Los Angeles County Supervisor, Michael D. Antonovich is a member of the California Judicial Council Blue Ribbon Commission on Foster Care and has been involved in streamlining the adoption process working towards better educational opportunities for older youth.
“Children aren’t the future, they are today.
If we don’t meet their needs today,
they will have no future,” said Michael D. Antonovich, 2011.
Antonovich’s attention to the issues surrounding foster care attracted my attention.
Every time I think of my niece, Meredith, I think of how different her life will be now that she is no longer a part of my family. For a long time my family and I were consumed in how we would continue living our lives without her, but it is more important that I pray for her happiness and success every day, as we can’t know how she is doing.
The focus, as Antonovich said, is today. My call to action is that he lives up to those words. As the attention to the young adults who have “aged out” of the foster care system is important to address, I am pleading with lawmakers and leaders of this country to pay closer attention to how cases are being treated in foster children’s first years of life. When they are being placed with their birth parents and eventually re-entering the foster care system, this vicious cycle is destroying the foundation of this country – our youth.
Giving children a healthy and loving home when they are in the most vital stages of growth and learning needs to be of UTMOST CONCERN.
“Emancipation without permanency or support
is a form of government-sanctioned child abuse,”
says Antonovich in the text of his main website.
“The parents of our youth have rejected or abandoned them in one form or another. When they turn age 18, their government is doing the same, placing them at risk of long-term dependence on public assistance, homelessness, substance abuse, incarceration and death.”
Such an awesome blog topic! Your writing is inspiring and really well written, I can’t wait to read what else you have. I think it’s especially great that you’re discussing a topic that is so close to your heart, It takes a lot of guts to do that! Great job 🙂 – Amy Logan
Your topic is one that I was never really aware of. The system does need to change and it is very unfair for them to take a baby who was being loved by many. I feel that the system really needs to think of what is best for the child, not who they are biologically related to.
What a sad reality. I hope your blog can make the change to spare people of the trouble and sadness that you and your family had to go through. It is not fair for a baby to be taken from such a loving family and put into another that may not necessarily be as good.