Newly Adopted

In this photo, I'm (2nd on the left) sitting with other kids that had been recently adopted too.

Did you know that adoption ranks pretty high on issues that people care about but lowest on issues people understand? In fact, a recent study found that people were less likely to be informed about adoption than any other social issue measured.Information gathered is from Brave Love.

To clear any confusing or misguided facts, I wanted to provide some general information and statistical facts about adoption. All of the information I gathered for this is coming from a website called Adoption Network. This site is very resourceful and has everything for birth mothers to adoptive parents and even an Adoption Network Law Center. The data on here is a few years old, but it is still relevant and insightful to see.

1. More than 60% of children in foster care will spend about 2-5 years in the system before being adopted. Almost 20% will spend another 5 or more years before being adopted and some never get adopted.


2. There are over 400,000 children in foster care in the U.S. and of those children, males outnumber females.


3. About 1/3 of Americans have considered adoption and no more than 2% have actually adopted. One out of every 25 U.S. families with children have an adopted child.


4. U.S. citizens completed 19,942 international adoptions in 2007, however there was a decline of 9,319 in 2011 due to the increase restrictiveness of international adoptions.


5. Around 7 million Americans are adopted.


6. About 135,000 children are adopted in the United States each year. Of non-stepparent adoptions, about 59% are from a foster system, 26% are from other countries, and 15% are voluntarily relinquished American babies.


7. 40% of the children who are adopted are of a different race, culture or ethnicity from their adoptive parents.


8. The average child will wait more than 3 year for an adoptive family. 11% will spend 5 or more years waiting for a family and the average age a child will wait for an adoption is 8.

Adoption is everywhere and children are always being placed into loving homes. However, there are still many children that need homes. After reading the statistics and learning more about the adoption rate and how it works, I was surprised to see the number of foster kids there were. I did not expect it to be that high. Another thing that caught my eye was the huge decrease in international adoptions. A lot has changed in 20 years since I was adopted and it looks like the process has become more restrictive.