Ruminations

Parent-Child Fulfilment

One commonly enough sees the Humane Society and local newspapers combine efforts to entice potential pet adopters by publishing appealing-looking photographs of domestic animals, mostly dogs and cats but rabbits as well, and attaching character descriptions to them to broaden interest among the public in opting to care for abandoned pets. It is difficult to view those photographs without a stirring of regret that living creatures are left in such limbo. And people do respond.

And they seem to respond too, when photographs of children of all ages are posted, with brief descriptions of their personalities, to invite interest on the part of mature adults who might be willing and interested in changing their lives immeasurably by reaching out to children whose most basic requirements in life have failed to be fulfilled. Life in foster care, with its confused impermanence and abrupt departure from familiarity and the comfort of belonging leaves bruised little souls.

There are thousands and thousands of Canadian couples who struggle to come to grips with the reality that they are unable, for one reason or another, to conceive a child. These are the people who are anxious to raise a family of their own. And who often will seek desperate means to attempt to make that dream a reality. Undertaking costly and uncertain-in-outcome in-vitro fertilization in the hopes that their aspirations to raise child of their own may be realized.

Despite the fact that such a struggle, the expense, the anxiety and the pain associated with it, could be by-passed by a decision to take into their care children whom an unhappy fate has abandoned to the care of others than their natural birth mothers and fathers. There are some 30,000 children awaiting adoption in Canada, living with foster parents but hoping for 'forever parents' to somehow materialize and raise them in a lovingly supportive environment.

The average age of adoptable children biding time in the country's foster care systems is six years of age. From that age to the supposedly last-ditch age of nine years of age, when it becomes highly unlikely that a child will be chosen for adoption, these children wait out the years hoping against hope that someone might find them appealing and wish to raise them as their own.

And those who do make that decision end up with a child wild to have a home of their own and parents dedicated to their welfare, and who will love and cherish them, but whose personality may also have been impacted by the original rejection that left them without the care of their own birth parents. Patience and loving support can be stretched beyond endurance, but enduring most often results in the comfort of acceptance and a hurt soul made whole again.

The Adoption Council of Canada is a fledgling organization dedicated to the task of bringing together foster children with sets of people prepared to welcome them into their lives. They mount a Heart Gallery with the photographs of children awaiting adoption, as a fledgling group, inspired by the American parent group which has 120 galleries in the U.S. to Canada's three.

Alberta's Ministry of Human services has succeeded through its adoption profile and photographic website to find adoptive homes or private guardianships for 532 children in the last year alone. Sharing photographs with prospective parents has proven to be successful in attempts to 'recruit' people to become adoptive parents. Children deserve no less.

In the United States, over 100,000 children await permanent homes. On websites devoted to attracting attention to potential adoptions, there are over three thousand child photographs and descriptions of children hopeful of being discovered by those who will recognize their need and wish to fulfill both their own and the children's most elemental needs, to be loved and cared for.