I chose to make flyers for the non-profit organization Youth Villages because I wanted to encourage adults to adopt older teens before they age out of the foster care system with the help of foster care and adopted teenagers. The teenagers will give prospective adoptive parents a positive insight on how teenagers can easily get accustomed to a new environment. Many prospective adoptive parents get discouraged from adopting teens because they wereinformed about the complicated ordeals many foster care teens experience while transitioning from an ordinary life to a foster care life. To get a large percentage of college students to attend this informative meeting, the flyers will be hung in the Hodges Library and the Office of the Provost, which is in Andy Holt Tower. To get a large percentage of thirty to forty-year olds to show up to the informative meeting, posters will be hung in work settings that work with different family services, cafes, and YMCA. I chose YMCA because many older people go there to work out, but a lot of community service with foster care teenagers takes place there as well. The primary audience for the yellow, purple, and brown poster is for college students who either aged out of the foster care system or was adopted. The primary audience for the red, brown, and crème poster is adults who are between the ages 30 and 40.
To appeal to both of the audiences, I used a pathos appeal. On both posters, I used pictures of families who adopted many diverse teens into their family or a group of diverse teens and young adults to express the feeling of accepting teens or young adults no matter the ethnic background. The one element that I chose to emphasize in the poster for college students is free food. Free food will...
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... them to adopt older children.
From a personal experience of speaking at one of these meetings, I can say that it is definitely not easy speaking to older adults about foster care and adoption. What I can say I learned about the meeting is that a positive story can change the lives of many other teenagers who want a stable home and someone they can call their parent. I wanted to create these posters because it is important to me to share with the community that adopting older children are blessings in disguise. Creating this poster helped me contribute to a non-profit organization without donating money. This project also helped me learn that strategizing what movement and rhetoric to use for two different audiences will impact how successful the poster will be in getting people to come out and change the opinions about teenagers in foster care wanting to be adopted.
...t with a child in the foster care system. This paper gave me the opportunity to learn the positives and the negatives as well as more details about the little parts of the foster care system that I didn’t know existed. Even though my focus is to help the child and think about their best interest, this paper showed me that the parents, both biological and foster, are another important factor that helps the children. It made me realize that I will need to meet the parents and work with them to make a plan that fits their life. I will need to figure out what issues they feel are important to fix and how to get to those solutions. Foster care is a complex system that will challenge me daily if I enter the into this specific field but even if I work with children in a different environment I need to be aware that children come from all different types of backgrounds.
...ices, the medical field, teachers, and administrators could all benefit from reading about Kathy and her family. People who are considering taking part in fostering certification should definitely read Another Place at the Table. The events she walks the reader through are not common events taking place in the traditional family. It would help any professional who may be exposed to the Social Service System to understand the systematic process that a child in foster care experience, the good, and bad. So many professionals are mandatory reports and they know nothing about the system as it relates to the child’s experience. Hearing how these children and the foster homes they occupy could benefit from quality assistance and support would provide improvement to the system.
Many potential adopted parents have experienced heartbreak, anguish and other problems that can be associated with adoption. There is an imbalance in the Nations foster care system and the system needs to be strengthening and the quality of services improved.
When I heard the clicks of heels in the hallway, I sat up attentively on the waiting couch. A pleasant looking woman came to greet me. She was in her mid fifties and introduced herself as Celeste Drury. She worked with the children home society, an adoption agency that is located in Oakland. I found Celeste through a family friend. The family friend knew my interest in learning about adoption and the criteria used for adoption processes. I was excited to meet Celeste and to learn about what she did. Settling in my chair, Celeste slightly cheered me. Celeste orphanage was licensed under the adoption agencies act. It has been in existence for many years. Children home society is in charge of providing adoption services in the entire state of California. I asked Celeste of its role and she said that it “helps parents to make informed decisions about their children, and also give tips on the adoptive parents” (Drury).
I value words as more than mechanisms of communication, but as depictions of one’s character. The words: determination, caring, compassion, goal oriented, and resilience accurately depict my character. I am very kind hearted and caring individual who will go out of my way to help people in need with no expectations of reciprocation. I keep at a problem until it’s solved and do what is necessary to complete all tasks. My knowledge and skill set as a Pediatric Registered Nurse can contribute to Junior League’s focus on children’s welfare and education. Unfortunately at my work, I come across too many incidents of children requiring foster care due to inadequate parenting. I see a huge need for organizations, like Junior League, to raise awareness and funding for these children to give them a life they
In 2002, 51,000 children were adopted through the foster care system. The federal government tracks the number of adoptions from the United States foster care system, and all of its international adoptions. It’s estimated that around 120,000 children are adopted by U.S citizens each year. Half of these children are adopted by individuals not related to t...
The Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA) was as a response to growing concerns about “foster care drift”; that is, children experiencing multiple, unstable foster care placements over extended periods, children virtually lost within the child welfare system (Rockhill, 2007). The ASFA has become a very important and much needed policy that helped with placement and safet...
The foster system intends to place children in homes where they will remain until they can find permanent residence with an adoptive family. Sadly, this is often not the case with children placed privatized homes and they end up bouncing from home to home until they eventually age out of the system forced to enter into adulthood with no permanent family ties. Over the past decade the number of teenagers aging out of the system without a permanent family has risen from 19,000 to 23,000 per year. These teenages enter into the world without emotional, relational, or financial support and therefore possess a greater risk of poverty as well as low academic achievement. This causes many of these teenagers to rely on government benefits during their adult lives which places a heavier burden on taxpayers. The National Council for Adoption reported that the 29,000 teenagers that aged out of the system in 2007 will cost over one billion dollars per year in public assistance and support. These teenagers who age out are also found to be at greater risk of concerning behaviors, such as: creating disciplinary problems in school, dropping out of school, becoming unemployed and homeless, becoming teenage parents, abusing alcohol and drugs, and committing crimes. The privatized system does not have the best interest of the children in mind and
This paper will view two theories as it pertains to human behavior and the development of adolescent youth who are in the foster care system. The two human behavior theories, which will be discussed, are the psychosocial theory and the labeling theory. The key concepts of each human behavior theory will be compared and contrasted, as it relates to the marginalized population, adolescent youth in foster care. The purpose of this paper is to view how youth in foster care interact in their social environment, at the adolescent stage of development where forming their identity is pertinent to completing that stage. While adolescents in their normative stage of development deal with identity formation, adolescents in foster care have to deal with
The song “Independence Day”, by Martina McBride, gives the account of an 8-year-old girl’s life, ravaged by her father’s alcoholism. The song ends when she is sent to “the county home,” leaving the listener to wonder, “What next?” A life in foster care is next for that little girl and many others like her. Over 530 thousand children were in foster care in 2009 (“Sexual Abuse: An Epidemic in Foster Care Settings?”). For these foster children, their stay in foster care will affect their future for the rest of their lives. Research proves that our country’s poor foster care system results in negative effects ranging from poverty and joblessness to psychological and physical problems. Programs centered on family preservation, stability, and preparation for the future will help these children later in life.
Foster care is an agency that takes in more than 250,000 children EVERY year. With this many children entering the system every year; the amount of problems on finding the right caregiver for the child increases tremendously. When these problems are created there are many effects that can happen to the child that can last short-term and unfortunately long-term. Fortunately, there are multiple solutions for these problems that everyone can do so that everyone's position is improved. Foster care agencies can create negative situations due to the selection of the caregiver and the plethora, deluge, profusion, surplus, vast, prodigious, immense of problems that are created; however, there are several pathways that either party can take to improve the unpleasant situation and its effects.
According to American academy and adolescent psychiatry, about 120,000 children are adopted in the United States alone. That is a lot of children that need to find a new home to stay in. Not only do adoptions affect the child after they are adopted, no matter the age; but adoption also affects the parents giving their child up for adoption. There are many types of adoptions. Along with that, there are many reasons for giving the child up for adoption. There are three main perspectives that I will be talking about. One function would be the structural functionalism. How society cooperates. The second would be the conflict perspective. The third would be symbolic interactionism approach. There are many different aspects of adoption, making it
Government statistics, newspaper articles, and thorough research projects have been completed to answer the question, “is there a problem in the foster care system?” The results have revealed that a serious problem exist within foster care in the United States. At any given time there are approximately 542,000 children in the foster care system (Dept of Health). This number continues to rise each year. In 2001, 290,000 children entered into foster care, while only 263,000 children left the system (Dept of Health). Of the 263,000 children that left foster care in the year 2001, 31% were in care for over two years (Dept of Health). Nineteen percent of those children were in foster care for one to two years (Dept of Health). Two years is an unacceptable amount of time when taken into consideration that between the ages of 8 and ten are critical developmental years in a child’s life. The average age of the a child leaving the foster care system in 2001 was 10.2 years old (Dept of Health). The amount of children per foster home at any given time is another problem. The average number of children per home in the foster care system is 3.7, which is up from 1.4 in 1983. Although 3.7 children is an average per home, there are claims that tens of thousands of homes have 5 – 8 children at once (C...
Many people grow up in loving families and cannot imagine not having their parents and siblings around, but each year, 18,000 or more American born babies are put up for adoption (Newlin Carney). That means at least 18,000 children face the harsh truth of maybe not having a family to grow up in. Childhood is a very important part of one’s life and helps shape who one is. These children that are eligible to be adopted just need loving parents, good homes, and stability. And who is to say the high price of adopting is not ho...
The foster care program has become such a huge thing worldwide. It can help to provide children homes and families which they would not be able to find otherwise. Foster care programs also offer temporary food, domestic care for children from birth to age eighteen. While programs laws and rules are different from state to state, typically foster care is used by children 's welfare services when a child is identified as having been orphaned, abandoned, abused, or neglected. At the same time though it has a negative impact. The foster care system hurts the structure of the family unit which has existed for centuries. Foster Care has become better and better as time goes on. Before, there would be people who scam the system and it was hard to