Sunday’s Child is a weekly column featuring a child currently in foster care awaiting adoption.
Michele is a sweet-natured, artistically talented 12-year-old girl of Caucasian descent. She loves to color, draw, and play with her doll house or board games. She is also learning how to act in a play, portraying Charlie Brown in her first role. Michele is unsure what her future career aspirations are, but as she gets older, she thinks she would enjoy working with animals.
Michele loves school and having opportunities to learn. She is supported by an Individualized Education Plan, mainly due to lack of consistency in academics throughout her life of transitions.
She interacts extremely well with others and is kind and caring.
Since being in her current and most stable foster placement, she is making immense progress on identifying her feelings and needs.
Michele would benefit from a family willing to give her the love and support she needs.
It is recommended that Michele is placed with a two-parent family, as the youngest or only child in the home.
Michele requested that a family allow her to make her own religious choices and allow her to have frequent contact with her siblings, who are placed in separate homes.
Who are the children waiting for adoption?
There are approximately 2,600 children in Massachusetts foster care with the goal of adoption.
Through no fault of their own, they cannot be raised by their birth parents. Many will be adopted by a relative or foster parent, but more than 600 have no one to adopt them yet.
These waiting children include sibling groups who belong together, children of color of all ages, and children with intellectual, physical or emotional difficulties, or disabilities.
These children have experienced many losses and changes in their lives, and need patient and dependable adoptive parents who can help them grow and thrive in their new families. Free post-adoption support services are available to help.
To learn more about Michele, and about adoption from foster care, call the Massachusetts Adoption Resource Exchange (MARE) at 617-54-ADOPT (617-542-3678) or visit www.mareinc.org.
The sooner you call, the sooner a waiting child will have “a permanent place to call home.’’
