Today is National Adoption Day, which you may have guessed by the title of this blog post and also by the MJL homepage this week, which focuses on Jewish adoption. Besides our excellent article, I’ve read two interesting blog posts about adoption today. The first one is from a favorite blog of mine, This Woman’s Work, where Dawn, who is Jewish and adopted her daughter, writes:
National Adoption Day Is Not My Holiday
And I’ll tell you why.The whole point of National Adoption Month and National Adoption Day is to bring families to kids waiting in foster care.National Adoption Day is a collective national effort to raise awareness of the 129,000 children in foster care waiting to find permanent, loving families. For the last eight years, National Adoption Day has made the dreams of thousands of children come true by working with courts, judges, attorneys, adoption professionals, child welfare agencies and advocates to finalize adoptions and find permanent, loving homes for children in foster care.
It’s not for folks like me who adopted an infant in a private domestic adoption; it’s for the kids who are waiting.
I feel like it’d be hypocritical to wax on about adoption on National Adoption Day (I’m looking at you, Sheryl Crow!) just because I adopted. I mean, my story is sort of anti-national adoption day, isn’t it? Because I didn’t open my home to a child in need. I wanted to be a parent again and I deliberately chose NOT to foster-to-adopt. I’m neither condemning or defending that as a choice; I’m just stating facts.
More…
Meanwhile, Adfreak comments on the adoption Ad Council commercial:
This Ad Council spot by Kirshenbaum Bond + Partners, promoting adoption, does well to avoid the kind of too-cute-for-words approach (adorable kids with perfect teeth) or gut-wrenching guilt trips (adorable kids with perfect teeth menaced by Osama bin Laden) often adopted (so to speak) by such appeals. That said, it also helps explain why teens are difficult to place with adoptive families. That skinny dude whines about the way Dad does laundry and brings over all his dumb jock friends to hang out on the sofa. He’ll probably want an iPhone for Christmas. Still, it could be worse. If he didn’t get adopted, he might even start writing for an advertising blog! So visit AdoptUsKids.org to learn about teens who “would love to put up with you.” Let’s face it, you’re not such a prize yourself.
