Foster Children - Knowing Their Parent Is Important

It's the start of a new week, and like many people, you may have spent your weekend with at least one family member. Most of us probably don't give it a second's thought about our time with family. We just enjoy, eat, talk, listen, eat, bicker, argue, eat, make up and repeat because it's family, and that's what families do. Unfortunately, this reality is not one that many foster children can related to because often they don't know their family.

It can be difficult to imagine how it would feel to meet a birth parent we had never known. Although she was never a foster child, Faith Hill, country singer and actress, was adopted just days after being born. After she was married, she spent three years searching for her birth mother. Faith gives us an insight into the emotional draw that exists between a child and their birth parent.

"I look like her, and I walk like her. I actually look most like her mother, my granny," Faith said about seeing her mother for the first time. "I just stared at her. I'd never seen anyone that looked anything like me. It was the awe of seeing someone you came from. It fills something."

That "something" is often left empty for foster kids. This lack of parental connection leaves a whole in their heart. There is an overwhelming need for children to know their birth parents. Time and again, we are approached by former foster children to find their parent in Mexico.

Although we do our best to help, foster youth deserve to have a quality effort exerted to locate family members including a birth parent before they age out. Foster kids would have a much higher quality of life if they knew their parent who can connect the child with other family members such as grandparents and siblings.

As a society we owe it to these children to help them, including emotionally. These connections may result in a foster kid moving out of foster care which is the goal of everyone because foster care was never meant to be a place for a child to grow up.

Regards,


  Richard

Richard Villasana
Find Families In Mexico
760-690-3995

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