Child Development Agency moves to increase foster-parenting awareness
Published:Friday | February 11, 2011 | 12:00 AM
Philip Hamilton, Gleaner Writer
The Child Development Agency (CDA) has stepped up its activities aimed at encouraging more Jamaicans to become foster parents.
Carla Francis Edie, the agency's CEO, says the CDA's latest effort to build awareness of its foster-care programme comes amid a fall in the number of Jamaicans showing an interest in foster parenting.
"For the last four years, the response has been very lukewarm," Francis Edie told The Gleaner yesterday during a CDA children's event at Juici Patties in Duhaney Park, observing Foster Care Recognition Week.
Approximately 1,135 Jamaican children currently live in foster homes with 900 foster parents.
Francis Edie pointed to the current economic hardships as one factor behind the drop in foster-parent registrations, as well as misperceptions that only 'bad children' are to be found in children's homes.
"Children come to us for a number of reasons, some for uncontrollable behaviour and others because they were abused," said Francis Edie, adding that a family environment with love and structure would bring about change in those children's lives.
The CDA recently launched a Faces of Love campaign featuring the photographs of children living in children's homes, which Francis Edie hopes will attract prospective foster parents.
350 in need of fostering
The agency, which uses foster care as one of its programmes to provide a better quality of life for abused, abandoned or orphaned children in need of a substitute family, hopes to find foster parents for 350 children this year.
Diana Chung, who registered for the CDA's foster-parenting programme yesterday in Duhaney Park, said she was moved to become a foster parent after several visits to the Glenhope Children's Home with her Optimist Club.
"The hardest part of those visits is putting the child back in the crib when we're ready to leave," said Chung.
"The way they cry really touches your heart, so when I saw this opportunity, I thought it was a great thing to do."