There are many children in foster care, but they are rarely available for adoption before they reach their mid teens and badly damaged from bouncing around through the foster care system all their young lives.
we cared for 4-5 foster children. They were young and were adopted in a short period of time. Our social workers said we would be her worst foster parents because we would get too attached to the children. But we poured ourselves into creating memory books of their first years, and gave those to the adoptive parents. It was a very rewarding time.
We still keep up with one of them.
That’s wonderful! It may be that it differs by state? In my state, they really are rarely up for adoption before their teen years. Out of 8,000 children in the state’s foster care system:
“They said that 408 children are eligible for adoption in the state, and 278 of them are teens.”
So, only about 5% of children in the foster care system are eligible for adoption, and of those, nearly 3/4 are teens. The article also says that 80% are adopted by foster parents. It is likely to be younger ones being adopted by foster parents, leaving almost exclusively the teens available for adoption to couples outside the foster care system.
I get that children are best off with their biological parents when possible, but it seems it takes so many years before it can be determined that will not happen and adoption becomes possible, and the kids are so old, so often having been shuttled from foster home to foster home ... it just seems so sad.