How My Parents are Saving the World

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I really respect and admire my parents for what they are doing now. At a time when they should be relaxing after 24 years of parenting, they have taken on 3 foster kids - 2 of them at the last minute last week. It’s not as though my parents are trying to replace the void of their two college and one college graduate children. Originally, they just wanted to help out the world by taking care of children who needed foster parents. The system is so backed up that there are currently about 16 children with no home who spend their days at the office with the social worker. Until these children are placed into a home they cannot have normal lives. They cannot be loved, go to school, and be carefree as children should be. So my mother and father just meant to be a point of normalcy in a life thus far full of chaos. Then the child could be placed into the home of people who were unable to have kids of their own while my parents took on another child.

But now, with my mother taking classes full-time for a degree program she needs for advancement, they have accepted two more children, in order to help out a brother and sister who have been through hell.

“All very nice an well,” you may say, “but what does this have to do with saving the world?” Well, it is a proven fact (or as proven a fact as things can be concerning nature/nuture) that a child who grows up without love or who grows up being shuttled from house to house ends up becoming dislocated from society. After all, families are one of the key elements of socialization. These kids have above average odds of becoming violent criminals. So, my parents are saving the world by giving these kids love so that the rest of the world can be safe when these kids don’t become murderers, rapists, and terrorists.

And I admire then all the more because I know I’d never be able to do something like that.