A great foster parent can end the cycle of abuse and neglect, and impact not just the foster child's life, but also that child's future children's lives, the lives of people who would otherwise be victims of a lost foster child's crimes, and help end human trafficking and homelessness.
I was worried if you adopted a foster child, someone from the birth family could still come and take her back. I was afraid that any child in foster care might have suffered such trauma or neglect that she would be impossible to reach. I'm not proud of these fears. But I understand now when others ask me the same questions.
As I presided over Massie's execution, I thought about the abuse and neglect he endured as a child in the foster care system. We failed to keep him safe, and our failure contributed to who he was as an adult. Instead of spending hundreds of millions of dollars to kill him, what if we spent that money on other foster children so that we stop producing men like Massie in the first place?
I am extremely active in the foster care crisis in this country. Everything that I do is pretty much with the end goal of trying to make a difference in the lives of the children in foster care.
Child abuse continues to be a significant problem in the United Sates. It was estimated that 2001,903,000 children were the victims of child abuse or neglect. Child abuse is a crime perpetrated on the innocent and the defenseless.
Research on child abuse suggests that religious beliefs can foster, encourage, and justify the abuse of children. When contempt for sex underlies teachings, this creates a breeding ground for abuse.
I'm not proud of this, but I had a lot of misconceptions about American foster care. To me, foster care meant that a child would be placed with you, then taken away. I didn't want to go through all of that.
I have spent a lot of time with foster children over the years - kids for whom I have not necessarily acted as a foster parent.
I am not only the person who wrote and sold a novel while raising a houseful of biological and foster children; I am also the person who wrote a horrific young adult novel that never sold and gave up on a foster child I couldn't handle - an experience that still haunts me.
The so-called mother of the child isn't the child's begetter, but only a sort of nursing soil for the new-sown seed. The man, the one on top, is the true parent, while she, a stranger, foster's a stranger's sprout.
Liberal child welfare experts decided that child abuse was not evidence of a moral or character flaw in the abusing parent. Instead, like poverty, crime, and homelessness, child abuse came to be viewed as evidence of a societal failure.
I believe the best service to the child is the service closest to the child, and children who are victims of neglect, abuse, or abandonment must not also be victims of bureaucracy. They deserve our devoted attention, not our divided attention.
Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.
A conscious parent is not one who seeks to fix her child or seek to produce or create the 'perfect' child. This is not about perfection. The conscious parent understands that is journey has been undertaken, this child has been called forth to 'raise the parent' itself. To show the parent where the parent has yet to grow. This is why we call our children into our lives.
We needed to take a discrete population to give people the confidence that if we can end veterans' homelessness , we can attack chronic homelessness, families and other populations like foster youth, who each have distinct needs.
There are many children who need help, and anyone who wants to reach out and adopt a child from foster care or from a Russian orphanage should reach out and do it.
Children are my pet cause. I have a foster child in El Salvador, and whenever I'm home, I work for the Adam Walsh Foundation, which finds missing children. I also do some hospital visits and other things for the Make-a-Wish Foundation.