National Adoption Day is in November. On this day, many children are adopted into forever families. What exactly is adoption?
Before a child is born, it grows inside its mother. Sometimes the parents who give birth to children are unable to care for them. Adoptive parents promise to love and take care of that child forever. Sometimes, foster parents take care of the children while they are waiting for adoptive parents to adopt them.
Adoption does not mean that a child was unwanted or that the parents did not love their babies. It means that the parents could not take care of those children right away. So the babies got adopted into their forever families.
Some children are adopted by other relatives, such as grandparents or an aunt or uncle. Some children are born in countries other than the United States and adopted by parents in the U.S. Sometimes birth parents and adoptive parents meet each other. But no matter how they arrived in the family, an adopted child is the child of the parents who adopted them. They are loved in their families. There are many kinds of families, and they are all special!
What Do You Think? A friend asks, “What does it mean to be adopted?” How do you answer?
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