FacePalm Friday
This is where your hosts will list their top picks for this week’s FacePalm moment—something they learned or read about this week that caused the FacePalm to happen (you know, the expression of embarrassment, frustration, disbelief, disgust or mixed humor as depicted in our Rally FacePalm smiley).
We invite you to add your FacePalm of the week to our comments. Go ahead and add a link, tell a personal story, or share something that triggered the FacePalm on the subject of child welfare or adoption.
1. Celebrities and Media Promoting Adoption Merchandise:
Good Housekeeping magazine had a full-page ad for the organization, Help Us Adopt.org, that we featured on last week’s Facepalm Friday after CNN featured the owners as “heroes.” The organization gives grants for adoptions. The APs who run the organization admitted to spending $100,000 “upfront” for their two newborn domestic adoptions of white children. The ad features Nia Vardalos wearing a bracelet you too can own for $35 to help other families afford a kid.(Nia adopted from US foster care, by the way.)
The marketing line is “Crafted out of chocolate brown smoky quartz and accented with a gold leaf symbolizing a family tree, this jewelry signifies love,hope and the dream of parenthood through adoption.”
We should start a non-profit called, Help Me Get My Child Back, for those parents who are duped into placing their kids for adoption. Wonder how many bracelets we could sell to fund it? Would Nia help with that too? Would CNN promote it?
2. Senator Landrieu on how to help those aging out of foster care–pay others
Here is her self-promotional story coming off of her recent fab trip to Guatemala.
[The Times-Picayune 5/27/11 by Jonathan Tilove]”Landrieu, D-La., who is at the forefront of congressional efforts on adoption and foster care, was joined by Rep. Karen Bass, D-Calif., a freshman Democrat who served as speaker of the California Assembly, and who Thursday filed companion legislation to a bill filed earlier this year by Landrieu. It would authorize $15 million to establish mentoring programs in the states, $4 million to raise awareness of the program and recruit mentors, and up to $10,000 in federal student loan forgiveness for those who volunteer to mentor a foster child.”
Her solution is to spend a lot of money on a new bureaucratic system, spend some more money on advertising it and then give paybacks to mentors in the form of federal student loan forgiveness that impacts all federal taxpayers INSTEAD of improving the current foster system or handing the money to those actually aging out of foster care. If the foster carers were doing their jobs, why would they need extra mentors?
If you think that this plan sounds clueless, read this quote:”Without exception, every time I met a group of children who were in the system they said the one thing they wanted was an adult that would work with them who was not paid to be there,” Bass said. “What they were describing in their own way was really a mentor.””
No, I think they were REALLY describing how a lot of foster parents are just in it for the money and they would like someone to actually love them. I am sure they would have preferred their original family to love them. If their original parents couldn’t give them what they need, then they probably are wondering why their foster parents don’t care enough to help them transition.
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