’s a reason why their kids were taken away from them. Sure, not all kids want to be taken away from their parents, but the reasons behind a parent losing their child often involves the parent not being able to care for the child, abuse, or simply no longer wanting the child. Not just death. For those cases listed, often times the child will be put into foster care until either the parents shape up or a new home can be found for the children.

A common misconception of foster care is that children enter the system due to committing a crime. That’s false. Usually, they are victims of neglect, abandonment, or abuse. They might have psychological fears that effect their behavior, but aren’t always going to be messed up like the movies portray us to be. A kid with abusive parents might fear that our foster or adopted parents might grow it be like the kid’s original parents, might be afraid that our new parents might not love us for what we’ve been through. Others might be angry towards the parents and take it out any way they can. Not always violence, but they could go out and get drunk, egg a house, get arrested...they act out because they couldn’t get through to their parents any other way nor do theirr parents care about what they do. We want a reaction to see if our adopted/foster parents really care, unlike our birth parents.

Another thing the child faces is prejudice against family that doesn’t approve of the adoptive/foster child/childreen. This does happen more often than not. As someone who was adopted at a young age, I’ve had problems with my family for as long as I could remember. My adopted mom is fantastic, and my grandparents too, but I have family that refuses to talk to me or love me because I’m not blood related. I know other adopted/foster kids that have had the same problem. Not all families are welcoming of the new child, and if they are, it’s rare.

The older a child gets, the more problematic it could be for them to fit in with a new home, which is why not that many children older than 13 are adopted. People want to raise babies and little kids, wanting the experience of practically raising their own child in a sense. Who wants to raise a kid that’s ready to go to college in a few years? Understand the frustration and uncomfortable feeling that could go on between family and the foster/adopted child. They each have their own goals on what they want, and not all foster care and adopted families are evil. In fact, families need to be screened in order to become a parent to the kids. If the state doesn’t think you’re fit to be a parent, kids have a less chance of being placed in a bad home.

I know you might be disagreeing with me on this or questioning why I know this, but like I said, I went through foster care and adoption. My dad left my mom and I when I was really young and my mom took her life not that much later. I was adopted and raised by a single mom and I have a great life. I would never have succeeded without her. I struggle with family in a sense where, honestly, they don’t like me. I go to family reunions, the family that doesn’t like me ignores me by taking out their phones so they don’t have to talk to me. And then move rooms if I sit down to be with them. I still struggle with these problems to this day to where I’ve been forced to cut them from my life. I only have a handful of adopted family that actually loves me, no matter where I originally came from. I might have a good life, but not a lot of kids like me do.

Not all adoptive families are loving and not every kid is as lucky as I am. I know kids who have gone through the system and have taken their own lives, gone down a dark road of drugs, and have psychological disorders from what they’ve been through. One kid can’t accept hugs or anything like that because his own parents never did that to him growing up. So hugging and touching felt foreign to him. He has problems with making and keeping friends but his foster family is doing their best to help him with this. Life in foster and adoption care is not easy. It’s not a breeze. It’s not always about if the orphanage is horrid or not, but rather the psychology of what kids go through.

-Some statistics to better understand foster care:

-Currently, there are approximately 425,000 children in foster care in the United States. It's estimated that 115,000 are eligible for adoption.

-In 2009, about 57,466 children were adopted from foster care.

-69% of parents who adopt from foster care are married couples, 31% are single-parent families.

-Median age of child in foster care: 8.1 years.

-Race/ethnicity of children in foster care: 38% Caucasian, 30% African-American, 22% Hispanic, 10% other.

-The average child in foster care goes through three different placements and stays in the system for about 30 months.

-Each year, about 26,000 children age out of foster care.

Keep those statistics in mind when you create a character based in this system. Learn your facts and try to make the situation as real as possible. More often than not, kids want to be given a loving home. The only thing stopping them is the legal aspect and the low amount of families wanting to adopt or sign up to be foster parents.

Foster and adopted families have many different struggles from the kids acting out to the parents not knowing how to handle it to the family not accepting the kid to even having the child never finding a family by the time they become legal adults. I suggest watching White Oleander for research. The movie is great on depicting how a child feels through the foster care process. Maybe it’ll inspire ideas for you! Good luck in writing and thank you for reading!