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November features National Adoption Awareness Month (#NAAM). This has gained enthusiastic support from adoptive parents who wish to declare the benefits of adoption. Adoption provided them children to love and parent and they eagerly share their joy. We must contextualize our enthusiasm and admit that adoption is an imperfect solution. It brings grief as well as joy, loss as well as gain, family fracture as well as family creation. Because we embrace and align with Adoption Attunement, we understand and validate this truth. Our acknowledgment of adoption complexity becomes an act of love.
Note that adult adoptees have initiated a movement in response to #NAAM. #AdopteeVoices strives to counterbalance the societal narrative of adoption as a totally benign arrangement so that conversations also validate #AdoptionComplexity, #AdopteeLoss, #AdoptionReality and strives to create a picture that includes all aspects of adoption, not solely the benefits. We ask that you keep the focus of #NAAM on the need to find families for foster children with any memes that you create, post, or repost. Keep mind, heart, and ears open when listening to #AdopteeVoices, and do not try to refute, counter, dismiss, or invalidate their experiences. Simply listen and glean insight into #AdoptionComplexity,
We uplift the purpose of #NAAM: to be laser-focused on the thousands of children who languish in foster care. Life without a family is lonely, uncertain, and difficult. Foster children need and deserve permanent families. Yet for too many, family remains only a dream, out of reach. Every year, thousands of teens age out of foster care without having been adopted into safe, loving, permanent families. Consider becoming the family they dream of having.
This year in observance of National Adoption Awareness Month, GIFT has created many memes reminding people of this need to find homes for children in foster care. Several are posted in this blog. We encourage you to copy and share them. Help build a movement that finds families for these children. That would be a blessing worth celebrating. The lives of many fosterees could be changed for the better and a blessing that will echo through successive generations.
How will you help raise awareness of all of these important adoption-connected initiatives?
Check out this article that GIFT coach Gayle H. Swift wrote for America Adopts for National Adoption Awareness Month.
