I'm taken back to my school days when I had to pass by an orphanage on my way to and from school, I would leave remarks like "These children are just suffering here", "do people not send money and gifts to them?", "Why do they look so unkempt?" All those statements came from a place of sympathy and wishing that I could help.
And then, I saw a movie of a guy always buying little gifts to an orphanage not far from him and it wasn't that he had much. I also heard of news where orphan children run away from homes and some engage in vices to survive. Another movie I saw also shared the story of little girl who is long past the adoption age but hoping to be adopted.
Where am I getting at with this? The first intention of orphanage homes, I suppose, is to give these kids a better life than they would have had if abandoned. I believe most of the children in the orphanage homes are from unwanted births, death of parents and other reasons like it and these homes want to save them from dying.
And that brings me to the prompt asking about the many requirements made in the process of adopting children. I can understand where these rules are birthed from, to protect the children from people who just go to adopt children but won't care for them as their own. But if we're being honest, that doesn't guarantee their safety.
From a movie I saw, it made me understand that there are different reasons why stringent rules are made for these children to be adopted and one of them is the guardians in these homes wanting to exploit a family's emotions to own their own child but covering it with their need to protect the children from having wrong parents.
Another reason could be because the couples or family who come for a child could have bad intentions because we've heard of many cases where the families who adopt neglect or even make the adopted children go through worse things than they would have in an orphanage home. It's enough reason to have strict rules.
With those strict rules, we would have parents who really want to have their kids, go through the process with the joy that their prayers will soon be answered. Nothing good comes easy and I believe it should be same for this case because children are blessings from God in whatever way they come in, they should be treated as such.
But with these strict rules, some couples won't be able to find it convenient to use an adoption process to have a child, that would mean, more children will be at the orphanage. Of course, there are a lot of children in our homes than in the orphanage but that shows they have some guardian already, the worry should be on others.
It should be on the children who have no guardian except the ones at orphanage homes, they need real love from a parent and the adoption process is one of their ways to gain access to that love. The strict rules are necessary but it should be bent at some point for these children to not be stuck in orphanage homes.
Image used is AI generated.