Nearly 110,000 kids need a home in U.S.

Published: November 4, 2024

November is National Adoption Month. The Children's Bureau, within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, created this initiative through a partnership with AdoptUSKids and Child Welfare Information Gateway, to raise awareness of the need for adoption.

This awareness might happen by examining our understanding of adoption, learning about the ways to adopt or discerning if God is calling us or someone we know to adopt.

Adoption can be done in different ways: private, domestic or international, infant adoption through an adoption agency or attorney or the adoption of children of any age through the state foster care system. Have you ever considered adoption for your family? Is it possible God might be calling you to adopt?

"One of the highest forms of parenthood is to take on the responsibility of becoming adoptive parents, prepared to welcome an orphaned or abandoned child as part of one’s own family," said Pope Francis during a general audience in January 2022. "Let us pray that through Joseph’s intercession, fathers of families will be given the grace to respond to their noble vocation, and that the many children in our world who long for a secure and loving home will find a welcome on the part of good and generous families."

Though there are many ways to adopt, National Adoption Month focuses on raising awareness for the need to adopt children in the foster care system. 

According to the Children's Bureau, there are nearly 110,000 children waiting to be adopted in the United States. More than one in five of these waiting are ages 13–17. And the average for all children waiting to be adopted was 34.9 months, or nearly 3 years in foster care.

"The existence of so many children without families suggests adoption as a concrete way of love," St. Pope John Paul II said.

To learn more about adoption through foster care, read this FAQ from AdoptUSKids, or in Arkansas, visit Project Zero or Children of Arkansas Loved for a Lifetime (CALL), which reaches out to churches, including Catholic churches, statewide to help members become foster or adoptive parents. Project Zero has videos of kids in foster care waiting to be adopted.

National Adoption Day is normally the held the third Saturday in November. Cities nationwide participate in this event to finalize thousands of adoptions of youth previously in foster care. Organizers of this event work with policymakers, practitioners and advocates to finalize adoptions to show children that one day can be life changing.

Springs of Love is a resource website that offers Catholic foster and adoption support to families and aims to cultivate a culture of foster care and adoption in our parishes. Learn how your parish can help.