I think there's a need for more oversight by social workers, because there are a lot of foster parents who are just collecting checks. They need to look closely into the backgrounds of the people whose hands you're putting the kids into and then continue to monitor them.
I have a family member who was in the foster system briefly, and so I've kind of grown up knowing about it myself.
There's a lot of people in my family who've adopted children.
Sometimes a child will get lucky and be placed with foster parents who are loving and supportive and who consider that child their own. But for many, that doesn't happen. Kids are moved around from home to home, to group home and institutions, until they are 18, when they are considered adults and the system is finished with them.
Foster care was a big part of my life.
My foster parents were very religious. They told me that they had not decided to take me in, rather that it was God that had decided it for them.
Orphans Preferred
Riders were required to read the Bible and pray ever day.
Because adoption meets the needs of children so successfully, and because there have long been waiting lists of couples hoping to adopt babies and children, it would seem that the solution for abused or neglected kids was obvious. But not to the do-gooders. To remove a child from an abusive parent, sever the parent's parental rights, and permit the child to be adopted by a couple who would give the child a loving home began to seem too 'judgmental.'
Family doesn't necessarily mean that you have to have a mother, a father, a little brother, and an older sister.
There are so many kids in this world, and in this country, that need homes. And so we're perfectly content to look into adoption one day, if for some reason we aren't able to have a biological child.
The story of Kal-El is actually a great story about adoption. He is an alien who has embraced his human side. As much as he loves and honours his heritage, and he needed to know where he came from and discover who he was, he has to decide who he is going to be.
I always thought I would adopt. Even when I was young, I used to look up how to adopt.
The most violent and troubling stories become part of our national consciousness about foster care.
I moved up over Lower East Side and I was adopted by eight foster parents; I lived all over New York City with these parents, man, till I was about ten years old.
On November 15th, 2008, in over 300 cities, 4,000 children were adopted in one day.
We were pressured to accept kids we were not qualified to handle. And we do that to people all the time, which is why we don't have enough foster parents.
I wanted to make a film - and I've been wanting to do this for 16 years - about life in care, and bring it to the public's attention, because I had never seen anything, on TV or in the cinema, which said: 'This is how it feels to be a kid in care'.