National Children's Mental Health Awareness Day 2024 is on Wednesday, May 8, 2024: What should be done to improve foster care and adoption?

Wednesday, May 8, 2024 is National Children's Mental Health Awareness Day 2024. Children's Mental Health - Get resources, support & training‎ Join the cause. Change is needed.

This is one of those kinds of issues that's hard for anyone to think up a great way to accomplish. The problem is that in order to find the Parents people need to understand more about the Children waiting... and sadly, there are not very many voices speaking up for children who have no one.

When there have been efforts made to create "Recruitment" incentives or information in order to inspire able and willing parents to consider adopting a foster child many have vioced different concerns or objections over just about any logical means of doing so. Or these campaigns have been hijacked by other sorts of things that are only related because they involve the word Adoption.

For Example: National Adoption Awareness Month and National Adoption Day were both inspired and proclaimed to be All About the Children Waiting in the US Foster Care System... A few years pass and it seems that anyone connected in any way with adoption seems to think these proclamations somehow had something to do with whatever their own connection to adoption is...so,

Now everyone Thinks these proclamations are about them--and a soft whisper is heard about the children in Foster Care. It's very Sad and I really wish that everyone would please just give these special days of Awareness to those children who don't have safe parents to complain about.

Another Effort was made in 1997 when Bill Clinton signed the Adoption and Safe Families Act (AFSA) and it made specific statements about: Finding Adoptive Families for Children with Special Needs (special needs include a wide range and most of the waiting children in foster care) AFSA states:

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~Listing children's profiles on state and local websites.

~Exploring adoption by adults significantly involved in the child's life.

~Featuring profiles of children on local television news, radio and newspapers.

~Adoption celebrations.

~Facilitating a statewide exchange of information among social workers about children and awaiting parents.

~Targeting recruitment to local churches for special needs children, including minorities.

~Providing subsidies to relatives and foster parents who become legal guardians, utilizing IV-E waivers.

~Improving stability with better matches between adoptive families and children. Mental health assessments of the child's readiness to bond and the family's ability to meet the child's needs as well as providing training for families.

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