I’ve decided that I’d like to one day become a foster parent. Someone’s got to pick up the slack and it doesn’t seem to be the infertile couples.

On NYC’s “Become A Foster Parent” site, they have a “meet our kids” page with pictures of all the kids and short descriptions of them, written to feature the kid’s selling points and endear them to the browsing viewer. It is a catalogue similar to online dating sites or pet adoption sites, or perhaps, donor/surrogate sites. You see a picture of the child, and learn their age and select personality characteristics. The children are rated on their severity of special needs: Medical/physical, Emotional/behavioral, Diagnosed psychiatric, Developmental delay, and Developmental disability.

Many of the children are rated as having severe special needs.

What struck me most, was how many of the kids had their picture taken when they were very young, yet are older in age. To me this meant that they had been in and out of foster care for years- some of them probably ten years total. It broke my heart. And out of 30-40 kids, only one or two were light-skinned. And almost all of the children featured were boys. Apparently, people are more willing to care for girls.

I thought about the practical concerns. As much as I want to be a gift to these kids in need, what am I inviting into my life when I invite a strange teenage boy into my home with documented severe emotional/psychiatric needs? What if, abused by a mother, he doesn’t trust women? What if he doesn’t trust white people? What if he becomes upset and violent and I can’t compete with the muscle and mass of a young male adult? What if what I have to offer isn’t good enough?

If you value ease and comfort, it would be a lot smoother to exit the foster care site and visit one of the many user-friendly donor/surrogate agencies recommended by the American Fertility Association. There you can raise a kid “right”, from the very start, and customize their features as to control the probability that you and your kid will get along and have a lot in common. You won’t have to worry about psychiatric needs, because your donor has been screened for clean mental health history. You won’t have to worry about physical disabilities, because you bought sperm from a former Olympic athlete. You won’t have to worry about racial tension, because your kid will look just like you. Commercial conception has a lot of great… selling points.

But while you’re deliberately creating a kid removed from their heritage and biological kin, defying nature, and rupturing the peace of wholeness in ontology, there are kids out there that need someone to welcome them into the world today. There are kids that need to discover kindness, and truth, and spirituality, and skills. There are kids that need capable ushers into adulthood. And these kids already exist.

How do you express your creativity and skill in parenting? By buying the perfect child? Or by spinning straw into gold through the incredibly difficult, but surely rewarding pursuit of foster-care and adoption?

                 

Categories: General

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