Soldier Chooses Her Son Over Her Service

No matter how loyal one is to the military, there’s not a parent alive who can’t sympathize with the predicament of Alexis Hutchinson, a 21-year-old single mother and army cook who refused to deploy to Afghanistan because she had no one to care for her son. Hutchinson is currently confined to Hunter Army Field in Georgia and may face criminal charges, depending on what the Army’s investigators turn up. Continue reading »

Too Dumb to be a Mum?

Surely, we’ve all come across people who we’ve thought maybe shouldn’t have been parents at all — I’m quite certain most people feel that way about me.  And we’ve all done really stupid things on occasion.  But are there people who shouldn’t be parents simple because they aren’t smart enough?  Social workers in Fife, Scotland seem to think so.  Which is why Kerry Robertson is on the run despite being 29 weeks pregnant.
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Every Kid Deserves A Family

Kids are different from grown-ups: they don’t know everything, they can’t take care of themselves, and they have much to learn.  That’s why they need parents and caregivers — to teach them what they don’t know, take care of them, and keep real world distractions at bay so that they can concentrate on learning, growing, and maturing.  Unfortunately, for a myriad of reasons, not all kids have families.

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Federal Program Aims at Increasing Adoption of Black Foster Kids

While only about 15% of U.S. American children are African American, over 30% of the children in U.S. foster care are Black.  A new federally funded campaign aimed directly at encouraging Black parents to adopt Black children from foster care launched this week to try and balance some of the disparity.

Programs to help place children with biological relatives have already moved the numbers of Black children in foster care from Continue reading »

Pro-Gay Family Judge Demoted in Miami

The judge who overturned Florida’s ban on gay parents adopting children has been demoted.  Judge Cindy Lederman made Florida history in November 2008, granting the adoption of the children of a gay foster dad who had been raising them all their lives.  Judge Lederman called the ban  unconstitutional.

After her ruling, the state Continue reading »

Ohio Cuts Funding to Foster and Foster-Adoptive Families

Ohio Cutting Funds to Help Foster In the latest sad story of state budgets getting desperate, Ohio is planning cuts that will directly and negatively impact the well being of foster and adoptive families across the state.

After last year’s raise from the $250 per month to $300 a month–a raise twenty years coming–the stipend for families adopting foster children will be cut to $215 per month.

This is just one example of the negative repercussions Continue reading »

Single Black Women Step Up and Adopt

There is a well documented racial imbalance in the child welfare system in the United States.  A Black child is many times more likely to be in foster care or state custody than a white child.  (For example, in New York, a Black child is 10 times more likely to be in state care; in Chicago, 95% of the children in care are Black.)  And though Continue reading »

Dad Who Dumped 9 in Nebraska Expecting Another

Remember the Nebraska child haven fiasco of 2008? The straw that finally broke the law’s back was the dad who dropped not one but NINE of his kids off at a hospital.

Gary Staton’s back in the news, but he’s not getting his kids back. Instead, he’s having ANOTHER one. Continue reading »

Michigan Reduces Adoption Backlog; Now How About Second-Parent Adoption?

A wonkish little report out of Michigan hails a 14 percent increase in adoptions across a thirteen-county area from 2007 to 2008, after efforts focused on identifying and removing obstacles to finalizing adoptions of children “who had a goal of adoption and an identified adoptive parent, yet had been waiting for more than a year for the adoption to be finalized.”

Aiming really high aren’t we?

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