melannen: Commander Valentine of Alpha Squad Seven, a red-haired female Nick Fury in space, smoking contemplatively (Default)
melannen ([personal profile] melannen) wrote in [community profile] agonyaunt 2021-04-16 11:46 pm (UTC)

Those are all excellent and valid reasons, because they are your reasons. Also you don't need to list your reasons! You can just not want to take in a child.

But I guess I just wanted to point out that there's a tendency in childfree-related discussions to focus on people who either absolutely do not ever want children, or who have circumstances in their life that they don't think will ever allow them to have a child. But there are also lots of childfree people who just feel equivocal about having kids and don't think feeling equivocal is a good enough reason to create a person, and those people can get excluded from discussions and communities by people who think they are supporting childfree.

And there are also lots of people who do have kids already who wouldn't take in someone else's, and that's also valid, and often a very good choice because they wouldn't have the capacity to do right by them. Whether you want to, or feel equipped to, have kids of your own is not really the determiner in whether you can, or want to, take in someone else's kid who needs help. I think both LW and the original answers were ignoring that.

The question of foster care is very complicated and very dependent on individual circumstances. And the percent of foster kids who are abused in placements is much higher than the percent of foster *parents* who are abusive, because the bad placements tend to have much higher turnover (and also a fair amount of abuse of foster kids happens at the hands of older foster kids, and abusive kids also tend to cycle through a lot of placements instead of being helped.) But there are very good reasons why most systems try very hard to keep kids with family or friends when they can, even if the family/friends need more in terms of financial or social assistance.

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