Is There Room in Your Family?

With the month of May easing into the scrapbook, thousands of children and teenagers remain in foster care, still waiting for a permanent home. The calendar allots one month, May, for special attention to the need for more families who will embrace young ones left to the care of those other than relatives, but the yearning for a family of their own is yearlong.

“I was about two weeks old when I was put up for adoption and brought into foster care around the same time,” says Brandon Harper. “I was legally adopted around the age of three or four.”

The couple who adopted Brandon also adopted other children. All grew up alongside their biological daughter in a Chicago suburb.  Harper, a college student studying to become a band director, credits his parents with ushering him to the brink of manhood.

Chyrel Thornton became a foster parent for the first time 30 years ago. She remembers her first child very well.

“She was a very young teenage girl with a small child,” says Thornton. “The child did not live with us, however, we had visits every other weekend. We are still in communication with her.”

At the time Thornton was single. When she and her husband married, the two girls she was fostering attended the wedding “with us and went back home with us!”

More foster parents like the Thorntons are needed. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services , there were more than 435,000 children in foster care on September 30, 2016. The statistics record more than 40 percent of the children in foster care as white, and 23 percent are African-American. The numbers also underscore an encouraging trend, recognizing a decrease between 2006 and 2016 in the percentage of African-American children in foster care.

“My love for children motivates me to foster,” shares Thornton. “After several unsuccessful pregnancies…I was never able to carry a child full-term. I love loving, showing and giving love.”

Thornton and her husband, Rev. Clarence Thornton, have adopted three children. One of them they fostered prior to adoption.

“We did foster our youngest son who is now four-years-old,” Thornton adds. “He was placed in our home as a medically fragile infant and had been severely abused. He was three months old.”

For Harper, stories like the Thornton’s bring back memories and inspire gratitude for his parents.

“My mother and father have helped me become the man I am today, teaching me to take responsibility for my actions,” he says. “They have also taught me morals and values as a person and through whatever, they have always been there.”